Well, the first month turns out to be pretty easy. We're apparently easing our way into things slowly, and a lot of people are impatient as they wait for the next assignment to go up. The first three weeks could probably have been combined into a single week, but at the same time I suspect the padded time gave people a chance to get comfy with the forum setup and get acquainted with each other. And also to drop out if it turns out that they weren't serious when they signed up. Seeing as how there's 160 people signed up at the moment, a high dropout rate would probably be good for the rest of us. A large number of people haven't even done the first assignment yet, so I guess we have plenty of no-shows right off the bat.
So far Zette herself hasn't gotten involved in discussing the assignments. She posts them and leaves us to fend for ourselves. I assume that at some point she'll actually look at what her students are doing... otherwise it might've been better to stick with a format where all the assignments are posted at once where everyone can see, that way it is with Uncle Jim's forum thread.
As for me, I've taken to rambling on at length in response to the assignments. I figure nobody is actually reading them anyway, so I might as well indulge. I do the actual assignments themselves, explain in excruciating detail how I arrived at the answers I did, and also argue with anything in Zette's posted material that I disagree with. It does help me think. Much like blathering over here does, from time to time. ;)
The story itself is starting to form up pretty well as I attempt to do the assignments. It's looking like it'll be fairly straightforward for a change. Thankfully. ;) I really do need to do something that's not as convoluted as my other stuff.
In other news, I'm involved with one other writing project that's been very addictive so far. Group Story Project is basically a roundrobin story where each participants writes a chapter, then passes the last ten lines to the next person in line. Eventually when the story is finished, it gets assembled and read by everyone for the first time. So far we're on Round 1 with four people - I wrote Chapter 2 and passed 200 words to alcar, and now I'm breathlessly waiting for my turn to write chapter 6. And sitting around insanely curious what alcar did with my 200 words - what kinds of conclusions he came to about the plot, given the hopelessly incomplete info. ;) I'll be trying to stick with the plot ideas I came up with when it's my turn again, though by that point they might make no sense. All depends on what analog feeds me.
Eventually I'm thinking to make an RPoL game based on the concept. But it would probably be better to wait for an entire story to get finished first, in case any glitches come up.
Sadly, that's all the writing I've been doing lately. Roleplay is still crawling along as well, though every game is still dead including mine. With occasional spurts of activity here and there.
And now to keep things from getting hopelessly long and sucking up all the space on Blogs, I'll post my assignments to Zette's class behind a separator... Basically I want to save them here too as backup in case something happens to Forward Motion.
[cut would be here if Blogger did cuts - 28 Sep 2009]
(...and also because I suspect Galen would enjoy all the extra reading. ;) )
Week 1: State an idea in 50-100 words.
Short Version:
Two diplomats from warring nations try to make peace by drawing on a childhood bond.
Long Version:
Two young boys from different nations played together as children when their families met while stationed in a third nation. Fifty years later, their nations are at war with each other, and they meet again as emissaries for peace. Can they draw on their shared childhood to find common ground?
Week 2: What genre is it?
Possible genre definitions for my idea:
a) going by Agent Query - commercial fiction, military or political thriller (depending on which way I go with it)
b) going by http://www.cheapest-book.co.uk/book-retailers/about-genres.shtml - realistic fiction
c) going by http://dannyreviews.com/subjects.html - war fiction
I've noticed that not everywhere agrees on the definitions. What Zette says about "mainstream" and what Agent Query says about it are somewhat contradictory, for example.
My particular story could also easily fall under "science fiction" or "fantasy" depending on what kind of setting I decide to use. (Somehow, setting is always the last thing that gets pinned down when I'm writing a story. I always start with a plot, derive characters from it, and then figure out setting last.)
At the moment, I'm thinking to use something similar to Earth. But not necessarily with the same nations and cities that actually exist. Nor necessarily with the landmasses in all of the same places. But it would have the same kind of sky, seas, rocks and trees, plant and animal life, and humans as the people. It would have cities, contemporary technology levels, and no magic. Perhaps "alternate Earth" would be a good way to describe it.
