Someone on a mailing list posted this link (thanks Lyn!) and I had to pass it on. Daniel Jose Older, an SFF writer and editor, wrote an article called 12 Fundamentals of Writing "The Other" (And The Self). If you write, or have considered writing, about characters who are different from you in some basic way, this'll give you some good stuff to think about.
I particularly like #5 -- "Racist writing is craft failure." Absolutely. It's easy to reach for obvious traits or characteristics without thinking about it, and have your hand fall onto a racist (sexist, homophobic, etc.) cliche. If bigoted cliches end up in your story, they're like any other cliches and make the writing weaker and more shallow.
Good stuff, check it out.
Angie
Showing posts with label worldbuilding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worldbuilding. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Friday, October 14, 2011
Guest Post at Rosalie Lario's
I have a guest post up at Rosalie Lario's blog today, talking about stories where there's paranormal activity in a contemporary setting. Do you try to set up a situation where everyone knows what's going on, like in Stacia Kane's Downside books, or do you try to keep it all a secret from the general public, like I do in my Hidden Magic series? Taking it public can give a greater sense of OMGWOW! to the events, if they were so wide-spread that everyone's aware, but keeping the secret can give you an additional source of conflict to toss at your characters. Come check it out and weigh in. :)
Angie
Angie
Friday, August 26, 2011
WorldCon Part 2
Another panel I made it to was John Scalzi's "A Trip to the Creation Museum." I'd previously read Scalzi's blog post about the visit and had a great time reading it. I knew it'd be even more fun in a room full of like-minded folk, so I made sure to get there to hear it live -- I even managed to get a seat. :)
Scalzi explained in the panel how this came about. The Creation Museum (which is exactly what you think it is) was built within a reasonable distance of Scalzi's home, and someone asked if he was going to go. He explained exactly how unlikely it would ever be that he'd visit such a place, even under considerable duress. A bunch of people thought it'd be hilarious for him to go, though, so he finally made a deal -- he'd go if the people who thought it'd be hilarious raised $250, which he would donate to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. He says on his blog:
As of 11:59 and 59 seconds (Pacific Time) last night, the "Drag Scalzi's Ass to the Creation Museum" donation drive raised $5,118.36. That's 256 times the admission price to Creation Museum, a multiple I find both amusing (from a dork point of view) and gratifying, since it means what tiny bit of income the creationists running the museum gain by having me pass through the door will be utterly swamped by the amount I'm going to send to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Would that it worked that way for every admission to that place.
For those of you who were wondering, some statistics: The first milestone for this fundraiser, the $250 to get me to go at all, got passed within the first hour of posting the challenge. The $1000 mark got passed about 12 hours later. The $5,000 marker got passed last night sometime between 6 and 11pm, while I was out on a date with my wife, celebrating our anniversary. I'm particularly pleased about hitting the $5k mark. The least amount donated was $1; the most was $300. More than one person donated more than $250, usually with the notation "Ha! Now you HAVE to go!" Multiples and variations of $6.66 were amusingly common, although the $5 suggested amount was the amount most received.
The people at Americans United were reportedly delighted by the donation, if a bit bemused by the curiously specific amount. :)
The panel was indeed humorously awesome and I'm very glad I went. The visit report is funny too, scaled down a bit to take the solo experience into consideration. Highly recommended.
I went to another panel that I'm not going to name specifically, since I want to do a bit of constructive analysis, although I suppose anyone who gets ahold of the program book could figure out which one it was, since I have to give some detail to get my point across. :/
All right, fine, it was on world creation for writers, how to create a realistic world for your science fiction story. I've been to such panels before, and they've all gone pretty much the same way, which isn't a compliment. What tends to happen is that there are several scientist types on the panel, one or two who are into the astronomy and planet creation end of things, and one or two who are into the smaller scale geology and biology end. The logical thing to do is to start out with the creation of the star system and the planets, talking about dust clouds and star spectra and magnetic fields and galactic arms and gravity and such. You have to have all that before you can have any small scale geology, much less anything biological, so starting with the bigger picture makes sense.
The problem is that the panelists get used to the idea that the stars-and-planets people are doing all the talking at the beginning, and... they usually just keep on doing all the talking. One person in particular has been on every similar panel I've ever attended; this individual really likes to talk, to jump in, and even to interrupt. To give the person credit, they're a good speaker and know a lot about the subject and are very eager to share that knowledge, which is cool. But, as has often happened before, this person plus the other stars-and-planets person ended up doing about 85% of the talking. The biologist did about another 10-12%, and the geologist squeezed in whatever shards of speakage were left.
This isn't an ideal way to run a panel, and the moderator did nothing to get things under control.
Again, there was a lot of great info presented here, but it was frustrating to watch all the same. And judging by the look on the geologist's face through the last third or so of the panel, that person might well be thinking twice next time an invitation shows up to be on panels. Or maybe their lunch didn't agree with them. At any rate, they didn't seem to be having a great time.
I think (if anyone cares what I think) that in future it'd be better to split this panel into two. Let the stars-and-planets people have a panel all to themselves. They'll do a great job with it, and it'll end up being essentially the same panel they've given for however many years, without the bother of having to talk over and interrupt those other folks. Give the smaller-scale geologists and the biologists -- maybe add a botanist and an oceanographer to round things out -- their own panel, talking about smaller scale landforms, climates, biomes, and what sorts of life might develop under different conditions. That'd be at least as useful to SF writers as the stars-and-planets panel, and separating them out seems to be the only way to give the smaller scale planetbuilding speakers a chance to get more than five sentences in edgeways. Everyone wins.
Angie
Scalzi explained in the panel how this came about. The Creation Museum (which is exactly what you think it is) was built within a reasonable distance of Scalzi's home, and someone asked if he was going to go. He explained exactly how unlikely it would ever be that he'd visit such a place, even under considerable duress. A bunch of people thought it'd be hilarious for him to go, though, so he finally made a deal -- he'd go if the people who thought it'd be hilarious raised $250, which he would donate to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. He says on his blog:
As of 11:59 and 59 seconds (Pacific Time) last night, the "Drag Scalzi's Ass to the Creation Museum" donation drive raised $5,118.36. That's 256 times the admission price to Creation Museum, a multiple I find both amusing (from a dork point of view) and gratifying, since it means what tiny bit of income the creationists running the museum gain by having me pass through the door will be utterly swamped by the amount I'm going to send to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Would that it worked that way for every admission to that place.
For those of you who were wondering, some statistics: The first milestone for this fundraiser, the $250 to get me to go at all, got passed within the first hour of posting the challenge. The $1000 mark got passed about 12 hours later. The $5,000 marker got passed last night sometime between 6 and 11pm, while I was out on a date with my wife, celebrating our anniversary. I'm particularly pleased about hitting the $5k mark. The least amount donated was $1; the most was $300. More than one person donated more than $250, usually with the notation "Ha! Now you HAVE to go!" Multiples and variations of $6.66 were amusingly common, although the $5 suggested amount was the amount most received.
The people at Americans United were reportedly delighted by the donation, if a bit bemused by the curiously specific amount. :)
The panel was indeed humorously awesome and I'm very glad I went. The visit report is funny too, scaled down a bit to take the solo experience into consideration. Highly recommended.
I went to another panel that I'm not going to name specifically, since I want to do a bit of constructive analysis, although I suppose anyone who gets ahold of the program book could figure out which one it was, since I have to give some detail to get my point across. :/
All right, fine, it was on world creation for writers, how to create a realistic world for your science fiction story. I've been to such panels before, and they've all gone pretty much the same way, which isn't a compliment. What tends to happen is that there are several scientist types on the panel, one or two who are into the astronomy and planet creation end of things, and one or two who are into the smaller scale geology and biology end. The logical thing to do is to start out with the creation of the star system and the planets, talking about dust clouds and star spectra and magnetic fields and galactic arms and gravity and such. You have to have all that before you can have any small scale geology, much less anything biological, so starting with the bigger picture makes sense.
The problem is that the panelists get used to the idea that the stars-and-planets people are doing all the talking at the beginning, and... they usually just keep on doing all the talking. One person in particular has been on every similar panel I've ever attended; this individual really likes to talk, to jump in, and even to interrupt. To give the person credit, they're a good speaker and know a lot about the subject and are very eager to share that knowledge, which is cool. But, as has often happened before, this person plus the other stars-and-planets person ended up doing about 85% of the talking. The biologist did about another 10-12%, and the geologist squeezed in whatever shards of speakage were left.
This isn't an ideal way to run a panel, and the moderator did nothing to get things under control.
Again, there was a lot of great info presented here, but it was frustrating to watch all the same. And judging by the look on the geologist's face through the last third or so of the panel, that person might well be thinking twice next time an invitation shows up to be on panels. Or maybe their lunch didn't agree with them. At any rate, they didn't seem to be having a great time.
I think (if anyone cares what I think) that in future it'd be better to split this panel into two. Let the stars-and-planets people have a panel all to themselves. They'll do a great job with it, and it'll end up being essentially the same panel they've given for however many years, without the bother of having to talk over and interrupt those other folks. Give the smaller-scale geologists and the biologists -- maybe add a botanist and an oceanographer to round things out -- their own panel, talking about smaller scale landforms, climates, biomes, and what sorts of life might develop under different conditions. That'd be at least as useful to SF writers as the stars-and-planets panel, and separating them out seems to be the only way to give the smaller scale planetbuilding speakers a chance to get more than five sentences in edgeways. Everyone wins.
Angie
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Discussion on "The Chosen Hero"
NK Jemisin and Sam Sykes were talking about the Chosen Hero trope in fantasy, and the various ways in which it's problematic if you think about what-all it implies about how the world works. It's short but it makes a lot of good points, and Sam posted it on his blog. It's definitely worth a read for anyone who writes or reads fantasy.
Excerpt from Sam:
But in terms of philosophy, I sometimes wonder if the whole concept of The Chosen One isn’t a toxic one. I occasionally wonder if it’s right to put the concept of someone utterly infallible in all that he does out there, if it’s right to put up this concept that birth matters more than effort. Or, at the very least, if it’s right to put it out there without questioning it.
Excerpt from Nora:
And Chosen Ones who are “select people” or have some birthright to leadership are even more problematic, because then you get into eugenics. If some people are *meant* to be rulers, then that means some people are meant to be ruled — and the latter group can therefore never be allowed to have the power to self-govern. Why give it to them if they’re genetically or magically or psychologically less fit for leadership? And while you’ve got two divisions of people (“select people” and peons, patricians and plebians, whatever you want to call them), why stop there? If some people are especially fit to rule, why not decide that some people are especially fit only for combat, and some only for skilled trades, and some only for intellectual pursuits? And maybe some people aren’t fit to do anything but die, because they’re old or disabled, or because some of your industries (e.g., mining) are especially dangerous and you can’t spare anyone *valuable* to do that kind of work. You’ve just created a eugenicist caste system, whee.
There's more, it's good, click through and read. :)
I'd never thought of the Chosen One trope from this POV before, but the conclusions do follow from the given. Having the gods or whoever point a finger and say "You" implies that they're saying "Not You" to everyone else. None of the other people can become the hero, the ruler, the winner, no matter how hard they work, how good or moral or smart they might be. And yeah, that creates an underclass of people who might as well not even try to ever be more than a farmer or a potter or an assistant pig keeper, because that's what Fate has written for them and that's what they're suited for, The End.
I'm trying to think of ways to subvert this. You could have someone who's been Chosen to perform some task, but maybe that's all they're good for and everyone knows it. So you've got a bodyguard/babysitter following the Chosen One around to make sure he doesn't choke on his own shoes before fulfilling his narrowly-focused but necessary destiny, and once he's done, give him his reward, pat him on the head, and send him home.
Or you can come at it from the POV that the god/Fate/Oracle/whatever doesn't decide who's going to do great things, but rather knew who was going to do what. Certain sects of Christianity have spent a lot of time wrestling with the whole predestination question, but to me there's a clear difference between causing and knowing. If you assume omnicience but not omnipotence, then your oracle can say "This one, but not that one," with no question of actually controlling anyone's life. Or maybe you have a Hero's Oracle who'll give a prediction to anyone who comes to ask, but the people who come to ask (a long journey over hard terrain, of course) are the ones with the ambition and ability, and thus the ones more likely to get a "Yes, You" sort of answer. [ponder] But anyone can do it; it's up to them.
