Attract Mode

I’ve been reading about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics again. I can’t help myself! I have questions and ideas, and no physicist handy. I have to stop now, though, because my eyes are bleeding, even though I’m ignoring all the formulae and everything.

You know how when you read or say a word over and over again, it becomes divorced from its meaning and you can appreciate just how weird a sound/shape it is? My bleeding eyes have reached that point with The Laws and their extrapolated consequences.   The heat death of the universe is just… stupid. And entropy? It’s the plot hole of thermodynamics.

Every magical universe I invent is significantly less bizarre than this one.

One of my writing group people mentioned ‘cluttering’ as a speech disorder, while we were discussing dialogue. I went and looked it up. I read the Wikipedia page. It made me kind of uncomfortable, so I showed the page to Kevin, asked him what he thought, and didn’t think about it the rest of the day.

It made me uncomfortable because it was very familiar. Rapid, disorganized speech.  Forgetting specific words. Performs better at language tasks when stressed.  Repeating the same word over and over again, half-finished sentences, random clauses, missed words. Impatient, interruption-prone. Giving the appearance of being frustrated to listeners without actually being frustrated, so that the listeners try to change the subject to soothe the apparent frustration, causing real frustration. Messy, sprawling handwriting. Mostly unaware of how they sound to other people.

Kevin said, “That’s my girl!” He spent the day reading all about it. He thinks it’s fascinating and interesting. I was just embarassed.

He said, “I figured that you just had so much to say that it gets jumbled coming out. And that’s the conclusion other people have come to as well.”

I said, “Well, it must not be too bad, or I’ve learned to compensate or something, because I’m better at writing than most people with this disorder seem to be. Possibly that’s even why I’m more comfortable doing things in a written form– phone calls, games, etc.”

But today I was writing and I stumbled over a sentence. I stared at it and I realized I was ‘cluttering’ it– stating one thing, modifying it, and then modifying the modifier. I fixed it, but I realized that was one reason that so often I write so slowly, and why I get so frustrated with myself.

Later, I was thinking about what to write next, and I knew I had three mini-events I wanted to write and I wanted to write them all at the same time. And I couldn’t, and sequencing them, choosing one to start with would probably make the others not come out as I imagined. And I recognized that I’d been in that position before– uncertain what to write next because I had too much and it was poorly organized. And that my usual reaction to that kind of frustration was to find a distraction and stop writing.

And now I feel weird. On the one hand, recognizing this will probably help me accept the frustration and move on. Eventually. I mean, now I know why writing’s so hard these days (although have I come up with theories for why in the past? I’m sure I have…)

But right now I’m in a kind of self-pitying shock. QQ. Well, not shock. We’re not at the elevate feet severity. But definitely self-pity. I used to be proud of my writing. I used to think writing was easy. Now I’m whiny and sad that the easy writing days of yore aren’t ever going to come back, that this isn’t a funk I’m in that I just have to snap out of. I can’t wait it out or write it out. All I can do is try to recognize it and move through it and take every opprotunity the revision process offers. All I can do is work. And I’m lazy!

Although I still don’t know what to do about the ‘want to write 3 things next’ problem. I don’t know if I should try to work around the hard parts (write all 3, and decide later!), or force myself through them (pick one and move on with the story as it flows from there, bozo! Even if it frustrates you!).

And I’m suddenly terribly self-conscious about even writing blog posts.

Somebody on the web said it had gotten worse for them after they left college. Me too. Less semi-public speaking, I suspect. Bleah.

I’ve been vaguely inspired to poke at some worldbuilding, though. For a different setting entirely, of course.

I have problems doing extended generalized worldbuilding for Carouselchain. It’s so very big and it doesn’t map well, what with all the mobile skylands. It has my happy-making original elemental system, and I’ve done a lot of basic metaphysics for it but I just haven’t been able to sit down and detail out a large percentage of countries and peoples. This is kind of because it’s supposed to be able to contain, well, not everything, but an awful lot. I mean, I don’t want to set things there if I’m not comfortable with the setting having flying islands and potential access to a variety of sentient nonhumans. It’s an unbounded setting, where I haven’t even answered a lot of the basic questions I make myself answer in world-creation.