Zette says that genre decision would likely depend on how the Earthlike place is related to 'real' Earth. I say that it doesn't matter. It matters to the story about as much as the name of the world mattered to the Black Company (Glen Cook) - that is, we never even get a name at all. Of course, The Black Company series is clearly fantasy because it has a lot of swords & sorcery elements in it, so it was never hard to classify for publishers.
Week 3: What's the theme?
It took me a while to figure this one out. Again, like with the first assignment, I found it easier to first start with the long-form version, and then derive a single-word version out of it.
Theme: Communication
Communication is the key to everything.
***
Okay, so what I have is a war between two nations. I also have two MCs who knew each other in childhood and haven't seen each other since their families went their separate ways. They recognize each other as adults due to things like personality quirks, characteristic gestures or identifying spoken phrases.
Why did the war start? Well, why do any wars start? The most obvious (and possibly easiest to resolve) would be: a misunderstanding of some sort. Could be a cultural difference. Could be the way one group views the other is detrimental to the second group, even though the first group thinks that they're doing "good" by subjugating/converting/annihilating them. Could be that the first group is actually trying to achieve something else entirely, and the second group started out as either a convenient means to that end or "collateral damage." Could be whatever the heck the U.S. is presently doing, mucking about in the Middle East - I'm still not entirely sure why we're there (though I've read some interesting rumors about a deadly combination of power-mongering and incompetence), only that as far as I can tell the U.S. is definitely the Bad Guy in that particular war.
Anyway. A misunderstanding of some collossal sort, that the two MCs have to sort out by building from their long-ago common ground.
I've long thought that human social interactions are fundamentally the same at every level. It all scales up and down the same, from two people to two nations.
Things that cause people to want to hurt each other:
1. A hurts B. Could be because B was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could be that A is a natural phenomenon (earthquake, hurricane, flood, etc.). Could be a misunderstanding about something. A might've hurt B on purpose or entirely by accident.
2. Three possible reactions:
a) B retaliates by hurting A.
b) B hurts C, because C reminds B of A in some way.
c) B hurts C, because C is the nearest convenient target.
3. 2.a) would be the most straightforward thing. A lengthy conflict begins between A and B. This is probably the form of plot my story will take.
The other two, B turns around and hurts C, causes C to react in some way in turn, which can cause a chain of hurting to begin.
To summarize the above a bit:
Pain springs from Nature, from ignorance and naivete', misunderstandings and retaliations. Pain begets pain down unending chains, until someone is strong enough to break free, sometimes (rarely) even turn it to joy.
Also, the possible reactions aren't mutually exclusive. It could be more than one, or a combination of things.
So I'm focusing on a misunderstanding as the main cause of this war. Misunderstandings are overcome by communication - telling each other truths until both sides understand why the war is happening. Realizing that there doesn't need to be a war at all.
Other possible themes:
1. pain and joy
2. experience and innocence
3. An end to world suffering, a moment of peace.
As for symbolism. For me, a lot of the symbolism will naturally emerge as I'm writing; I don't need to figure it out consciously beforehand. So this is the sort of thing I'll worry about when I'm doing final-polish on a story - making sure that symbols are referred to consistently and in appropriate places.
Week 4: What are the goals of the main characters? What are the conflicts they must resolve/overcome?
To recap, my story is about two childhood friends on opposite sides of a war, who are meeting again for the first time after 50 years.
So, goals. There are two sets of goals here. First, the nations who are at war with each other. Second, the actual MCs themselves.
So why is there a war?
A long time ago - maybe 50 years, maybe longer ago than that - there was another war. Several different nations sought to destroy each other, but none could prevail. Instead, over a decade, they wore each other down until finally the victor was the last one still standing in an utterly defeated land.
Just as this last nation (A) was about to declare victory, however, another nation swooped in, easily crushed A which had no reserves left to defend against it, and claimed victory for itself. That nation (C) had been standing on the sidelines the whole time, neutral, hiding from everyone and doing its best to pretend it didn't matter.