Another thought -- the oracle would have to give "No Comment" type messages to some people, because foreknowledge can change the decisions a person makes. Or even lie to them sometimes? Although that kind of manipulation could be considered interference and you're back to having the oracle choose people and force a path upon them. [ponder] Maybe the person's response to hearing their fate is part of it? Maybe it's just a potential -- so if you ask, "Will I be a hero?" the answer tells you the most heroic future you have available to you at that time, and it's your choice to work toward it or turn away. If your potential heroism is to step in front of an arrow and die saving the girl who's going to eventually defeat the Evil Wizard-King, well, some would be content with that and some would say "No freaking way!" and high-tail it back to the smithy. But what if that choice impacts the prediction given to the girl who came last week and was told that she could defeat the Evil Wizard-King?
This could get twisty. Of course, that just makes it more fun to play with. :)
Angie
Excerpt from Sam:
But in terms of philosophy, I sometimes wonder if the whole concept of The Chosen One isn’t a toxic one. I occasionally wonder if it’s right to put the concept of someone utterly infallible in all that he does out there, if it’s right to put up this concept that birth matters more than effort. Or, at the very least, if it’s right to put it out there without questioning it.
Excerpt from Nora:
And Chosen Ones who are “select people” or have some birthright to leadership are even more problematic, because then you get into eugenics. If some people are *meant* to be rulers, then that means some people are meant to be ruled — and the latter group can therefore never be allowed to have the power to self-govern. Why give it to them if they’re genetically or magically or psychologically less fit for leadership? And while you’ve got two divisions of people (“select people” and peons, patricians and plebians, whatever you want to call them), why stop there? If some people are especially fit to rule, why not decide that some people are especially fit only for combat, and some only for skilled trades, and some only for intellectual pursuits? And maybe some people aren’t fit to do anything but die, because they’re old or disabled, or because some of your industries (e.g., mining) are especially dangerous and you can’t spare anyone *valuable* to do that kind of work. You’ve just created a eugenicist caste system, whee.
There's more, it's good, click through and read. :)
I'd never thought of the Chosen One trope from this POV before, but the conclusions do follow from the given. Having the gods or whoever point a finger and say "You" implies that they're saying "Not You" to everyone else. None of the other people can become the hero, the ruler, the winner, no matter how hard they work, how good or moral or smart they might be. And yeah, that creates an underclass of people who might as well not even try to ever be more than a farmer or a potter or an assistant pig keeper, because that's what Fate has written for them and that's what they're suited for, The End.
I'm trying to think of ways to subvert this. You could have someone who's been Chosen to perform some task, but maybe that's all they're good for and everyone knows it. So you've got a bodyguard/babysitter following the Chosen One around to make sure he doesn't choke on his own shoes before fulfilling his narrowly-focused but necessary destiny, and once he's done, give him his reward, pat him on the head, and send him home.
Or you can come at it from the POV that the god/Fate/Oracle/whatever doesn't decide who's going to do great things, but rather knew who was going to do what. Certain sects of Christianity have spent a lot of time wrestling with the whole predestination question, but to me there's a clear difference between causing and knowing. If you assume omnicience but not omnipotence, then your oracle can say "This one, but not that one," with no question of actually controlling anyone's life. Or maybe you have a Hero's Oracle who'll give a prediction to anyone who comes to ask, but the people who come to ask (a long journey over hard terrain, of course) are the ones with the ambition and ability, and thus the ones more likely to get a "Yes, You" sort of answer. [ponder] But anyone can do it; it's up to them.
Another thought -- the oracle would have to give "No Comment" type messages to some people, because foreknowledge can change the decisions a person makes. Or even lie to them sometimes? Although that kind of manipulation could be considered interference and you're back to having the oracle choose people and force a path upon them. [ponder] Maybe the person's response to hearing their fate is part of it? Maybe it's just a potential -- so if you ask, "Will I be a hero?" the answer tells you the most heroic future you have available to you at that time, and it's your choice to work toward it or turn away. If your potential heroism is to step in front of an arrow and die saving the girl who's going to eventually defeat the Evil Wizard-King, well, some would be content with that and some would say "No freaking way!" and high-tail it back to the smithy. But what if that choice impacts the prediction given to the girl who came last week and was told that she could defeat the Evil Wizard-King?
This could get twisty. Of course, that just makes it more fun to play with. :)
Angie
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Speculative Law
I've recently found a really wonderful blog written by a couple of attorneys, and I have to share. It's called Law and the Multiverse, and it's full of great legal discussions of questions you'll never run into in a law review.
For example, what are the legal issues related to being immortal? I have an immortal character in my Hidden Magic series, so that post was particularly welcome.
Another post was about characters who are invulnerable or otherwise incredibly difficult to kill -- how would that affect crimes committed against them, such as murder and assault? Is it actually attempted murder if you knew at the time that your victim wouldn't die when you shot him 72 times?
There's a discussion of outlawry that starts with its historical precedents and projects it into a present or future where there are criminals conventional law enforcement can't deal with, and another discussion about resurrection, probate law and insurance.
The blog is oriented around comic book universes -- superheroes and supervillains -- but the info here would be useful for an SF world too, or a world where paranormal creatures or powers exist, or an urban fantasy type setting. And besides, it's just fun to read. Highly recommended.
Angie
For example, what are the legal issues related to being immortal? I have an immortal character in my Hidden Magic series, so that post was particularly welcome.
Another post was about characters who are invulnerable or otherwise incredibly difficult to kill -- how would that affect crimes committed against them, such as murder and assault? Is it actually attempted murder if you knew at the time that your victim wouldn't die when you shot him 72 times?
There's a discussion of outlawry that starts with its historical precedents and projects it into a present or future where there are criminals conventional law enforcement can't deal with, and another discussion about resurrection, probate law and insurance.
The blog is oriented around comic book universes -- superheroes and supervillains -- but the info here would be useful for an SF world too, or a world where paranormal creatures or powers exist, or an urban fantasy type setting. And besides, it's just fun to read. Highly recommended.
Angie
Thursday, August 5, 2010
A Few Things
You'd think that by now people -- especially people involved with publishing -- would know better than to razz on writers. We can razz back with a vengeance, and we have a significant audience to do it for, or we know people who have significant audiences.
Arlene Harris started using iUniverse's services back when they were actually kind of reasonable. Their prices have gone up considerably, however, with no significant increase in services, so she's decided to take her business elsewhere. She wrote to them to terminate their business relationship, and got a snarky reply from some self-righteous marketing weasel, which begins, "Hello Ms. Harris, I wish there was something I could say to pacify your hurt feelings," and goes downhill from there.
Arlene happens to be friends with Colleen Doran, a very successful comic artist and writer. Colleen has been successful both through large publishing houses and on the self-publishing side. As she puts it herself: Unlike most of the people reading this, I have been a successful self publisher and have sold over 300,000 copies of my works via self publishing, not to mention all the books my name is on that I didn’t self publish. So Colleen knows whereof she speaks. Colleen has a huge blog audience, and decided to point out to iUniverse, line-item by line-item, exactly why any writer with a brain in his or her head would decide to forego their services. It's great -- read it here.
==========
From the Department of Wasn't This SF a Few Years Ago? -- a Chinese company has plans for a humongous kind of bus, two lanes wide, that runs on tracks and is hollow on the bottom so cars can run under it. It's kind of like a big mobile tunnel with a passenger cabin on top. Check it out. Thanks to Tobias Buckell for the link.
It's worth watching the video, even if most of it is just some guy speaking Mandarin. (Of course, if you understand Mandarin, I'm assuming it's geometrically cooler.) There are bits in the video-within-a-video, though, showing how cars go under the bus, how the bus goes over stationary cars, how people get on and off, how they prevent trucks and cetera that are too big from running in the bus lanes, and what they'll do to get the passengers off in case there's some kind of wreck anyway. The last bit is almost at the end of the video. Cool stuff -- definitely a good idea for adding really big busses to city streets without adding to traffic congestion. From an SF writer's POV, though, it's necessary to keep up with this sort of thing. It'll let your near-future Chinese story sound a bit more realistic, and will prevent you from having your 24th century civil engineer dramatically unveil his Brand New and Original Mobile Tunnel-Bus idea. [wry smile]
==========
Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Freelancer's Survival Guide is done. If anyone was waiting for the whole thing before reading, the whole thing is now there. She's working on getting both an e-book and POD print version up and ready to go. I'm getting the paperback, myself. I've been reading along and there's a ton of excellent info here -- more than most publishers would be willing to stuff into one volume, so rather than let the publisher decide what to cut, she's putting it out herself, complete and entire. This is a great resource, whether you're a writer or any other kind of freelancer, which includes anyone who owns a business or otherwise works for themself. Highly recommended.
==========
One experiment has shown that snails might have a homing instinct. Ruth Brooks had snails in her garden, as many of us do, and since she'd rather not hurt them, she tried collecting them and taking them over to (waste land? sounds like a vacant lot, maybe?) and leaving them there. But they kept coming back, which was rather boggling, since scientists had thought the snails didn't have enough brain to manage something like a homing instinct.
This was only based on Ruth's own findings, though, which really isn't enough data. So Ruth is organizing a larger-scale experiment. They're in England, and they're only looking for a particular kind of snail, but it looks interesting anyway; I hope they get a lot of participants.
Speaking for myself, back when I did a lot of gardening, there was an alley behind our back yard, and on the other side of the alley were a bunch of front yards of houses facing the alley. I'd go out at night hunting snails and slugs; I'd pick up the snails and pitch them over the back fence. Every now and then I'd pick up a snail with a crunchy shell; he apparently hadn't learned his lesson and had come back. I'd pitch him again. The thing is, I had a decent arm, and after the snail landed, there would've usually been plant life (on the other side of the alley) closer than our back yard. But a lot of the snails came back anyway. Which is all completely unscientific, but I'm tending toward agreement on the whole snail-homing thing. Also, on the belief that snails are really stupid.
This is another data point for SF writers, though. You might well not need to invent a creature with a brain the size of a pigeon's to have something that'll find its way home.
Although I still think butterflies are the most amazing homers. I got this from a thing the spousal unit and I saw on TV (Life? Planet Earth? something like that) so I don't have any links, but butterflies -- Monarchs, IIRC -- actually migrate in three generations. They start out at one end of the migration path, fly to a waypoint and reproduce, then die. The next generation is born, pupates, flies on to the next waypoint and reproduces, then dies. The third generation is born, pupates, flies back to the starting point, reproduces, then dies. The thing is, none of the butterflies who are migrating have ever been where they're going before. Migratory yak and whales and swallows and salmon are born, then migrate somewhere else, then go back to where they were born, so they've been there before. Most of them will even have older members of their herd/pod/flock to show them the way. But butterflies keep flying between the same waypoints when none of them have ever been there before. That's freaky, in a pretty neat way. :)
==========
The Fourth Vine over on Dreamwidth gave several Good Reasons for a Professional Fiction Writer to Fear Fan Fiction. This is an issue which pops up periodically and gets completely rehashed, with the usual griping, snarking, whining, and hystrionics. Fourth Vine summarizes the logical arguments neatly, and lets you know which arguments are not at all logical and will get you mocked. My favorite is the last one, but they're all excellent, as is the accompanying commentary. This isn't a brand new post, but it'll be a fresh issue soon enough, and then again, and again after that; classics are always relevant.
==========
I'm up in Reno visiting my mom and my brother this week. The third was my birthday, although we're going to dinner tonight; this is my brother's first day off. I'm spending a lot of time on the laptop, as usual, but if I take a while to get around to various blogs, or don't comment as often as I usually do, that's why. [wave]
Angie
Arlene Harris started using iUniverse's services back when they were actually kind of reasonable. Their prices have gone up considerably, however, with no significant increase in services, so she's decided to take her business elsewhere. She wrote to them to terminate their business relationship, and got a snarky reply from some self-righteous marketing weasel, which begins, "Hello Ms. Harris, I wish there was something I could say to pacify your hurt feelings," and goes downhill from there.
Arlene happens to be friends with Colleen Doran, a very successful comic artist and writer. Colleen has been successful both through large publishing houses and on the self-publishing side. As she puts it herself: Unlike most of the people reading this, I have been a successful self publisher and have sold over 300,000 copies of my works via self publishing, not to mention all the books my name is on that I didn’t self publish. So Colleen knows whereof she speaks. Colleen has a huge blog audience, and decided to point out to iUniverse, line-item by line-item, exactly why any writer with a brain in his or her head would decide to forego their services. It's great -- read it here.
==========
From the Department of Wasn't This SF a Few Years Ago? -- a Chinese company has plans for a humongous kind of bus, two lanes wide, that runs on tracks and is hollow on the bottom so cars can run under it. It's kind of like a big mobile tunnel with a passenger cabin on top. Check it out. Thanks to Tobias Buckell for the link.