So, anyhow, I’ve been working on Calizene, home of the Alexandrine (Alexandrian?) Empire and setting of the unwritten Victoria novels. Well, when I say ‘working’, I mean that I’ve been going over old notes on it, and digging up old notes on another entirely different cosmological system that I decided to integrate into it. The setting is already the victim of one integration, because I came up with two separate magical elemental systems at two different times. (These aren’t crazy new elemental systems, just an arbitrary assignment of some of the old familiars. When I say elemental systems, I think I mean ‘fundamentals of magic’)

Integrating settings is hard but I think it will ultimately make for something richer. Something I’ve been infatuated by in recent years is obscuring the cosmology. My very oldest settings all featured a world that basically understood itself. The gods were the gods, the creation of the world and the role of humanity was all stuff that was written down and understood. After all, a lot of the stuff I read was like that. Then I started believing that all the fun came when people didn’t understand the universe. In Engines of Heaven, there are only two layers of obfuscation, and tearing away one of them is the point of the story. In Carouselchain, the happy-making elemental system is obfuscated and every culture has their own imperfect understanding of how and why magic works the way it does. However, because I tell everybody who shows the slightest interest how the setting’s magic works, it’s not a very interesting tool for storytelling. It was originally designed as a game setting.

TFN (Citadel of the Sky) has, oh, around two layers of obfuscation. Possibly a few more. As with Engines of Heaven there’s a Secret of the Universe that will never show up in any written form, but that I know and use to shape the answers to various important questions. In Engines of Heaven the other veil is important and global, whereas in TFN… well, I won’t say. Let’s just say that TFN is a bit more complicated.

The thing is, obfuscation is hard for me. I come up with ideas I think are cool and I want to share them. The best I’ve been able to do is try to build theories around fragments of The Truth. So the more complicated The Truth is, the more theories I can come up with. I don’t think Calizene has a Secret of the Universe yet, or at least nothing I’ve come up with so far feels Secret. There are lots of lower-case secrets but they’re mostly of the ‘meant to be discussed someday’ variety. However, this may be because Calizene is most likely to have the sort of thaumaturgical physicists who dig that deep. Carouselchain is very magical but it’s fantasy-practical, Engines of Heaven is idealistic steam-punk, TFN is deconstructionist (reconstructionist?) epic. I think I’d describe Calizene as, well, for lack of a better phrase at the moment ‘old imperial gothic’.

I finally feel comfortable explaining why.

I’m pregnant! Today we had an ultrasound that placed me 9 1/2 weeks pregnant, due September 11 (just as I expected), a little over 1 inch long and a heartbeat of 166 beats per minute.

Oh yes, lots of symptoms. Exhaustion. Morning sickness since, oh, four weeks? Nearly constant morning sickness. Luckily I’m very attuned to what I feel like eating and careful listening has allowed me to neither gain nor lose any weight. Cheese is the very best.

Also, sniffly sneezing coughing so you can’t sleep thingie. Basically, a constant cold. And I sleep in 4-5 hour stints, twice a day, with a 2 hour nap sometime in there, usually.

My story is about 3/5 done, in terms of major events? It shall definitely be done by next Friday, and maybe even by Wednesday. Oddly, I’d been beating myself up about not finishing it until just now, when I planned out the sentence: babies are on an unpredictable schedule and thus so am I!

It’s been really hard not sharing the utter misery of the past month and a half with the world. But a heartbeat has been confirmed, and so now I’m ready to share the ups and downs with every stranger who happens by.

The developing embryo has been named General Zod. It dwells, of course, in the Phantom Zone. Blame Michelle.

my current mode, inspired by anime and superpowered epic fantasy: wherein one undergoes character growth and is rewarded with power growth and plot progression in response
George R. R. Martin: undergo character growth, be punished by plot /regression/

I’m basically done with my ghost draft! Go go meeting milestones! I even got a taste of the bang-smash ending thrill.
I think I’m better at coming up with justifications and explanations than I am at being spontaneously original.  Or at least, it’s much more satisfying and rewarding.

Having a two-story house creates climate control problems!