Nation A was much angered by this. A small, cowardly nation who hid during battle, only to steal the victory at the end. Secretly, as C built up its misbegotten empire now that no one could stop them, A plotted its revenge. Fiftyish years later they were ready. C had grown complacent during the time of peace. A caught C entirely unprepared in a surprise assault that wiped out the nation almost instantly. But then they kept going. They saw that Nation B had been actively trading with C and mistook B for just another colony - part of C that also deserved to be wiped out. They attacked.
B defended. B had no idea who A was or why they were attacking, having of course always been told the winner's story of the last great war. Some people of B wanted to take the offensive and go wipe out A, while others wanted to find out why A was attacking at all.
Goals
1. Nation A wants to annihilate Nation B because it thinks B is a part of C, and they hate C.
2. Nation B doesn't want to be wiped out, and some of them want to find out what A wants with them while others want to go wipe out A.
3. Character X is from nation A. He's a standard, straightforward military officer of some sort, leader of one army among many. He is a strong believer in the goals of his own nation, and wants to do his best to destroy nation B.
4. Character Y is from nation B. He's also military, but more of a spy/special ops sort of skillset than straightforward battle. He has been tasked with finding out why A is attacking them to help his nation decide what to do next.
Let me pause here to mention a few other working details. First, the above scenario is based on the outcome of a Starcraft game I watched a few years back, on Battlenet USEast. Nation A was named Tesseract, C was named omray. Omray stole Tess's win in a FFA game, at the last minute, and was quite pleased with himself and how clever he was. I must say I'm going to get a lot of cheap thrills whenever an opportunity comes up to describe nation C being soundly thwacked.
Second, I'm still thinking about the nations in terms of the actual real nations they're based on. Nation A is Nordic, Nation B is Japanese. So what we have here are Vikings vs. Samurai. :) I might push back the technology level a bit to accommodate this version of setting.
Moving on to the MCs then. I have an opening scenario in mind to get them together. First, X's army is ambushed and defeated in battle by one of B's armies. As the fighting comes to an end, Y's special task force sneaks around back and captures X. The idea is to acquire a high-ranking officer in A's military so they can interrogate.
However, before Y's task force can secure X and bring him back to B's strongholds, something bad happens and the task force is also wiped out. Maybe it was an unexpected, unfortunate spot of bad weather. This leaves X and Y with just each other, X nominally Y's prisoner (but not really; X's bluff is probably going to get called early on), and having to team up if they want to survive whatever Nature is now throwing at them.
Opening Conflicts
a) X and Y have to work out their differences enough to cooperate with each other. On their side of things, they recognize each other, which helps give them a common frame of reference to work from.
b) X and Y have to survive and overcome Mother Nature's obstacles and make it back to somewhere civilized.
c) Once they make it back to civilization, they have to convince their governments to end the fighting and begin working out their differences on an international scale. They have to find common frames of references to work from for their nations, not just themselves.
About Taking Control
I don't take control. My characters and I cooperate and compromise. That's the best way to really describe it.
Basically, I start each scene with a list of plot points I want to cover in it. Could be key bits of info that need to get passed from one character to another. Could be specific small events that need to happen. Could be particular characterization I want to see revealed.
I start the scene and give this list to the characters that are going to be in it. I then let them loose. They may do my list of points in any order they choose. They may do whatever else they'd like with the scene, so long as my list is covered by the end.
Occasionally I discover that I've cast the scene wrong. Then I have to pause it, take out the character that isn't cooperating, and replace with a different one. Then unpause and let things continue.
Reading over Zette's comments about "control," followed by her first example where she says "MC will attempt to kill his wife and her lover," I can't help thinking that it would never work that way for me. If my characters don't want to do what I want them to, they won't. I actually had a story stall out because I had a plotline like that - "MC will kill Bad Guy and then find that this has doomed him, and now he feels bad." Well, it turns out that that particular character would never do such a thing, and when it finally occurred to me to ask what would cause him to do such a thing, he told me that it would never occur to him to want to kill the Bad Guy under any circumstances; it just wasn't in him. That's why the story wouldn't go.
So I guess it was a matter of wrong casting. If I want to tell that particular story, I need to start over with a new set of characters that are more appropriate. Meanwhile, the first set of characters continue to thrive in an entirely different story that will hopefully have the same broad end goals, but will probably get there in a completely different way than I had in mind.