It's worth watching the video, even if most of it is just some guy speaking Mandarin. (Of course, if you understand Mandarin, I'm assuming it's geometrically cooler.) There are bits in the video-within-a-video, though, showing how cars go under the bus, how the bus goes over stationary cars, how people get on and off, how they prevent trucks and cetera that are too big from running in the bus lanes, and what they'll do to get the passengers off in case there's some kind of wreck anyway. The last bit is almost at the end of the video. Cool stuff -- definitely a good idea for adding really big busses to city streets without adding to traffic congestion. From an SF writer's POV, though, it's necessary to keep up with this sort of thing. It'll let your near-future Chinese story sound a bit more realistic, and will prevent you from having your 24th century civil engineer dramatically unveil his Brand New and Original Mobile Tunnel-Bus idea. [wry smile]
==========
Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Freelancer's Survival Guide is done. If anyone was waiting for the whole thing before reading, the whole thing is now there. She's working on getting both an e-book and POD print version up and ready to go. I'm getting the paperback, myself. I've been reading along and there's a ton of excellent info here -- more than most publishers would be willing to stuff into one volume, so rather than let the publisher decide what to cut, she's putting it out herself, complete and entire. This is a great resource, whether you're a writer or any other kind of freelancer, which includes anyone who owns a business or otherwise works for themself. Highly recommended.
==========
One experiment has shown that snails might have a homing instinct. Ruth Brooks had snails in her garden, as many of us do, and since she'd rather not hurt them, she tried collecting them and taking them over to (waste land? sounds like a vacant lot, maybe?) and leaving them there. But they kept coming back, which was rather boggling, since scientists had thought the snails didn't have enough brain to manage something like a homing instinct.
This was only based on Ruth's own findings, though, which really isn't enough data. So Ruth is organizing a larger-scale experiment. They're in England, and they're only looking for a particular kind of snail, but it looks interesting anyway; I hope they get a lot of participants.
Speaking for myself, back when I did a lot of gardening, there was an alley behind our back yard, and on the other side of the alley were a bunch of front yards of houses facing the alley. I'd go out at night hunting snails and slugs; I'd pick up the snails and pitch them over the back fence. Every now and then I'd pick up a snail with a crunchy shell; he apparently hadn't learned his lesson and had come back. I'd pitch him again. The thing is, I had a decent arm, and after the snail landed, there would've usually been plant life (on the other side of the alley) closer than our back yard. But a lot of the snails came back anyway. Which is all completely unscientific, but I'm tending toward agreement on the whole snail-homing thing. Also, on the belief that snails are really stupid.
This is another data point for SF writers, though. You might well not need to invent a creature with a brain the size of a pigeon's to have something that'll find its way home.
Although I still think butterflies are the most amazing homers. I got this from a thing the spousal unit and I saw on TV (Life? Planet Earth? something like that) so I don't have any links, but butterflies -- Monarchs, IIRC -- actually migrate in three generations. They start out at one end of the migration path, fly to a waypoint and reproduce, then die. The next generation is born, pupates, flies on to the next waypoint and reproduces, then dies. The third generation is born, pupates, flies back to the starting point, reproduces, then dies. The thing is, none of the butterflies who are migrating have ever been where they're going before. Migratory yak and whales and swallows and salmon are born, then migrate somewhere else, then go back to where they were born, so they've been there before. Most of them will even have older members of their herd/pod/flock to show them the way. But butterflies keep flying between the same waypoints when none of them have ever been there before. That's freaky, in a pretty neat way. :)
==========
The Fourth Vine over on Dreamwidth gave several Good Reasons for a Professional Fiction Writer to Fear Fan Fiction. This is an issue which pops up periodically and gets completely rehashed, with the usual griping, snarking, whining, and hystrionics. Fourth Vine summarizes the logical arguments neatly, and lets you know which arguments are not at all logical and will get you mocked. My favorite is the last one, but they're all excellent, as is the accompanying commentary. This isn't a brand new post, but it'll be a fresh issue soon enough, and then again, and again after that; classics are always relevant.
==========
I'm up in Reno visiting my mom and my brother this week. The third was my birthday, although we're going to dinner tonight; this is my brother's first day off. I'm spending a lot of time on the laptop, as usual, but if I take a while to get around to various blogs, or don't comment as often as I usually do, that's why. [wave]
Angie
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Most Awesome Settings
...are right here on Earth. Check this out:
Pamukkale, Turkey
Calcium carbonate spills coming from thermal springs under the mountain have formed a series of spectacular and beautiful pools.
Most science fiction and fantasy writers can't come up with anything anywhere near as awesome or creative as this for their settings. I know I never have, and I can't think of anything I've read that came even close, leaving out the spectacular-engineering type SF books, such as Ringworld. For natural wonders, though, whether set here on Earth or on an alien planet or in a magic-filled fantasy world, nothing can match mundane Nature.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't be trying. :)
Angie
Pamukkale, Turkey
Calcium carbonate spills coming from thermal springs under the mountain have formed a series of spectacular and beautiful pools.
Most science fiction and fantasy writers can't come up with anything anywhere near as awesome or creative as this for their settings. I know I never have, and I can't think of anything I've read that came even close, leaving out the spectacular-engineering type SF books, such as Ringworld. For natural wonders, though, whether set here on Earth or on an alien planet or in a magic-filled fantasy world, nothing can match mundane Nature.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't be trying. :)
Angie
Friday, January 2, 2009
Light Columns
Light columns in Latvia, from SpaceWeather.com via adistantsoil.com -- thanks to Colleen for posting.
This is absolutely gorgeous, and it's an effect I've never seen before, nor have I ever seen anyone else use it -- isn't it just perfect for an alien planet, or a fantasy forest? They look kind of like trees, which makes me think "space elves," LOL! But seriously, something this beautiful just has to make it into someone's fictional world, or hopefully several. :)
Spaceweather says, "They appear during winter when city lights shine upward into the icy air. Reflections from plate-shaped crystals spread the light into a vertical column." I'd link, but it's on their front page (which I assume changes regularly) and there doesn't seem to be any way to get a permalink of this piece. They do have a link to another page of photos, including the one above and three others here.
Atmospheric Optics adds, "The pillars are not physically over the lights or anywhere else in space for that matter ~ like all halos they are purely the collected light beams from all the millions of crystals which just happen to be reflecting light towards your eyes or camera." The link goes to a page with more explanation, a diagram, and another light pillars pic, although this one doesn't have the spreading cones at the top.
Angie
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Support Writing 2 -- Macro
[Continued from Previous Post: Support Writing 1 -- Micro. This was originally a single post, split for length.]
Plotting is another set of notes. As I said above, I don't actually outline, but if I think of an interesting plot twist and am afraid I might forget it, I'll jot it down in the Notes file. If I run into a roadblock, I'll try to work it out by "babbling" about it, and for that I'll usually start a separate file called StoryNameBabble.doc.
I started using babbling as a solution to a story problem during my first NaNo year, when I ran into a roadblock and couldn't figure out how to get past it. I'd been exchanging e-mail with a writer friend who was also NaNoing that year, and decided to ask if she had any ideas. Of course, to do that I had to explain everything from the beginning -- what I'd had in mind and what I'd done and where I wanted to go and why that wasn't working, what the problems seemed to be and why and what I'd thought of to maybe fix them and why the possible solutions hadn't worked... everything.
And in typing all that out, every detail, explaining the problem in so many words from the ground up, to someone who didn't know anything at all, I came up with a solution.
I assumed at the time that writer's block was now a thing of the past for me. It didn't turn out quite that well, unfortunately, but it is a great technique and often helps. Most of my longer stories end up with an associated babble file at some point.
[I'd give a babble example but they tend to run a couple thousand words or more, so....]
The trick, though, is to explain everything. Pretend you're asking for advice from a writer friend -- someone who knows about plotting and worldbuilding and characterization and pacing and POV and all that, but doesn't know anything about your particular story. Write it like you're actually talking to that person, and explain everything, just as you would if you were going to send them that e-mail and wanted to make sure they got what was going on first. They need enough info and details to understand exactly what's up before they can give you any advice. (Heck, if just writing about it all doesn't work for you, you can actually send it to your friend and maybe they will have an idea for you. :) )
Explaining what possible solutions you've thought of already and exactly why they won't work is particularly helpful. What ended up producing a solution for me at that point was that while I typed, I found I didn't want to look dumb in front of my friend, so I was coming up with more and more possibilities. I didn't want her to go, "Well, why don't you just do X?" and have to do a facepalm. And having just explained my story and what direction I wanted to take it in minuscule detail, I had all the info at the top of my head, ready to feed into ideas and options. In trying to cover all my bases before I sent the e-mail, I came up with a scenario that would work, and I was able to get back to the novel again.
It's all about details, though. It's like you're spreading all the pieces of your story out on the desk in front of you, so you can see it all at one time. It seems like it should all be there anyway, in your head, but in reality (or at least in my reality -- your head might work differently, and chances are at least a few of you do) when I've been working on a given chapter or scene, focusing on a particular plot thread, the rest fades a bit, as though it's been filed away. It's still there, and I can get to it when I need it, but it's not right there in immediate sight. It's like the difference between having things out on the desk and having them in your desk drawer.
On my current WIP, I started doing something new. This story's structured differently -- I had a lot of backstory but I didn't want to actually start the story thirty-two years before the main plot begins. [wry smile] Neither did I want to tell thirty-two years worth of flashbacks or reminiscing conversations or whatever, but I really wanted to get some of that past info in; it showed how the relationship between the two main characters developed, which is vital in order for the present-day storyline (a kidnapping story which turns out to be a part of something larger) to work for the reader.
What I ended up doing was going back and forth, scene by scene. The first scene was labelled [Thirty-Two Years Ago] and then the next was labelled [Today]. Then [Twenty-Six Years Ago] then [Today], etc. It was an experiment and at first I was afraid it wouldn't work, that the backstory would be boring or annoying or whatever, but reader response has been overwhelmingly positive, yay. So that's a technique I'll keep in my toolbox for future use when appropriate.
As I go from scene to scene, I bip around between multiple viewpoint characters. Where I am now, I'm caught up with the backstory and everything is "Today," but I'm still showing what's going on at different places, with different characters. To a certain extent, I have some discretion in what order I put the scenes; it won't always ruin a progression or even look strange if I put Scene Q after Scene T rather than before. I've been writing this one as a series of scenes, rather than a single, smooth story flow, so what's been in my head has been ideas for scenes I want to write, each of which has one or more plot points I need to get across to the reader. When I finish one, I grab the one I want to do next -- usually in a different setting and often with different characters from the previous scene -- and keep going.
I've gotten to the point, though (fifteen chapters in) where I can't hold it all in my head anymore. Or rather, maybe I could but it's getting iffy and I don't want to gamble any further and start losing vital chunks. So I've started jotting down notes, like:
SCENE: [2--scene couple of weeks after 1] Blah-blah-scene description, mainly jotting down all the plot points.
This is the fanfic story I mentioned a few posts ago. I'm not comfortable actually giving details in this blog, but you get the idea. The note in [square brackets] links this scene with two others; this is number two, so one of the others comes before it and the other comes after. The three together have to go in a particular sequence, and have to happen a certain length of time apart, so I made sure to hilight it. Each scene in this cluster has a similar bracketed note, in blue to make them stand out and make it visually obvious that they're together when I'm scanning over the list of scenes. I have another cluster of ordered scenes with their bracketed notes in green.
Formatting things this way, I can bang out notes for a scene whenever I think of it, without having to worry right away about what order it'll come in.
[I know it sounds weird, but in many cases with this story it really doesn't matter, up to a point; there are three or four people or groups acting independently in parallel, and until they get together and talk or their activities cross, the fine-grained order doesn't make a difference in the story. I make final ordering decisions as I write, looking at what I need to build a good flow, with rising action and tension in the proper places at the chapter level, grabbing scenes from the pool as needed.]
But I find that I now have notes at the scene level for a little way forward into the story -- seven scenes ahead at this point -- and this is the closest I've come to outlining since my last disastrous attempt. I'll admit I'm a bit nervous about it, but with this many major characters and this many major plot threads which all have to braid together evenly and wrap up at about the same point, however many chapters in the future, I feel like I need some sort of scheme for taking plot notes and planning things out. It's not really an outline, but it serves some of the same functions as one. We'll see how it goes. [crossed fingers]
So how does everyone else work? Do you outline? If not, do you do anything else to help keep the plotlines straight and make sure all the ends get woven in reasonably neatly? What support writing do you do, outside of the story itself?