I hope I don’t always have an excuse. We’re almost out of the old house, almost done with that albatross. Then it’s just the unpacking. But that’s no excuse. I can’t always have an excuse. I mean that in an abstract intellectual way; that I can’t turn things I hate into excuses.
That’s about not writing.

But I haven’t been posting here so much kind of ’cause of Dante. My sleep schedule is messed up ’cause of him and all my posts used to either be right after I got up or at work.

On Dante himself: I’m happy with him, except for the cat situation. Yeah, he destroys stuff, yeah, he fucks up my sleep schedule. Yeah, I might complain. Yeah, there’s stuff I’d change and yeah, we’re working on some of those. And yeah, I’m making it harder on myself than I have to in a few ways. If I kept him locked up in a very small space anytime I wasn’t ready to fully focus on him, things would be easier. And he might not even mind. Instead, I sometimes put him in the office when I leave home, or put him outside on a tieout line for a while during the day (and keep the door open and a close eye on both dogs) or on the other end of a leash I wear around my ankle. And I think, when it’s a baby, some of these things won’t be legal.

Of course, it takes two humans to get a baby and just one human to get a puppy.

Anyhow, might be time for my morning nap now.

A friend doesn’t enjoy reading fantasy novels but will happily snatch up fantasy movies and fantasy comics. Why?
I think it has to do with establishing setting rules. With a non-familiar setting, pictures are worth a whole lot for establishing the basics. The sky is blue. The roads are paved. People carry guns. So many things can be established without ever drawing attention to them. But in most prose fiction, the convention is that setting details should be established through narration, and incorporated into the story itself. Show, don’t tell. This requires a lot more words than conventional modern fiction.

I admit it, I’ve bought into the vague idea that fiction set in pre-existing settings (Star Trek, Werewolf, Forgotten Realms, fanfiction) is somehow not as cool as stuff set in an original world. It isn’t as prestigous. I suppose I’ve picked up some of that idea because the quality control on some licensed stuff doesn’t seem that great; like the publishers are relying on the license to sell books rather than the stories and writing. And I suppose that’s probably true.

But now I’m wondering if there’s a confusion of motivations; if the readers aren’t embracing it just because it’s a license they’re attached to, but because with all of the setting basics pre-established, the stories are a much more enjoyable light read than ‘original fantasy’. This connects to the pleasure I’ve always felt reading stories set in comfortable well-established settings and my own interest in incorporating original mythological resonance in fiction.

Okay, so, let’s take this as true: speculative fiction’s barrier to entry is the amount of setting internalization required of the reader (which usually neccesitates lots of dense prose that is difficult to make interesting without incorporating ‘tours’).

Now, the challenge is to think of ways to present that setting information without incorporating it into the narrative. Comics and movies do it with images. Games do it with a dry presentation of the setting material that is then incorporated into RPG experiences. The trick there is getting people to read the setting material, which, in my experience, a lot of people don’t really want to do. It’s dry, it’s boring, they read the parts that relate to them (maybe) and make the GM help them figure the rest out later.

I have some ideas, though.

I’m in a strange place writing-wise. I could blame dog-house-move but I think I’d be working on TFN2 even so if I was enthusiastic about it.

Instead I feel stuck wondering if it’s worth going on. The depression I anticipated coming with quitting seems to be focused around feeling like I’m an insignificant ant with nothing to make me stand out from the crowd of nobodies and wannabes. My blog posts aren’t entertaining enough, my stories aren’t gripping enough, I don’t have the artistic or technical skills to make other kinds of projects stand out.

The beta reader situation is as follows: 2 readers have completed it, with minimal comments and general praise. 2 readers are very slowly slogging through it (that is, less than halfway through after a month or two). 2 readers have it but have not yet started it (as far as I know). Of the readers, one finished is my husband and one is somebody who may or may not prefer that genre, but I think enjoys close cousins of the genre. Of the sloggers, one definitely doesn’t read the genre, and one does. Of the yet-to-readers, I think both are familiar with the genre.

I think about this stuff because it matters to how I weight reactions. While my husband is an invaluable resource in improvements, he has reasons other than ‘this is a good story’ to encourage me to go on with the project. (Admittedly, probably so does everybody else involved, but less immediate day-to-day reasons.)