For this 2YN story, I haven't cast anyone yet. I've sketched out the roles that need to be filled, but not yet started coming up with characters to fill them. Maybe I won't. For something like this, where plot comes first and characters are derived from plot, perhaps it should be the roles that define the characters. Who they are beyond their roles is secondary.
Hmmm. Interesting lesson.
2007/01/31
2007/01/21
2007 Book Challenge 2: Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward
Out of Thin Air is a science nonfiction that explains a new theory on the underlying basis for how and why animal life on Earth had the history that it did. In a word: oxygen. The one thing all animals (and plants, and fungi, and protists and most bacteria) must do is breathe - and in particular they must figure out a way to take up enough oxygen to exist. Oxygen levels have fluctuated up and down through the ages, from as high as 35% to as low as 10% (it's 20% today). Times of high oxygen means high species diversity; times of low oxygen means high diversity in body plans.
The book was written by a university professor, and although it was apparently marketed for general public reading, it really requires at least a biology degree for full understanding. I can easily see a semester-long graduate-level seminar course that uses this book as an outline. One chapter at a time, along with all the primary literature that gets cited in support of all the things each chapter says. Lots of discussion on what the heck the author means. In fact, I suspect that the author uses this book for exactly that purpose.
As books go, this one could've used some more revising. The logic is unclear and even circular in some parts. There are also parts where the author starts out stating one thing, then goes off on a tangent and never gets back to supporting the original statement. And many many parts where he makes leaps, assuming that the reader knows things and can follow along if he omits stating a few in-between steps. Overall, it needs to be written from a completely different angle; as is, it looks like he's beating a tiresome drum over and over ("the answer was oxygen levels!"). It could be rewritten so that you don't start with a bunch of questions that lead to the same answer, but with the answer first followed by all the consequences thereof. It would still have the same content, but be a much smoother read.
Several factual things bothered me:
a) Early on he mentioned that birds are able to survive and thrive at much higher altitudes (thinner air, lower oxygen levels) than mammals. However, it isn't until the last hundred pages where he even mentions the setup of their lungs. That is, bird lungs have unidirectional airflow. Instead of a bag that inflates and deflates like ours, where oxygen-rich air goes in and then carbon-dioxide-laden air goes back out through the same paths, bird lungs have a system where air goes in one way and out a different way, and it's coupled to blood flow that moves in the opposite direction. It's a lot more efficient.
I spent a lot of the book wondering how he could've possibly overlooked such a basic fact, when he's writing something about oxygen and breathing. Fortunately for him, he eventually makes up for this lack by going into extreme detail on bird lungs for almost an entire chapter. Not only the details of how they're set up now (which I hadn't actually known fully), but lots of good nuggets of information from paleontology on when and from what it arose, and whether some of the dinosaurs had a setup like it (in the author's opinion: yes). But he needed to at least hint that such a section was upcoming.
b) There are whole sections in the book that strongly imply that lungs evolved from gills. No, they didn't. Lungs and gills are separate organs, and in some fish and amphibians you can even have both at the same time. Modern lungs (such as in us humans) are analogous to the modern swim bladder in bony fishes.
c) He also implies that reptiles evolved from amphibians. I'm fairly certain I read somewhere a while back that they both came from lobefinned fish, but did not evolve from each other. How controversial that was, I don't know - depends where I read it, and I can't remember.
d) Near the beginning he really should've talked more about how free oxygen first came to exist on Earth. The very first life on Earth was anaerobic. Oxygen is actually a toxin and was put out as a waste product. (It's still a toxin; we're just set up to make sure it doesn't do too much damage while we're harnessing it to do useful things). Eventually the first anaerobes polluted their atmosphere with it so much that there were no more rocks left to absorb it (by oxidizing).
Also, "descendant" is the correct spelling.
As for me and the Book Challenge. I actually started reading this back in December, so technically it's half a book I've read for 2007. I received it just before Christmas from a regular customer of the Chinese takeout where I work. He found out I have advanced degrees in biology, so he loaned me the book to read. He said he didn't understand it, and hoped I would be able to explain it to him. Having now read it in its entirety, I don't know if I can, unless I also want to teach him basic biology. It didn't bode well that one of the things he seemed amazed about was "wow, did you know humans came from fish?" This signals to me that we'd have to start with an uphill battle about evolution first...