Angie
Plotting is another set of notes. As I said above, I don't actually outline, but if I think of an interesting plot twist and am afraid I might forget it, I'll jot it down in the Notes file. If I run into a roadblock, I'll try to work it out by "babbling" about it, and for that I'll usually start a separate file called StoryNameBabble.doc.
I started using babbling as a solution to a story problem during my first NaNo year, when I ran into a roadblock and couldn't figure out how to get past it. I'd been exchanging e-mail with a writer friend who was also NaNoing that year, and decided to ask if she had any ideas. Of course, to do that I had to explain everything from the beginning -- what I'd had in mind and what I'd done and where I wanted to go and why that wasn't working, what the problems seemed to be and why and what I'd thought of to maybe fix them and why the possible solutions hadn't worked... everything.
And in typing all that out, every detail, explaining the problem in so many words from the ground up, to someone who didn't know anything at all, I came up with a solution.
I assumed at the time that writer's block was now a thing of the past for me. It didn't turn out quite that well, unfortunately, but it is a great technique and often helps. Most of my longer stories end up with an associated babble file at some point.
[I'd give a babble example but they tend to run a couple thousand words or more, so....]
The trick, though, is to explain everything. Pretend you're asking for advice from a writer friend -- someone who knows about plotting and worldbuilding and characterization and pacing and POV and all that, but doesn't know anything about your particular story. Write it like you're actually talking to that person, and explain everything, just as you would if you were going to send them that e-mail and wanted to make sure they got what was going on first. They need enough info and details to understand exactly what's up before they can give you any advice. (Heck, if just writing about it all doesn't work for you, you can actually send it to your friend and maybe they will have an idea for you. :) )
Explaining what possible solutions you've thought of already and exactly why they won't work is particularly helpful. What ended up producing a solution for me at that point was that while I typed, I found I didn't want to look dumb in front of my friend, so I was coming up with more and more possibilities. I didn't want her to go, "Well, why don't you just do X?" and have to do a facepalm. And having just explained my story and what direction I wanted to take it in minuscule detail, I had all the info at the top of my head, ready to feed into ideas and options. In trying to cover all my bases before I sent the e-mail, I came up with a scenario that would work, and I was able to get back to the novel again.
It's all about details, though. It's like you're spreading all the pieces of your story out on the desk in front of you, so you can see it all at one time. It seems like it should all be there anyway, in your head, but in reality (or at least in my reality -- your head might work differently, and chances are at least a few of you do) when I've been working on a given chapter or scene, focusing on a particular plot thread, the rest fades a bit, as though it's been filed away. It's still there, and I can get to it when I need it, but it's not right there in immediate sight. It's like the difference between having things out on the desk and having them in your desk drawer.
On my current WIP, I started doing something new. This story's structured differently -- I had a lot of backstory but I didn't want to actually start the story thirty-two years before the main plot begins. [wry smile] Neither did I want to tell thirty-two years worth of flashbacks or reminiscing conversations or whatever, but I really wanted to get some of that past info in; it showed how the relationship between the two main characters developed, which is vital in order for the present-day storyline (a kidnapping story which turns out to be a part of something larger) to work for the reader.
What I ended up doing was going back and forth, scene by scene. The first scene was labelled [Thirty-Two Years Ago] and then the next was labelled [Today]. Then [Twenty-Six Years Ago] then [Today], etc. It was an experiment and at first I was afraid it wouldn't work, that the backstory would be boring or annoying or whatever, but reader response has been overwhelmingly positive, yay. So that's a technique I'll keep in my toolbox for future use when appropriate.
As I go from scene to scene, I bip around between multiple viewpoint characters. Where I am now, I'm caught up with the backstory and everything is "Today," but I'm still showing what's going on at different places, with different characters. To a certain extent, I have some discretion in what order I put the scenes; it won't always ruin a progression or even look strange if I put Scene Q after Scene T rather than before. I've been writing this one as a series of scenes, rather than a single, smooth story flow, so what's been in my head has been ideas for scenes I want to write, each of which has one or more plot points I need to get across to the reader. When I finish one, I grab the one I want to do next -- usually in a different setting and often with different characters from the previous scene -- and keep going.
I've gotten to the point, though (fifteen chapters in) where I can't hold it all in my head anymore. Or rather, maybe I could but it's getting iffy and I don't want to gamble any further and start losing vital chunks. So I've started jotting down notes, like:
SCENE: [2--scene couple of weeks after 1] Blah-blah-scene description, mainly jotting down all the plot points.
This is the fanfic story I mentioned a few posts ago. I'm not comfortable actually giving details in this blog, but you get the idea. The note in [square brackets] links this scene with two others; this is number two, so one of the others comes before it and the other comes after. The three together have to go in a particular sequence, and have to happen a certain length of time apart, so I made sure to hilight it. Each scene in this cluster has a similar bracketed note, in blue to make them stand out and make it visually obvious that they're together when I'm scanning over the list of scenes. I have another cluster of ordered scenes with their bracketed notes in green.
Formatting things this way, I can bang out notes for a scene whenever I think of it, without having to worry right away about what order it'll come in.
[I know it sounds weird, but in many cases with this story it really doesn't matter, up to a point; there are three or four people or groups acting independently in parallel, and until they get together and talk or their activities cross, the fine-grained order doesn't make a difference in the story. I make final ordering decisions as I write, looking at what I need to build a good flow, with rising action and tension in the proper places at the chapter level, grabbing scenes from the pool as needed.]
But I find that I now have notes at the scene level for a little way forward into the story -- seven scenes ahead at this point -- and this is the closest I've come to outlining since my last disastrous attempt. I'll admit I'm a bit nervous about it, but with this many major characters and this many major plot threads which all have to braid together evenly and wrap up at about the same point, however many chapters in the future, I feel like I need some sort of scheme for taking plot notes and planning things out. It's not really an outline, but it serves some of the same functions as one. We'll see how it goes. [crossed fingers]
So how does everyone else work? Do you outline? If not, do you do anything else to help keep the plotlines straight and make sure all the ends get woven in reasonably neatly? What support writing do you do, outside of the story itself?
Angie
Support Writing 1 -- Micro
[I wrote this as a single post, but it's a bit long so I'm splitting it. The first couple of paragraphs apply to the whole piece.]
Normally I don't outline -- I think I've mentioned that before. I've tried it and it's crashed and burned pretty miserably, on one landmark occasion taking an entire novel with it. Even in school I never outlined my papers unless the outline had to be turned in for credit, and sometimes not even then; I've essentially pantsed major research papers with footnote numbers in triple digits (and gotten As on them) so after a few failed experiments I've never had any particular incentive to go back and try again.
Which isn't to say that every story is created completely within its Word file, with no support writing. Short stories, sure. But for longer pieces and series stories I find I do need some help keeping everything straight, at the very least for the sake of continuity.
Most of my longer stories have a Notes file, usually called StoryNameNotes.doc. I'll jot down character notes at the top -- full name, any nicknames, age, family/friend/work relationships, physical details, plus things like how they take their coffee, whether they call it a "couch" or a "sofa," where they're from, etc. I'll add to it as I go, whenever anything significant comes up in the story that I think there's any possibility I might need to refer to later. The character notes go first in the file because I refer to these most often, usually protags at the top, then supporting characters, then minor characters. Sometimes I'll cluster characters differently, like in my current WIP where I have the bad guy's notes followed by a bunch of very minor characters who are his henchmen and who pretty much are just names and skills/functions; exactly how I organize things depends on what I think will be the most useful for the current story.
Then I'll start adding setting notes below that, which might be more or less detailed depending on the setting. SF or fantasy gets a lot of notes because every time I make something up I have to remember it, while mundane contemporary settings get fewer. So for A Hidden Magic, an urban fantasy set in modern times in the Bay Area (where I grew up, and lived until I got married and moved to Long Beach), I've got the following setting notes, among others:
Underhill or Under the Hill
It's winter
the wildlands, the chaotic territory Underhill between enclaves
the light Underhill was a perpetual dim twilight and days passed only in the sense that meals and sleeping periods came and went.
The first bit is a nomenclature note; I wanted to remember how I wrote it out and what capitalization I used. (I do that a lot, for consistency.) The bit about it being winter refers to the story period; it's not winter Underhill all the time. The last bit is a clip directly from the story; no sense retyping it, right?
Farther down I have some spells I used:
don't-look -- a magical glamour which coaxes the eye away
banishing -- sending creature back Underhill, chanting & hollow BANG! 2 min. when Aubrey does it
obscure -- spell to block someone who's Seeking
The timing note on the banishing is there because Aubrey's one of the most powerful mages in my world; anyone else doing that spell would take longer and I don't want to forget and have some apprentice-type do it in thirty seconds a hundred pages later. [laugh/flail] Most of what I jot down are things like that, for consistency. It's all right for different characters, who might've been taught by different people or groups or traditions, to call the same spell something different, but if I do that I want it to be a deliberate choice because I was adding depth to my world, rather than accidentally because I forgot what I called it last time.
Swords and Shadows, a fantasy set in a world I made up, has more notes about little things:
Ulder Pass -- main artery through Daro Uldrem, the mountain range east of Pilenem, the capital province.
Five of Arden's brothers were at the victory feast
Pilen -- the Molani language
bridegild -- brideprice
Money -- Molani
terran -- copper coin
lunar -- silver coin
solar -- gold coin
Money -- Ruvori
pes -- copper coin
kas -- small silver coin
vas -- larger silver coin
chas -- gold coin
I start out just jotting things as they occur to me, which is usually as I create them within the story, which is why the ordering might seem a bit chaotic. As I collect more notes, I start cut/pasting to get them more organized. In this file, I separated out lists of gods and other religious matters, because all the magic in this story comes from the gods and the main plot is based on the gods messing with the world, so there's a lot of info piling up about the different gods -- their name, appellation (Ashti, a goddess of travellers, is often called Ashti of the Roads, for example) what they're in charge of, how their priests dress, temple descriptions, etc.
I don't necessarily worry about putting in every detail -- the point is to jog my own memory. There's actually very little verbage in my note file about the one god who's stirring up all the trouble, for example, because I've been focused on him all along and I haven't come up with much that I thought I'd have a hard time remembering. This is for my own utility, so I tune it to my own needs. If this ever turned into, say, a shared world and I had to come up with a bible for other writers to use, I'd have to add a lot.
So how does everyone else work? How do you make sure your character who's allergic to citrus in Chapter Two doesn't slug down a lemonade in Chapter Thirty-Seven? Or that a character who says "dresser" for twelve chapters doesn't suddenly start saying "bureau?" Or that your landlocked city doesn't suddenly develop a thriving waterfront at the climax of the story?
Angie
[To Be Continued in "Support Writing 2 -- Macro"]
Normally I don't outline -- I think I've mentioned that before. I've tried it and it's crashed and burned pretty miserably, on one landmark occasion taking an entire novel with it. Even in school I never outlined my papers unless the outline had to be turned in for credit, and sometimes not even then; I've essentially pantsed major research papers with footnote numbers in triple digits (and gotten As on them) so after a few failed experiments I've never had any particular incentive to go back and try again.
Which isn't to say that every story is created completely within its Word file, with no support writing. Short stories, sure. But for longer pieces and series stories I find I do need some help keeping everything straight, at the very least for the sake of continuity.
Most of my longer stories have a Notes file, usually called StoryNameNotes.doc. I'll jot down character notes at the top -- full name, any nicknames, age, family/friend/work relationships, physical details, plus things like how they take their coffee, whether they call it a "couch" or a "sofa," where they're from, etc. I'll add to it as I go, whenever anything significant comes up in the story that I think there's any possibility I might need to refer to later. The character notes go first in the file because I refer to these most often, usually protags at the top, then supporting characters, then minor characters. Sometimes I'll cluster characters differently, like in my current WIP where I have the bad guy's notes followed by a bunch of very minor characters who are his henchmen and who pretty much are just names and skills/functions; exactly how I organize things depends on what I think will be the most useful for the current story.
Then I'll start adding setting notes below that, which might be more or less detailed depending on the setting. SF or fantasy gets a lot of notes because every time I make something up I have to remember it, while mundane contemporary settings get fewer. So for A Hidden Magic, an urban fantasy set in modern times in the Bay Area (where I grew up, and lived until I got married and moved to Long Beach), I've got the following setting notes, among others:
Underhill or Under the Hill
It's winter
the wildlands, the chaotic territory Underhill between enclaves
the light Underhill was a perpetual dim twilight and days passed only in the sense that meals and sleeping periods came and went.
The first bit is a nomenclature note; I wanted to remember how I wrote it out and what capitalization I used. (I do that a lot, for consistency.) The bit about it being winter refers to the story period; it's not winter Underhill all the time. The last bit is a clip directly from the story; no sense retyping it, right?
Farther down I have some spells I used:
don't-look -- a magical glamour which coaxes the eye away
banishing -- sending creature back Underhill, chanting & hollow BANG! 2 min. when Aubrey does it
obscure -- spell to block someone who's Seeking
The timing note on the banishing is there because Aubrey's one of the most powerful mages in my world; anyone else doing that spell would take longer and I don't want to forget and have some apprentice-type do it in thirty seconds a hundred pages later. [laugh/flail] Most of what I jot down are things like that, for consistency. It's all right for different characters, who might've been taught by different people or groups or traditions, to call the same spell something different, but if I do that I want it to be a deliberate choice because I was adding depth to my world, rather than accidentally because I forgot what I called it last time.
Swords and Shadows, a fantasy set in a world I made up, has more notes about little things:
Ulder Pass -- main artery through Daro Uldrem, the mountain range east of Pilenem, the capital province.
Five of Arden's brothers were at the victory feast
Pilen -- the Molani language
bridegild -- brideprice
Money -- Molani
terran -- copper coin
lunar -- silver coin
solar -- gold coin
Money -- Ruvori
pes -- copper coin
kas -- small silver coin
vas -- larger silver coin
chas -- gold coin
I start out just jotting things as they occur to me, which is usually as I create them within the story, which is why the ordering might seem a bit chaotic. As I collect more notes, I start cut/pasting to get them more organized. In this file, I separated out lists of gods and other religious matters, because all the magic in this story comes from the gods and the main plot is based on the gods messing with the world, so there's a lot of info piling up about the different gods -- their name, appellation (Ashti, a goddess of travellers, is often called Ashti of the Roads, for example) what they're in charge of, how their priests dress, temple descriptions, etc.
I don't necessarily worry about putting in every detail -- the point is to jog my own memory. There's actually very little verbage in my note file about the one god who's stirring up all the trouble, for example, because I've been focused on him all along and I haven't come up with much that I thought I'd have a hard time remembering. This is for my own utility, so I tune it to my own needs. If this ever turned into, say, a shared world and I had to come up with a bible for other writers to use, I'd have to add a lot.
So how does everyone else work? How do you make sure your character who's allergic to citrus in Chapter Two doesn't slug down a lemonade in Chapter Thirty-Seven? Or that a character who says "dresser" for twelve chapters doesn't suddenly start saying "bureau?" Or that your landlocked city doesn't suddenly develop a thriving waterfront at the climax of the story?
Angie
[To Be Continued in "Support Writing 2 -- Macro"]
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
On Food
Food is an important part of worldbuilding and I've recently come across a couple of things which have me thinking about how food fits into a world, whether SF or fantasy or contemporary.
The first was Alton Brown's latest short series, "Feasting on Waves." He and his crew sailed around the Caribbean in a couple of catamarans and visited markets and homes and restaurants, helped catch and prepare and eat food on a number of islands around the area. It's a great series and I highly recommend it. One thing that struck me, though, was that one of the traditional staple proteins on several of the islands was a dried, salted fish.
Now, you might not think this is at all odd or unusual. They're in the middle of the Caribbean, after all, and there are fish all around -- fin fish, shellfish, lobsters and shrimp, all kinds of seafood. True, there are. But this particular dried, salted fish is imported from Canada.
Seriously, I have no idea how this got started -- neither did the locals AB asked -- but they've been doing it for at least several generations and it's worked its way into a number of traditional recipes.
And I'm not talking about fancy food prepared and eaten by a small number of elites who can afford to import luxury food from overseas. These were all working-class people. The dried, salted fish is cheap enough for them to buy and use regularly.
Which still doesn't answer the question why. Why do these countries in the middle of the Caribbean, where most people live within a mile or two of the sea, import fish at all? I'd love to hear the historical background on this one.
It occurred to me, though, that this is the sort of detail that if someone stuck it into, say, a fantasy story -- island culture, relatively low average income, staple food fish imported from a couple thousand miles away -- most readers would eyeroll and assume the writer hadn't put any thought at all into that particular paragraph. Unless, of course, the story went into some detail on the historical and economic aspects of the situation. But unless that imported fish played a key role in the plot, that much detail would be out of place. And yet just tossing that imported fish into the setting without an explanation could leave the writer with, well, a lot of explaining to do. :) File this one under truth being stranger than fiction, because truth doesn't have to justify itself.
The other item was an article in the New York Times Magazine on the 9th, written by Michael Pollan and entitled "Farmer In Chief." It's a long, open letter to the President-Elect talking about food as a national security issue. Pollan goes into issues including the vulnerability of our food supply to disaster, whether human or natural; the truly enormous amount of ever-more-expensive fossil fuels consumed by agriculture; and the health implications of our nation's reliance upon a fossil-fuel-supported monoculture in our farming sector.
It's a very long piece -- nine pages -- but worth a read.
What makes me mention it here, though, is his proposed solutions to the various problems, which start on page three. Anyone writing science fiction, particularly anything set on Earth in the next fifty or hundred years (or five or ten years) would find some interesting material here, whether you're looking for some clues about how society might change to stave off disaster, or how some food or fuel or ecological or health related disasters which change society might occur. There's a lot of great food for thought here. [cough]
Angie
The first was Alton Brown's latest short series, "Feasting on Waves." He and his crew sailed around the Caribbean in a couple of catamarans and visited markets and homes and restaurants, helped catch and prepare and eat food on a number of islands around the area. It's a great series and I highly recommend it. One thing that struck me, though, was that one of the traditional staple proteins on several of the islands was a dried, salted fish.
Now, you might not think this is at all odd or unusual. They're in the middle of the Caribbean, after all, and there are fish all around -- fin fish, shellfish, lobsters and shrimp, all kinds of seafood. True, there are. But this particular dried, salted fish is imported from Canada.
Seriously, I have no idea how this got started -- neither did the locals AB asked -- but they've been doing it for at least several generations and it's worked its way into a number of traditional recipes.
And I'm not talking about fancy food prepared and eaten by a small number of elites who can afford to import luxury food from overseas. These were all working-class people. The dried, salted fish is cheap enough for them to buy and use regularly.
Which still doesn't answer the question why. Why do these countries in the middle of the Caribbean, where most people live within a mile or two of the sea, import fish at all? I'd love to hear the historical background on this one.
It occurred to me, though, that this is the sort of detail that if someone stuck it into, say, a fantasy story -- island culture, relatively low average income, staple food fish imported from a couple thousand miles away -- most readers would eyeroll and assume the writer hadn't put any thought at all into that particular paragraph. Unless, of course, the story went into some detail on the historical and economic aspects of the situation. But unless that imported fish played a key role in the plot, that much detail would be out of place. And yet just tossing that imported fish into the setting without an explanation could leave the writer with, well, a lot of explaining to do. :) File this one under truth being stranger than fiction, because truth doesn't have to justify itself.
The other item was an article in the New York Times Magazine on the 9th, written by Michael Pollan and entitled "Farmer In Chief." It's a long, open letter to the President-Elect talking about food as a national security issue. Pollan goes into issues including the vulnerability of our food supply to disaster, whether human or natural; the truly enormous amount of ever-more-expensive fossil fuels consumed by agriculture; and the health implications of our nation's reliance upon a fossil-fuel-supported monoculture in our farming sector.
It's a very long piece -- nine pages -- but worth a read.
What makes me mention it here, though, is his proposed solutions to the various problems, which start on page three. Anyone writing science fiction, particularly anything set on Earth in the next fifty or hundred years (or five or ten years) would find some interesting material here, whether you're looking for some clues about how society might change to stave off disaster, or how some food or fuel or ecological or health related disasters which change society might occur. There's a lot of great food for thought here. [cough]
Angie
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Summiting Everest
Everyone and their brother-in-law around the writing-related blogoverse has been posting or linking to this cartoon, and yeah, it can be true, but sometimes it's not. It depends on the skill of the writer, really, as do so many things.
You can be an Anne McCaffrey and make up a lot of words and names which fit your world well and are internally consistent in their tone, derivation, etc., and incorporate them very smoothly into your text such that the reader is never confused about what's what. Or you can be a JR Ward whose made-up words and names sound like she hit up a local junior high for suggestions, only use your own made-up rules when you feel like it, and just toss the new vocabulary into your text however so your readers are always going, "Huh??" and having to flip to the glossary. Credit to her for putting a glossary in her books, and for putting it at the front of the book so you know it's there right when you start, but seriously, the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are an advanced course in how not to make up words and names, and how not to use them in a piece of fiction.
But it depends. It's one of those things which is very easy to mess up, so many writers do and many readers remember the trainwrecks. But the problem isn't with the concept of making up words; it's with the writers and how they do it. There are a lot of aspects of fiction writing -- including many of the subgenres and plot devices and techniques and whatnot which get massive snarking -- which really aren't problematic in and of themselves, but rather which are difficult to do well and so are rarely done well.
But it's like waxing sarcastic about Everest expeditions, just because 99.9% of the people on the planet don't have the skills or resources to actually make the summit. High-end mountain climbing isn't stupid; people who try to do it when they aren't prepared to do it successfully are stupid. Or maybe they're just still learning. But don't blame the mountain if most of the people who try to climb it end up failing. (At least with writing, failure rarely means death.)
I think deciding whether to try a new or difficult device or technique is one of those areas where a writer has to be brutally honest with him- or herself. It's easy to say, "Oh, I've seen this done, so I can do it too." Or "Well, I know a lot of people say you shouldn't do this, but Chris Awesomewriter did it and it was great so what do they all know?" It's harder, though, to make an honest assessment of whether your particular skills are up to the task. Am I honestly as good as Chris Awesomewriter? If not, maybe I should back off on using that one device Chris used to such good effect, but which a hundred other writers have crashed and burned on.
Which isn't to say one should never try new things. I try new techniques and plot devices and character types and narrative voices all the time; it's one of the reasons I have so many WIPs on my hard drive. I just don't share them all, because I've developed a decent sense of when something's working and when it's not.
There's something to be said for a practice piece, or what an artist would call a study. Labelling something as being For Practice means the pressure is off. You don't have to worry about whether it'll work or whether it'll be perfect or whether that train will wreck and take the station with it. If it's just an experiment, then you're free to fail and to learn from the failure and go on to the next piece.
I get uncomfortable, though, when something as basic as making up new vocabulary for an SF or fantasy story is mocked and held up as something which makes a story suck. Only bad writing can make a story suck.
The best way to become a writer who doesn't suck is to practice a lot, try new things, and learn from your failures. Maybe after three or four or a dozen failed expeditions you'll finally make the summit, while the folks who carefully avoid everything that's difficult and therefore prone to failure never make it past the foothills.
Angie
You can be an Anne McCaffrey and make up a lot of words and names which fit your world well and are internally consistent in their tone, derivation, etc., and incorporate them very smoothly into your text such that the reader is never confused about what's what. Or you can be a JR Ward whose made-up words and names sound like she hit up a local junior high for suggestions, only use your own made-up rules when you feel like it, and just toss the new vocabulary into your text however so your readers are always going, "Huh??" and having to flip to the glossary. Credit to her for putting a glossary in her books, and for putting it at the front of the book so you know it's there right when you start, but seriously, the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are an advanced course in how not to make up words and names, and how not to use them in a piece of fiction.
But it depends. It's one of those things which is very easy to mess up, so many writers do and many readers remember the trainwrecks. But the problem isn't with the concept of making up words; it's with the writers and how they do it. There are a lot of aspects of fiction writing -- including many of the subgenres and plot devices and techniques and whatnot which get massive snarking -- which really aren't problematic in and of themselves, but rather which are difficult to do well and so are rarely done well.
But it's like waxing sarcastic about Everest expeditions, just because 99.9% of the people on the planet don't have the skills or resources to actually make the summit. High-end mountain climbing isn't stupid; people who try to do it when they aren't prepared to do it successfully are stupid. Or maybe they're just still learning. But don't blame the mountain if most of the people who try to climb it end up failing. (At least with writing, failure rarely means death.)
I think deciding whether to try a new or difficult device or technique is one of those areas where a writer has to be brutally honest with him- or herself. It's easy to say, "Oh, I've seen this done, so I can do it too." Or "Well, I know a lot of people say you shouldn't do this, but Chris Awesomewriter did it and it was great so what do they all know?" It's harder, though, to make an honest assessment of whether your particular skills are up to the task. Am I honestly as good as Chris Awesomewriter? If not, maybe I should back off on using that one device Chris used to such good effect, but which a hundred other writers have crashed and burned on.