The book was written by a university professor, and although it was apparently marketed for general public reading, it really requires at least a biology degree for full understanding. I can easily see a semester-long graduate-level seminar course that uses this book as an outline. One chapter at a time, along with all the primary literature that gets cited in support of all the things each chapter says. Lots of discussion on what the heck the author means. In fact, I suspect that the author uses this book for exactly that purpose.
As books go, this one could've used some more revising. The logic is unclear and even circular in some parts. There are also parts where the author starts out stating one thing, then goes off on a tangent and never gets back to supporting the original statement. And many many parts where he makes leaps, assuming that the reader knows things and can follow along if he omits stating a few in-between steps. Overall, it needs to be written from a completely different angle; as is, it looks like he's beating a tiresome drum over and over ("the answer was oxygen levels!"). It could be rewritten so that you don't start with a bunch of questions that lead to the same answer, but with the answer first followed by all the consequences thereof. It would still have the same content, but be a much smoother read.
Several factual things bothered me:
a) Early on he mentioned that birds are able to survive and thrive at much higher altitudes (thinner air, lower oxygen levels) than mammals. However, it isn't until the last hundred pages where he even mentions the setup of their lungs. That is, bird lungs have unidirectional airflow. Instead of a bag that inflates and deflates like ours, where oxygen-rich air goes in and then carbon-dioxide-laden air goes back out through the same paths, bird lungs have a system where air goes in one way and out a different way, and it's coupled to blood flow that moves in the opposite direction. It's a lot more efficient.
I spent a lot of the book wondering how he could've possibly overlooked such a basic fact, when he's writing something about oxygen and breathing. Fortunately for him, he eventually makes up for this lack by going into extreme detail on bird lungs for almost an entire chapter. Not only the details of how they're set up now (which I hadn't actually known fully), but lots of good nuggets of information from paleontology on when and from what it arose, and whether some of the dinosaurs had a setup like it (in the author's opinion: yes). But he needed to at least hint that such a section was upcoming.
b) There are whole sections in the book that strongly imply that lungs evolved from gills. No, they didn't. Lungs and gills are separate organs, and in some fish and amphibians you can even have both at the same time. Modern lungs (such as in us humans) are analogous to the modern swim bladder in bony fishes.
c) He also implies that reptiles evolved from amphibians. I'm fairly certain I read somewhere a while back that they both came from lobefinned fish, but did not evolve from each other. How controversial that was, I don't know - depends where I read it, and I can't remember.
d) Near the beginning he really should've talked more about how free oxygen first came to exist on Earth. The very first life on Earth was anaerobic. Oxygen is actually a toxin and was put out as a waste product. (It's still a toxin; we're just set up to make sure it doesn't do too much damage while we're harnessing it to do useful things). Eventually the first anaerobes polluted their atmosphere with it so much that there were no more rocks left to absorb it (by oxidizing).
Also, "descendant" is the correct spelling.
As for me and the Book Challenge. I actually started reading this back in December, so technically it's half a book I've read for 2007. I received it just before Christmas from a regular customer of the Chinese takeout where I work. He found out I have advanced degrees in biology, so he loaned me the book to read. He said he didn't understand it, and hoped I would be able to explain it to him. Having now read it in its entirety, I don't know if I can, unless I also want to teach him basic biology. It didn't bode well that one of the things he seemed amazed about was "wow, did you know humans came from fish?" This signals to me that we'd have to start with an uphill battle about evolution first...
2007 Book Challenge 1: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi
Agent to the Stars is available as a free online read in its entirety. It's a humorous science fiction story about a Hollywood agent who is assigned to figure out a way to introduce Earth to an alien race that looks like gelatinous blobs. The blobs in question are mild-mannered beings with great senses of humor.
It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.
I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.
I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.
By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.
Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.
The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.
Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.
My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)
It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.
I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.
I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.
By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.
Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.
The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.
Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.
My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)
2007/01/11
Beginning of the New Year: State of the Union (or at least my Writing Life)
Well, Zette's class is off to a rousing good start. So far, for the first week's assignment, we just needed to post up 50-100 words describing an idea. Here's mine:
Obviously I decided against the plot I mentioned in my last entry (though I might use it for something else later on). The above idea came to me last summer, while we had two visiting scientists on campus, one from Japan and one from Norway. They were both here for several months and they'd brought their families. They each had sons that spent a lot of time playing together.
I came up with the idea, didn't really know where to go with it from there, and filed it away. It occurred to me that Zette's class would be a perfect place to try to develop it, since I'm not doing anything much with it anyhow, and it's very different from everything else I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I wrote 992 words last night toward Amulet I. Since Nanowrimo ended I've managed to come up with around 4500 new words, mostly in fits and starts as the mood moves me. The good news is that the mood moves me rather more often than for either of my previous Nanowrimo novels. I've barely looked at Amulet II since Nanowrimo 2005 ended, and I'm holding off on any more fiddling with Temple (as well as Janis) until after Amulet I is done, and the setting ... umm, settles. Right now it's about as solid and stable as quicksand. Every time a character sneezes, it turns out I need to do more worldbuilding and change things around. (Note: no characters have ever actually sneezed in any of my efforts thus far. Hmm. Maybe someone should.)
As for Stranger on a Bus, it's still languishing on the backburner. I've decided that the next scene will involve a blizzard, however. So far I've managed to go ten chapters without any whiteout driving conditions; I need to "fix" that.
[members-only cut]
Then there's Dragonfly. I needed to get far enough away from it before I could figure out what it meant. Eight months later, here I am.
The main problem I struggled with is that, looking just at the framework of the actual story, what I have is a choice between death and death. So the question was: what's the difference?
That's not what the story is about though. What we have is a man that is bored (and boring), because from his view, he's sitting there waiting while nothing much happens. Ultimately his existence is meaningless. As far as he can tell, nothing much will ever happen, there will never be anything but the waiting, and eventually at some point it will end.
Then a dragonfly comes and shows him that there is a different way. That there is a place with meaning, and it's over a line that he didn't know about before.
Once he knew it was there, he had to make the decision to cross it. He knows that there's a lot to explore on the other side, and elephants to find, but he can't see them without crossing the line - he has to trust that they are there. It's a leap of faith that he has to take.
So it's not a choice between death and death. It's about either staying still and dying where he is, or crossing over and transcending into new life.
This is a metaphor that I've been discussing with my brother for a long time now. Life is like a holodeck. Everything is illusory on the inside, which means that everything is ultimately meaningless. But there's an outside to the holodeck. It's a scary place, and you can't know what's out there unless you actually leave. There's only so much information you can gather about the outside from the inside, and at some point there's nothing left to do but to actually go there and see.
My brother is still stuck in that holodeck. I took a leap of faith and crossed over. My dragonfly was a young girl named Dana who came along in 2002 and dragged me out of an abyss. The line appeared while we roleplayed. And now I know what's on the outside, but I can't show him. He demands proof that there's meaning and wondrous elephants. But he has to come over on his own.
How to convey all that in Dragonfly though. I could take the easy way out and make that playground more significant instead. Give the man a choice - get well and be able to go out to the playground with the laughing children, or die and be able to explore the other side of the line and find the elephants.
Hmm. I guess I'm still not really sure what the elephants mean. Memory would be the obvious thing. But memory of what?
Also, why a dragonfly? I think I know the answer to that one, though whether it's relevant to the story remains to be seen. My grandfather was born in a dragon year (Chinese zodiac). In early 2004 we all had to fly out to see him because he'd collapsed and everyone figured he was about to die. He was on a respirator when I got there; he'd survived tuberculosis several decades earlier, but it permanently damaged his lungs. When I went to hold his hand, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. After that he made a miraculous recovery, and not long after I left, he was able to go home. There's a bit more to that than I'm saying, but I think that's where the dragonfly came from.
I guess my grandfather, being a grandfather, would have a lot of memories. Hmmm.