Which isn't to say one should never try new things. I try new techniques and plot devices and character types and narrative voices all the time; it's one of the reasons I have so many WIPs on my hard drive. I just don't share them all, because I've developed a decent sense of when something's working and when it's not.
There's something to be said for a practice piece, or what an artist would call a study. Labelling something as being For Practice means the pressure is off. You don't have to worry about whether it'll work or whether it'll be perfect or whether that train will wreck and take the station with it. If it's just an experiment, then you're free to fail and to learn from the failure and go on to the next piece.
I get uncomfortable, though, when something as basic as making up new vocabulary for an SF or fantasy story is mocked and held up as something which makes a story suck. Only bad writing can make a story suck.
The best way to become a writer who doesn't suck is to practice a lot, try new things, and learn from your failures. Maybe after three or four or a dozen failed expeditions you'll finally make the summit, while the folks who carefully avoid everything that's difficult and therefore prone to failure never make it past the foothills.
Angie
Friday, September 5, 2008
And Done! Whew!
I finished the story I mentioned a few days ago, and I feel a thousand percent better now. It turns out I only added about ninety words to the thing before wrapping it. No sex, but then I don't add sex unless it's necessary, and in this case it wasn't. Hopefully not too many people will mind.
It's wonderful to be out from under the guilt, though. I still feel bad that it took so long, but it's done now and that's what matters. I remember a saying around work (I used to work for an electronics company -- we did R&D and systems integration in the signal processing field) that twenty years from now, no one will remember if you were late, but everyone will remember if it didn't work. I was late, but it works, and hopefully that's what folks will remember. :)
Next deadline is my Halloween short for Torquere, due on the fifteenth. That's not very far away, but I feel optimistic about it. I did last year's in less time, and it got me my first review, which was pretty cool. And heck, at this point any deadline that's in the future is a good one. [wry smile]
Speaking of deadlines, Writtenwyrdd has extended the deadline for her contest to Monday, so we've got the weekend to come up with some awesome setting descriptions.
Angie
It's wonderful to be out from under the guilt, though. I still feel bad that it took so long, but it's done now and that's what matters. I remember a saying around work (I used to work for an electronics company -- we did R&D and systems integration in the signal processing field) that twenty years from now, no one will remember if you were late, but everyone will remember if it didn't work. I was late, but it works, and hopefully that's what folks will remember. :)
Next deadline is my Halloween short for Torquere, due on the fifteenth. That's not very far away, but I feel optimistic about it. I did last year's in less time, and it got me my first review, which was pretty cool. And heck, at this point any deadline that's in the future is a good one. [wry smile]
Speaking of deadlines, Writtenwyrdd has extended the deadline for her contest to Monday, so we've got the weekend to come up with some awesome setting descriptions.
Angie
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Writtenwyrdd's Bloggaversary!
Okay, anyone who can crank out 933 posts in two years, and keep them all interesting and helpful and full of cool links, definitely deserves to throw a party for it. So to celebrate two years of awesomeness, WW is having a contest.
Head over to this post and give her a 150- to 300-word narrative describing a different reality. (See the post itself for details.) Deadline is Friday the fifth, at 6pm. I'm figuring Eastern timezone just to be safe.
Congrats, WW!
Angie
Head over to this post and give her a 150- to 300-word narrative describing a different reality. (See the post itself for details.) Deadline is Friday the fifth, at 6pm. I'm figuring Eastern timezone just to be safe.
Congrats, WW!
Angie
Friday, May 9, 2008
RTB Column on Worldbuilding
I had a new column go up on Romancing the Blog this morning, this time on worldbuilding. I've been heavily into science fiction and fantasy since I was small and this has always been one of my favorite topics. :) Head on over and let me know what you think.
Building Your Own World
Building Your Own World
Monday, October 1, 2007
Research vs. Invention
Candy Proctor wrote an interesting post today about that authentic feel a reader gets when fiction sounds real, whether it actually is or not. It's an interesting post (and I'm still pondering the concept of "aboutness") but it made me think about the trade-off we need to make whenever we don't have extensive personal experience or some other acquired expertise in the topic(s).
I think there's room for well done fakery in most areas of fiction. No one expects a writer to look up absolutely every fact about everything used or shown or talked about in a story, and sometimes doing so would be a bad idea even if we could. Using a real restaurant -- with the name, location and staff accurately described -- when a character gets a raging case of food poisoning there and dies is a good way to get sued, for example. But even beyond the grasp of the lawyers, a well crafted fake will often work just as well as the real info, at least for the majority of your readers. Weaving research with invention is a valuable skill and writers who are good at it can surround the reader with a seamless mesh of rich detail which all flows and hangs together.
I do like accuracy when I read, of course, but I also like my favorite writers to publish more often than once every five years. [wry smile] And from the writer's point of view, even if the need to earn a decent paycheck a bit more often isn't an issue, it can be frustrating and unsatisfying for a writer or anyone else to put so much prep work into projects that they only get results two or three times per decade. Some people have the mindset to make this sort of schedule satisfying, but for everyone else there's a reasonable balance which can be achieved.
I think the trick is to figure out who your audience is and make some sort of decent squint-and-roll-the-dice estimate as to about how many of them are likely to know more about [whatever] than you do, and make your researching decisions from there. Diminishing returns become a factor eventually and if you get to a point where another year of research will only cut down your nasty letters and sarcastic reviews from, say, five to three, maybe it's not worth the time spent. You might have to just accept that there's going to be some small fraction of readers out there who'll be sneering, but if the vast majority will be reading and nodding and reccing, you're still well ahead of the game.
Not that anyone can estimate reactions that closely, but it's definitely possible to hop onto Google and start reading reviews and other commentary in the genre (and preferably the subgenre) you're writing in. What do the readers want? What do they praise? What do they laugh at? This is really basic information, and for that matter one might hope that anyone writing in a given genre would have already read enough in that genre to know these things, but I've read plenty of stories where it was pretty clear the writer did not know the genre even that well and I'm sure others have too. Even someone new to a genre can find out what the readers like and dislike and scorn with just a few hours spent blog-hopping, though, and I can think of a writer or two who engineered their own downfall by (apparently) not bothering.
Or maybe they just didn't pick up on the subtleties.
One writer wrote a murder mystery a number of years ago set at a science fiction convention. Theme mystery series are popular and this could've been a neat idea, but it was pretty clear to me, as someone who's attended and worked SF conventions for a very long time, that this writer's actual experience of SF cons was extremely minimal, to the point where I doubt she'd ever attended a general SF con of any size. The book was published by TSR (the company which at the time owned the Dungeons and Dragons property) and there was some speculation among friends of mine at the time that maybe TSR had sprung for a couple of free passes to gaming conventions, which are unfortunately very different from science fiction conventions. Or maybe they just described them to her. It was particularly frustrating because so many small details were correct, but they just underscored the major clunkers. Whatever the reason, though, I and a number of others spent the entire book wincing and eyerolling over errors, which was a shame because the writing was decent and the mystery itself was interesting.
It's one thing to get a few minor details wrong, but when the entire setting sounds fake and third-hand to anyone who's actually been there, you've got a serious problem. Especially with something like a theme mystery, where the whole point is to market the books to a special interest group, you're deliberately courting readers who'll know where all your duct taped patches are. :/ It's like writing a police procedural and forgetting about Miranda, or writing a war story about submarines and completely ignoring pressure, or having your hard-SF characters hop into their reaction rocket and fly out to Rigel by lunchtime. These are incredibly basic errors and would signal to any reader at all familiar with the genre that the writer was faking and not doing a very good job of it.
Comparing time and effort spent in research versus your skill when it comes to invention, and balancing the result against the likely return in reader satisfaction is a valuable skill whenever you're writing about things you aren't already an expert at. It requires a strong familiarity with the intended audience, though, and a misstep can do considerable damage to both the story and the writer's reputation.
Angie
I think there's room for well done fakery in most areas of fiction. No one expects a writer to look up absolutely every fact about everything used or shown or talked about in a story, and sometimes doing so would be a bad idea even if we could. Using a real restaurant -- with the name, location and staff accurately described -- when a character gets a raging case of food poisoning there and dies is a good way to get sued, for example. But even beyond the grasp of the lawyers, a well crafted fake will often work just as well as the real info, at least for the majority of your readers. Weaving research with invention is a valuable skill and writers who are good at it can surround the reader with a seamless mesh of rich detail which all flows and hangs together.
I do like accuracy when I read, of course, but I also like my favorite writers to publish more often than once every five years. [wry smile] And from the writer's point of view, even if the need to earn a decent paycheck a bit more often isn't an issue, it can be frustrating and unsatisfying for a writer or anyone else to put so much prep work into projects that they only get results two or three times per decade. Some people have the mindset to make this sort of schedule satisfying, but for everyone else there's a reasonable balance which can be achieved.
I think the trick is to figure out who your audience is and make some sort of decent squint-and-roll-the-dice estimate as to about how many of them are likely to know more about [whatever] than you do, and make your researching decisions from there. Diminishing returns become a factor eventually and if you get to a point where another year of research will only cut down your nasty letters and sarcastic reviews from, say, five to three, maybe it's not worth the time spent. You might have to just accept that there's going to be some small fraction of readers out there who'll be sneering, but if the vast majority will be reading and nodding and reccing, you're still well ahead of the game.
Not that anyone can estimate reactions that closely, but it's definitely possible to hop onto Google and start reading reviews and other commentary in the genre (and preferably the subgenre) you're writing in. What do the readers want? What do they praise? What do they laugh at? This is really basic information, and for that matter one might hope that anyone writing in a given genre would have already read enough in that genre to know these things, but I've read plenty of stories where it was pretty clear the writer did not know the genre even that well and I'm sure others have too. Even someone new to a genre can find out what the readers like and dislike and scorn with just a few hours spent blog-hopping, though, and I can think of a writer or two who engineered their own downfall by (apparently) not bothering.
Or maybe they just didn't pick up on the subtleties.
One writer wrote a murder mystery a number of years ago set at a science fiction convention. Theme mystery series are popular and this could've been a neat idea, but it was pretty clear to me, as someone who's attended and worked SF conventions for a very long time, that this writer's actual experience of SF cons was extremely minimal, to the point where I doubt she'd ever attended a general SF con of any size. The book was published by TSR (the company which at the time owned the Dungeons and Dragons property) and there was some speculation among friends of mine at the time that maybe TSR had sprung for a couple of free passes to gaming conventions, which are unfortunately very different from science fiction conventions. Or maybe they just described them to her. It was particularly frustrating because so many small details were correct, but they just underscored the major clunkers. Whatever the reason, though, I and a number of others spent the entire book wincing and eyerolling over errors, which was a shame because the writing was decent and the mystery itself was interesting.
It's one thing to get a few minor details wrong, but when the entire setting sounds fake and third-hand to anyone who's actually been there, you've got a serious problem. Especially with something like a theme mystery, where the whole point is to market the books to a special interest group, you're deliberately courting readers who'll know where all your duct taped patches are. :/ It's like writing a police procedural and forgetting about Miranda, or writing a war story about submarines and completely ignoring pressure, or having your hard-SF characters hop into their reaction rocket and fly out to Rigel by lunchtime. These are incredibly basic errors and would signal to any reader at all familiar with the genre that the writer was faking and not doing a very good job of it.
Comparing time and effort spent in research versus your skill when it comes to invention, and balancing the result against the likely return in reader satisfaction is a valuable skill whenever you're writing about things you aren't already an expert at. It requires a strong familiarity with the intended audience, though, and a misstep can do considerable damage to both the story and the writer's reputation.
Angie
Monday, September 24, 2007
Worldbuilding as an On-Going Process
Fantastical worldbuilding seems to be the topic of the day, with WrittenWyrdd and Charles Gramlich both talking about it. They both made some good points and it got me thinking about something I've noticed here and there, especially in science fiction stories.
WW made the point that things are changing pretty quickly, and that someone who was born ninety years ago has seen a huge amount of change in his lifetime. That's very true and the rate of change has been increasing. And yet how often do SF books set in the far future, whether the setting is a future Earth or a planet colonized long ago, where the culture changed only so far and then stopped? It's as though the writer needed Setting X for the story, so they explained how it came to be that things changed from what we have now to what they've got then, and then it all froze and has remained static ever since.
A ship full of religious zealots who believe it's sinful to read on Wednesdays and that long pants are an abomination unto their god leave Earth to build the perfectly moral society. They find a nice planet, build their colony and ban reading on Wednesdays and all pants longer than the knee. A thousand years later when the story takes place, they're still religious zealots, they still don't read on Wednesdays and they still toss the protagonist in prison for wearing long pants.
Seriously? What's the likelihood that any culture stays that static for that long? Even assuming a static environment, which in itself is pretty far-fetched, this would be unbelievable. But on a newly colonized planet, where the people have to deal with alien plants and animals and geology and weather and who knows what other conditions, where any food stock they brought with them has to be adapted, where completely unforeseen dangers and problems and challenges will force them to adapt their habits and values and priorities in order to survive in this strange and possibly deadly place -- a thousand years later they're still rabidly anti-long-pants? Ummm, right. Sure.
The guy WW knows who just turned ninety has seen not only great technological changes, but also huge changes in attitudes and morals and values and priorities. The expectation of what's "normal" has changed several times since 1917, and society has adapted each time. Your average American in 2007 has a much different world view from that of your average American in 1917, or even 1957.
And if there's anything we know about large groups, it's that they're going to disagree. More than two people can't agree on where to go for lunch, much less on what government policy should be. Heinlein once said that a committee is a creature with six or more legs and no brain, and snark aside, I think he was pretty much on it.
So how is it that our entire religious society is still monolithically anti-long-pants after a thousand years? We're supposed to believe that every single generation grew up in absolute accord with the beliefs of their elders? They somehow completely eliminated teenage rebellion, and the desire of the young to be new and different just because? They eliminated the tendency toward factional divisions, and the really useful technique for an opposition party of proposing something different from what the party in power espouses, just to be different? They completely forbade all scientific and technological innovation, and are still using the technology their ancestors brought to the planet, since significant technological change always brings social change with it? (And yeah, in too many stories they still are using the same exact technology their ancestors were. [sigh])
Things just don't change once and then stop. Or if they did, then that's a major issue and big enough to dominate a book all by itself, explaining why and how. Realistically, though, human societies continue to evolve. Sometimes it's slower and sometimes it's faster but they always do change, and they keep changing, and then they change again. Writers who are developing new worlds for science fiction need to keep this in mind.
How did your society begin? What was the baseline? How and why did it change after that? What was the new baseline? Then what changed, and how and why? Then what changed? And then what changed? The farther in the future (or at least, the farther from your baseline) your story is set, the more change you need to work out, a whole series of changes which are all logical or at least believable. The readers might never see a lot of this info (but we're used to that, right? readers rarely see more than ten or twenty percent of our research and development no matter what genre we're writing in) but the writer needs to know it so that everything hangs together. And if the writer doesn't know how a civilization (or a character or an institution or whatever) got from point A to point Q, it'll show.
Charles talked about wanting to see the exotic in fiction, and the exotic is what makes SF -- and fantasy, and horror -- especially creative and memorable. But just as too many books don't show enough change, it's also too common to see what are presented as differences, as exotic and strange and weird, being just rehashes of our mainstream culture. If all a writer's familiar with is American culture, or Western Civilization, that's not a very large pool from which to draw, especially when you're looking for really basic characteristics of a society.
Take the economy. It's always just a given that there'll be some sort of even-exchange economy. Whether what's exchanged is money -- some sort of symbology representing work or production -- or whether the exchange is a direct bartering of goods and services for other services and goods, it's rare to find a future society, or even an alien society, which works any other way. And yet there are other ways of organizing things.
Families, for example, tend to run on true communism -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If Mom is a programmer and makes $65K a year, then that's what she does and that's what she contributes to the family. If Dad is a wood carver and travels to craft fairs on weekends selling his nature carvings, and takes care of the house and looks after the kids during the week around time spent at his carving, then that's what he does. If Sam is fifteen and can cook dinner every night and do all the yard work and laundry for the family, then that's what he does. If Chrissy is five and puts away her toys and cleans the bathroom (sorta) once a week, then that's her contribution. No one expects Chrissy to eat less food or go without shoes just because she doesn't contribute much of anything to the upkeep of the family. No one expects Sam to grow up with crooked teeth just because braces are horribly expensive and his cooking and chores don't add up to "enough" to "repay" the family for that expenditure. This system works for just about all of us and yet hardly any future or alien societies use it.
But okay, that's communism and there's a knee-jerk negative response toward it in the US. There are other systems, though. The potlatch system awards status to people or families who give away a lot of stuff to others in the community. In that kind of society, the status and admiration is worth more than wealth, so people accumulate stuff just so they can give it away in exchange for status. And reciprocity is like barter but not so direct -- more a system where people do favors for each other, give things to people who need them and get things from other people. There's a general awareness of who's given you things or done favors but not the strict record keeping that a money economy has, or the right-now exchange of value for value that a barter system uses.
Most of these alternative systems work best for small groups, but SF writers are supposed to be imaginative and good at extrapolating. If a society got to, say, the classical period on a communistic or potlatch or reciprocal system of exchange (and the Roman Empire did have a bit of the potlatch about it, with the Senators spending a lot of their personal income on public works and facilities and celebrations, because it was expected of their class and they'd lose status and influence if they didn't) how could that be tinkered with to last through the Middle Ages? The Industrial Revolution? The Information Age?
What new systems -- economic, political, social -- might settlers on a new planet come up with? After all, they're starting fresh. They can do whatever they want. What new and different systems might they invent and try out? And then how might those systems change in a generation or three? A century or three? A millenium or three?
There are more options than are immediately obvious in the industrialized world. An anthropology class (or even a good text or two) is a great source for ideas and will give a writer some notion of just how many different ways people all over the planet have organized themselves. When writing aliens, or even human societies far enough away from ours, it pays to give them customs and institutions and social organizations different enough from ours that they actually feel alien, different, exotic. And once you've got that, keep in mind that the society will change over time. A society with a dynamic history behind it will always feel more realistic than one which has apparently been stuck in the same rut for the last fifty generations.
The exotic is all about change, though. Whether your society starts with "us" and then evolves away, or starts somewhere strange and different and then evolves to be even more strange and different, it's not an alien (or elven or nether plane) society if it sounds like it was lifted right out of Iowa.
Angie
WW made the point that things are changing pretty quickly, and that someone who was born ninety years ago has seen a huge amount of change in his lifetime. That's very true and the rate of change has been increasing. And yet how often do SF books set in the far future, whether the setting is a future Earth or a planet colonized long ago, where the culture changed only so far and then stopped? It's as though the writer needed Setting X for the story, so they explained how it came to be that things changed from what we have now to what they've got then, and then it all froze and has remained static ever since.
A ship full of religious zealots who believe it's sinful to read on Wednesdays and that long pants are an abomination unto their god leave Earth to build the perfectly moral society. They find a nice planet, build their colony and ban reading on Wednesdays and all pants longer than the knee. A thousand years later when the story takes place, they're still religious zealots, they still don't read on Wednesdays and they still toss the protagonist in prison for wearing long pants.
Seriously? What's the likelihood that any culture stays that static for that long? Even assuming a static environment, which in itself is pretty far-fetched, this would be unbelievable. But on a newly colonized planet, where the people have to deal with alien plants and animals and geology and weather and who knows what other conditions, where any food stock they brought with them has to be adapted, where completely unforeseen dangers and problems and challenges will force them to adapt their habits and values and priorities in order to survive in this strange and possibly deadly place -- a thousand years later they're still rabidly anti-long-pants? Ummm, right. Sure.
The guy WW knows who just turned ninety has seen not only great technological changes, but also huge changes in attitudes and morals and values and priorities. The expectation of what's "normal" has changed several times since 1917, and society has adapted each time. Your average American in 2007 has a much different world view from that of your average American in 1917, or even 1957.
And if there's anything we know about large groups, it's that they're going to disagree. More than two people can't agree on where to go for lunch, much less on what government policy should be. Heinlein once said that a committee is a creature with six or more legs and no brain, and snark aside, I think he was pretty much on it.
So how is it that our entire religious society is still monolithically anti-long-pants after a thousand years? We're supposed to believe that every single generation grew up in absolute accord with the beliefs of their elders? They somehow completely eliminated teenage rebellion, and the desire of the young to be new and different just because? They eliminated the tendency toward factional divisions, and the really useful technique for an opposition party of proposing something different from what the party in power espouses, just to be different? They completely forbade all scientific and technological innovation, and are still using the technology their ancestors brought to the planet, since significant technological change always brings social change with it? (And yeah, in too many stories they still are using the same exact technology their ancestors were. [sigh])
Things just don't change once and then stop. Or if they did, then that's a major issue and big enough to dominate a book all by itself, explaining why and how. Realistically, though, human societies continue to evolve. Sometimes it's slower and sometimes it's faster but they always do change, and they keep changing, and then they change again. Writers who are developing new worlds for science fiction need to keep this in mind.
How did your society begin? What was the baseline? How and why did it change after that? What was the new baseline? Then what changed, and how and why? Then what changed? And then what changed? The farther in the future (or at least, the farther from your baseline) your story is set, the more change you need to work out, a whole series of changes which are all logical or at least believable. The readers might never see a lot of this info (but we're used to that, right? readers rarely see more than ten or twenty percent of our research and development no matter what genre we're writing in) but the writer needs to know it so that everything hangs together. And if the writer doesn't know how a civilization (or a character or an institution or whatever) got from point A to point Q, it'll show.
Charles talked about wanting to see the exotic in fiction, and the exotic is what makes SF -- and fantasy, and horror -- especially creative and memorable. But just as too many books don't show enough change, it's also too common to see what are presented as differences, as exotic and strange and weird, being just rehashes of our mainstream culture. If all a writer's familiar with is American culture, or Western Civilization, that's not a very large pool from which to draw, especially when you're looking for really basic characteristics of a society.
Take the economy. It's always just a given that there'll be some sort of even-exchange economy. Whether what's exchanged is money -- some sort of symbology representing work or production -- or whether the exchange is a direct bartering of goods and services for other services and goods, it's rare to find a future society, or even an alien society, which works any other way. And yet there are other ways of organizing things.
Families, for example, tend to run on true communism -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If Mom is a programmer and makes $65K a year, then that's what she does and that's what she contributes to the family. If Dad is a wood carver and travels to craft fairs on weekends selling his nature carvings, and takes care of the house and looks after the kids during the week around time spent at his carving, then that's what he does. If Sam is fifteen and can cook dinner every night and do all the yard work and laundry for the family, then that's what he does. If Chrissy is five and puts away her toys and cleans the bathroom (sorta) once a week, then that's her contribution. No one expects Chrissy to eat less food or go without shoes just because she doesn't contribute much of anything to the upkeep of the family. No one expects Sam to grow up with crooked teeth just because braces are horribly expensive and his cooking and chores don't add up to "enough" to "repay" the family for that expenditure. This system works for just about all of us and yet hardly any future or alien societies use it.
But okay, that's communism and there's a knee-jerk negative response toward it in the US. There are other systems, though. The potlatch system awards status to people or families who give away a lot of stuff to others in the community. In that kind of society, the status and admiration is worth more than wealth, so people accumulate stuff just so they can give it away in exchange for status. And reciprocity is like barter but not so direct -- more a system where people do favors for each other, give things to people who need them and get things from other people. There's a general awareness of who's given you things or done favors but not the strict record keeping that a money economy has, or the right-now exchange of value for value that a barter system uses.
Most of these alternative systems work best for small groups, but SF writers are supposed to be imaginative and good at extrapolating. If a society got to, say, the classical period on a communistic or potlatch or reciprocal system of exchange (and the Roman Empire did have a bit of the potlatch about it, with the Senators spending a lot of their personal income on public works and facilities and celebrations, because it was expected of their class and they'd lose status and influence if they didn't) how could that be tinkered with to last through the Middle Ages? The Industrial Revolution? The Information Age?
What new systems -- economic, political, social -- might settlers on a new planet come up with? After all, they're starting fresh. They can do whatever they want. What new and different systems might they invent and try out? And then how might those systems change in a generation or three? A century or three? A millenium or three?
There are more options than are immediately obvious in the industrialized world. An anthropology class (or even a good text or two) is a great source for ideas and will give a writer some notion of just how many different ways people all over the planet have organized themselves. When writing aliens, or even human societies far enough away from ours, it pays to give them customs and institutions and social organizations different enough from ours that they actually feel alien, different, exotic. And once you've got that, keep in mind that the society will change over time. A society with a dynamic history behind it will always feel more realistic than one which has apparently been stuck in the same rut for the last fifty generations.
The exotic is all about change, though. Whether your society starts with "us" and then evolves away, or starts somewhere strange and different and then evolves to be even more strange and different, it's not an alien (or elven or nether plane) society if it sounds like it was lifted right out of Iowa.