So that's where I am with that.
Two young boys from different nations played together as children when their families met while stationed in a third nation. Fifty years later, their nations are at war with each other, and they meet again as emissaries for peace. Can they draw on their shared childhood to find common ground?
Obviously I decided against the plot I mentioned in my last entry (though I might use it for something else later on). The above idea came to me last summer, while we had two visiting scientists on campus, one from Japan and one from Norway. They were both here for several months and they'd brought their families. They each had sons that spent a lot of time playing together.
I came up with the idea, didn't really know where to go with it from there, and filed it away. It occurred to me that Zette's class would be a perfect place to try to develop it, since I'm not doing anything much with it anyhow, and it's very different from everything else I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I wrote 992 words last night toward Amulet I. Since Nanowrimo ended I've managed to come up with around 4500 new words, mostly in fits and starts as the mood moves me. The good news is that the mood moves me rather more often than for either of my previous Nanowrimo novels. I've barely looked at Amulet II since Nanowrimo 2005 ended, and I'm holding off on any more fiddling with Temple (as well as Janis) until after Amulet I is done, and the setting ... umm, settles. Right now it's about as solid and stable as quicksand. Every time a character sneezes, it turns out I need to do more worldbuilding and change things around. (Note: no characters have ever actually sneezed in any of my efforts thus far. Hmm. Maybe someone should.)
As for Stranger on a Bus, it's still languishing on the backburner. I've decided that the next scene will involve a blizzard, however. So far I've managed to go ten chapters without any whiteout driving conditions; I need to "fix" that.
[members-only cut]
Then there's Dragonfly. I needed to get far enough away from it before I could figure out what it meant. Eight months later, here I am.
The main problem I struggled with is that, looking just at the framework of the actual story, what I have is a choice between death and death. So the question was: what's the difference?
That's not what the story is about though. What we have is a man that is bored (and boring), because from his view, he's sitting there waiting while nothing much happens. Ultimately his existence is meaningless. As far as he can tell, nothing much will ever happen, there will never be anything but the waiting, and eventually at some point it will end.
Then a dragonfly comes and shows him that there is a different way. That there is a place with meaning, and it's over a line that he didn't know about before.
Once he knew it was there, he had to make the decision to cross it. He knows that there's a lot to explore on the other side, and elephants to find, but he can't see them without crossing the line - he has to trust that they are there. It's a leap of faith that he has to take.
So it's not a choice between death and death. It's about either staying still and dying where he is, or crossing over and transcending into new life.
This is a metaphor that I've been discussing with my brother for a long time now. Life is like a holodeck. Everything is illusory on the inside, which means that everything is ultimately meaningless. But there's an outside to the holodeck. It's a scary place, and you can't know what's out there unless you actually leave. There's only so much information you can gather about the outside from the inside, and at some point there's nothing left to do but to actually go there and see.
My brother is still stuck in that holodeck. I took a leap of faith and crossed over. My dragonfly was a young girl named Dana who came along in 2002 and dragged me out of an abyss. The line appeared while we roleplayed. And now I know what's on the outside, but I can't show him. He demands proof that there's meaning and wondrous elephants. But he has to come over on his own.
How to convey all that in Dragonfly though. I could take the easy way out and make that playground more significant instead. Give the man a choice - get well and be able to go out to the playground with the laughing children, or die and be able to explore the other side of the line and find the elephants.
Hmm. I guess I'm still not really sure what the elephants mean. Memory would be the obvious thing. But memory of what?
Also, why a dragonfly? I think I know the answer to that one, though whether it's relevant to the story remains to be seen. My grandfather was born in a dragon year (Chinese zodiac). In early 2004 we all had to fly out to see him because he'd collapsed and everyone figured he was about to die. He was on a respirator when I got there; he'd survived tuberculosis several decades earlier, but it permanently damaged his lungs. When I went to hold his hand, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. After that he made a miraculous recovery, and not long after I left, he was able to go home. There's a bit more to that than I'm saying, but I think that's where the dragonfly came from.
I guess my grandfather, being a grandfather, would have a lot of memories. Hmmm.
So that's where I am with that.
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