Angie
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Writing Something Else -- Gambling but No Cowboys
Well, I've actually been writing. Fiction even, which is good. But not any of the stories I'd been working on earlier or even doing prep-work on, which is... not bad, but sort of wierd and sigh-inducing because it'd be nice to be able to work a bit more efficiently, or something like that. I guess that's not how creative work goes, though, or at least it never has for me, so as long as I'm working on something I suppose I should be happy. [wry smile]
So I was working on the djinn story and babbling in my notes file about it and the plot kept growing. On the one hand this is good because the anthology guidelines say "up to twenty thousand words" and even though there's no lower limit, I have a feeling that if I ended up with something only three thousand words long it likely wouldn't be looked upon in quite as positive a light as if it were more in the eighteen thousand word area, you know? But it was bad because the theme is gamblers and gambling (and cowboys but I'm ignoring that part because it also said "throughout time" and I don't get the impression that they'll be insisting on the cowboys if you're not in a setting which had them [crossed fingers] or even the gambling if you have a good cowboy story although that part is irrelevant to my current project) and the way the plot was developing, the gambling had turned into just a bit of a gimmick at the very beginning and then was left behind and forgotten. That didn't sound good, in a theme anthology and all. But I do like where the plot was going and how the setting was developing so I shoved it onto the back burner for later, then went back to my original image of a starting scene and opened a new notes file and started babbling again and now I have a plot idea which actually revolves around gambling throughout and to the end, yay.
I'm back to SF this time, with a setting on a colony world which had lost a lot of its tech as well as some of the more enlightened social structures in the struggle for basic survival during some extended period after the founding. It's fun coming up with a workable mix of high- and low-tech, figuring what might've survived and what might not have and what they would've re-built or re-invented and in what direction, because it's not reasonable to expect that the population "now" will have the same priorities and values and preferences that their ancestors did a dozen generations earlier, so as they redevelop and rework various things, they'll do a lot of them differently just because it suits them to do so.
And of course you have to figure out how things were before you can figure out how they'd have logically changed, which means that once again I'm coming up with a lot more worldbuilding info than is likely to make it into the final story. Although with 20K words to play with this time (my last SF story was only about 3300 words and change) I'll probably get more into it. But still, I expect to have a lot left over because there are things you need to know before you can figure out other things, which you need to know before you can decide about still other things which will actually make it into the story. Assuming you care about things making sense, that is. :)
Of course I could make this a cowboy story if I wanted to, since the tech level in some areas is pretty close and it makes sense that the colonists (who aren't really colonists anymore, but anyway) would be herding animals for food and other resources, assuming they either brought or discovered suitable animals in their new home. But I really don't want this to sound like a Firefly fanfic or something [sigh] so I'm avoiding the whole cowboys-in-space thing as much as I can. Despite the fact that the whole Colony World Loses Tech and Claws Its Way Back theme is older than Firefly and in fact is older than Joss Whedon himself, it's still a pretty visible example of the subgenre right now and I'd just as soon avoid comparisons (or insinuations) whenever possible. So no cowboys. [wry smile]
But I am writing, so setting aside the other story temporarily doesn't feel so bad.
Angie
So I was working on the djinn story and babbling in my notes file about it and the plot kept growing. On the one hand this is good because the anthology guidelines say "up to twenty thousand words" and even though there's no lower limit, I have a feeling that if I ended up with something only three thousand words long it likely wouldn't be looked upon in quite as positive a light as if it were more in the eighteen thousand word area, you know? But it was bad because the theme is gamblers and gambling (and cowboys but I'm ignoring that part because it also said "throughout time" and I don't get the impression that they'll be insisting on the cowboys if you're not in a setting which had them [crossed fingers] or even the gambling if you have a good cowboy story although that part is irrelevant to my current project) and the way the plot was developing, the gambling had turned into just a bit of a gimmick at the very beginning and then was left behind and forgotten. That didn't sound good, in a theme anthology and all. But I do like where the plot was going and how the setting was developing so I shoved it onto the back burner for later, then went back to my original image of a starting scene and opened a new notes file and started babbling again and now I have a plot idea which actually revolves around gambling throughout and to the end, yay.
I'm back to SF this time, with a setting on a colony world which had lost a lot of its tech as well as some of the more enlightened social structures in the struggle for basic survival during some extended period after the founding. It's fun coming up with a workable mix of high- and low-tech, figuring what might've survived and what might not have and what they would've re-built or re-invented and in what direction, because it's not reasonable to expect that the population "now" will have the same priorities and values and preferences that their ancestors did a dozen generations earlier, so as they redevelop and rework various things, they'll do a lot of them differently just because it suits them to do so.
And of course you have to figure out how things were before you can figure out how they'd have logically changed, which means that once again I'm coming up with a lot more worldbuilding info than is likely to make it into the final story. Although with 20K words to play with this time (my last SF story was only about 3300 words and change) I'll probably get more into it. But still, I expect to have a lot left over because there are things you need to know before you can figure out other things, which you need to know before you can decide about still other things which will actually make it into the story. Assuming you care about things making sense, that is. :)
Of course I could make this a cowboy story if I wanted to, since the tech level in some areas is pretty close and it makes sense that the colonists (who aren't really colonists anymore, but anyway) would be herding animals for food and other resources, assuming they either brought or discovered suitable animals in their new home. But I really don't want this to sound like a Firefly fanfic or something [sigh] so I'm avoiding the whole cowboys-in-space thing as much as I can. Despite the fact that the whole Colony World Loses Tech and Claws Its Way Back theme is older than Firefly and in fact is older than Joss Whedon himself, it's still a pretty visible example of the subgenre right now and I'd just as soon avoid comparisons (or insinuations) whenever possible. So no cowboys. [wry smile]
But I am writing, so setting aside the other story temporarily doesn't feel so bad.
Angie
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Not-Really Writing
For someone who's been doing a lot of writing stuff lately, I haven't gotten much writing done. :/ Anyone else had times when you seem to be always busy but not much concrete product comes of it...?
First, I've got this story I'm working on. It's a fantasy, in a sort-of old Arabic (pre-Islam) setting, so I've been doing research for that. I have a file with notes on the characters and notes on the plot and notes on djinn and magic and How The World Works in this sort of setting (and the husband and I watched a thing on TV last night that talked about old Egyptian magic which I think I'm going to incorporate into this story, or maybe use for another one but I'm going to use it for something 'cause it's cool) but haven't done any actual writing on the story itself yet. Last time I wrote a non-realspace story (that one was SF) I did most of my "planning" in the story itself, sort of, coming up with tech info and history and economics and social structures and such as I wrote. I had to cut most of it out, of course, since it was only a short story and couldn't support that kind of info-dump, and although I saved what I cut, I had to cut over and over and ended up starting the story three or four times. It worked out in the end but it was frustrating at the time so I figured I'd do all the work in a notes file this time rather than doing all my worldbuilding in story form. [wry smile] I'm not seeing that it's all that much less work, but we'll see how it goes. And I still haven't written a word of the actual story, which is for an anthology which closes on 30 September.
Then there's a fiction challenge I signed up for which requires a lot of pre-writing work. It's a remix fest, where you're assigned another fest writer and you choose one of her/his stories to rewrite -- remix -- putting your own spin on it. I've wanted to do one of these for a long time because they look like great fun, both to get to fiddle with someone else's story and to see what someone else will do to one of mine. It's a lot of work, though, and at this point I'm still going through my assigned writer's fiction index, reading through likely stories, pasting links to whatever rings a bell and taking preliminary notes. I have some possibilities but nothing that's really jumped up and waved at me, so I'm going on through the rest of the stories. Other people who've done this before have said that they've ended up starting remixes on several stories before finding one which actually works out past the first thousand words or so, so I'm starting early to give myself time. (Usually I'm a dedicated procrastinator but I have enough functional braincells to realize that might not work here.) The story's due on... 30 September.
Then there's the camping story I was working on earlier. I actually have about 1400 words of this one and it's coming along nicely, but the anthology I have in mind to submit to is open until 30 November so I've back-burnered it while I'm working on the other things. Figures, the one story I was making progress on is the one I have almost 3.5 months to do. [wry smile]
MOME Awards -- this is a sort of peripheral activity but it's still important to me. This is a new award this year and it's gotten a lot of interest and participation within its community. Voting is ongoing through 15 September and there are a lot of stories on the ballot which I haven't read yet, or which I need to at least skim to remind myself of what was which. This is a tighter deadline but at least it's just a matter of reading, which is time-consuming but not something I have to focus on producing like I do with a story. And luckily, as I go down the ballot (which goes from shorter categories to longer ones) I'll run into more and more stories I remember and won't have to reread, which is the only reason I have any hope of getting all the way through. And I do want to because I think this is a great award format and I want to support it. The fact that three of my own stories made the final ballot has nothing at all to do with it. [innocent humming]
At any rate, this is what I actually Have To Do in the next couple of months. Around that is keeping up with reading and such, and paying occasional attention to my husband. I'm just hoping with many sets of virtual fingers crossed that no major kerfuffles or blow-ups occur, because I seriously Do Not have time to get caught up in anything like that. [glares at LJ] But hopefully having it all written out like this will help me stay focused. I should have plenty of time for all this, it's just a matter of organization. Really. :/
Angie
First, I've got this story I'm working on. It's a fantasy, in a sort-of old Arabic (pre-Islam) setting, so I've been doing research for that. I have a file with notes on the characters and notes on the plot and notes on djinn and magic and How The World Works in this sort of setting (and the husband and I watched a thing on TV last night that talked about old Egyptian magic which I think I'm going to incorporate into this story, or maybe use for another one but I'm going to use it for something 'cause it's cool) but haven't done any actual writing on the story itself yet. Last time I wrote a non-realspace story (that one was SF) I did most of my "planning" in the story itself, sort of, coming up with tech info and history and economics and social structures and such as I wrote. I had to cut most of it out, of course, since it was only a short story and couldn't support that kind of info-dump, and although I saved what I cut, I had to cut over and over and ended up starting the story three or four times. It worked out in the end but it was frustrating at the time so I figured I'd do all the work in a notes file this time rather than doing all my worldbuilding in story form. [wry smile] I'm not seeing that it's all that much less work, but we'll see how it goes. And I still haven't written a word of the actual story, which is for an anthology which closes on 30 September.
Then there's a fiction challenge I signed up for which requires a lot of pre-writing work. It's a remix fest, where you're assigned another fest writer and you choose one of her/his stories to rewrite -- remix -- putting your own spin on it. I've wanted to do one of these for a long time because they look like great fun, both to get to fiddle with someone else's story and to see what someone else will do to one of mine. It's a lot of work, though, and at this point I'm still going through my assigned writer's fiction index, reading through likely stories, pasting links to whatever rings a bell and taking preliminary notes. I have some possibilities but nothing that's really jumped up and waved at me, so I'm going on through the rest of the stories. Other people who've done this before have said that they've ended up starting remixes on several stories before finding one which actually works out past the first thousand words or so, so I'm starting early to give myself time. (Usually I'm a dedicated procrastinator but I have enough functional braincells to realize that might not work here.) The story's due on... 30 September.
Then there's the camping story I was working on earlier. I actually have about 1400 words of this one and it's coming along nicely, but the anthology I have in mind to submit to is open until 30 November so I've back-burnered it while I'm working on the other things. Figures, the one story I was making progress on is the one I have almost 3.5 months to do. [wry smile]
MOME Awards -- this is a sort of peripheral activity but it's still important to me. This is a new award this year and it's gotten a lot of interest and participation within its community. Voting is ongoing through 15 September and there are a lot of stories on the ballot which I haven't read yet, or which I need to at least skim to remind myself of what was which. This is a tighter deadline but at least it's just a matter of reading, which is time-consuming but not something I have to focus on producing like I do with a story. And luckily, as I go down the ballot (which goes from shorter categories to longer ones) I'll run into more and more stories I remember and won't have to reread, which is the only reason I have any hope of getting all the way through. And I do want to because I think this is a great award format and I want to support it. The fact that three of my own stories made the final ballot has nothing at all to do with it. [innocent humming]
At any rate, this is what I actually Have To Do in the next couple of months. Around that is keeping up with reading and such, and paying occasional attention to my husband. I'm just hoping with many sets of virtual fingers crossed that no major kerfuffles or blow-ups occur, because I seriously Do Not have time to get caught up in anything like that. [glares at LJ] But hopefully having it all written out like this will help me stay focused. I should have plenty of time for all this, it's just a matter of organization. Really. :/
Angie
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