Originally, I was going to do the three books of the trilogy because it was going to be good practice. And I still think three practice novels is a good idea.  I’m just no longer convinced a trilogy is right. I mean, if the idea just isn’t working, maybe I should put it aside and start fresh? So I have a chance to apply my studies to multiple kinds of stories?

This might just be mid-story writer sloggy-slog-slogness. No longer fresh and shiny, still lots of work. I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent book 1 out for comments and feedback. Previously trying to get midstory feedback has been a mistake… I guess I thought it would be different because it was a whole book, darn it. And I’d done some pretty crazy things in it and I /really/ wanted to know if they worked.

Mope mope. Stay tuned for something more interesting though. Well, as interesting as I can make these things.

Everybody who investigates writing a novel learns about plot and characters, about dialogue and description. I think that’s reasonable, but not as comprehensively useful as it once was, before the internet days. I have some ideas of my own about what goes into good writing. Consider these components like the face/vase optical illusion; they exist simultaneously and in the same space as the traditional components. Also note: I am not a published author. Those who man the gatehouses of commercial publishing may not agree with me. But heck, I’d love to hear from people about this.

Wordcraft

That is, using written language to successfully accomplish goals. This includes not just the basics of grammar and spelling everybody graduates from high school with, but a sense of cadence and an extended understanding of vocabulary. To understand vocabulary, you need more than a big list of words (because a lot of great authors do wonderful things with a relatively small list of words). You also need to understand relationships between the words chosen, and making deliberate decisions in using those relationships. This category further includes layout and word arrangement, which should again be considered in light of the vision one is trying to communicate.

Here is a simile to explain why wordcraft is important. The book or webpage or whatever that somebody is reading is like a window to another world. As most windows contain glass, the medium contains words. If a writer ignores the words, the glass ends up smudged and dirty, blurring and distorting the story beyond. Refining wordcraft is like polishing the window to make it as transparent as possible.

As far as I know this skill is developed by the usual tactics of much reading and writing– but also, much reading of what you write.

Alone, all it produces are eloquent but not very interesting blog posts.

Storycraft

Fundamentally, this is skill is about learning what to show, and when and how to show it. A story should not be presented the way our lives are experienced, with every moment of a character’s life (through the story) described. Even reality TV skips the boring stuff. A basic rule of thumb is to exclude every detail that does not advance the reader’s understanding of the story you’re trying to tell.

But that’s the most basic level of storycraft. Just as the point of wordcraft is to keep the window transparent, the point of storycraft is to keep the reader curious and interested. This is a technical skill and one that can (I believe) be studied in order to gain basic competency. As a technical skill, it’s been developed and refined and passed down, and techniques can be learned from others. It is NOT about what is being observed through the window, but about organizing and presenting the observed matter so that the viewer remains as entertained and interested as possible. Storycraft shares basic concepts not just with pedagogy and marketing, but also with visual artistry and aesthetic design.

There are a great many variations built upon the foundations of basic storycraft, but you have to have the foundations first.

Refined storycraft alone produces comedy, best presented verbally. Have you ever heard, “It’s all in the timing?”

Ideas

This is the bit a lot of people think about when they think about creative writing. It’s what’s beyond the window, it’s the vision. There are many many sources out there that suggest ways to learn about ideas. Most of them are grounded in observation and speculation. Look at the world around you, ask questions about it, and come up with answers. Your observations will rarely be original. Your questions and answers might be, but it isn’t required. The more you observe your world and the more questions you ask, the more ideas you will have.

It’s important to know that if you come up with a different answer to a question that has already been answered convincingly, you’ll have to do a lot more work to support your idea– which usually involves coming up with more ideas. At some point you’ll rest your construction on ideas your readers are already familiar with. These familiar, shared ideas are much of what comprises ‘genre conventions’ and influences genre expectations.

Ideas alone produce either daydreams, or are cloaked in a mass of forgettable and confusing prose.

Persistence

Oh yes. You have to keep going. You have to keep writing. All of the above without persistence results in a lot of pretty, gripping, clever story fragments, or, in the best case, occasional brilliant short stories.

On the other hand, persistence alone doesn’t make a good story. It can and does produce vast manuscripts. Unfortunately.

Flexibility

What flexibility means in this context is that you have to be willing to read and change what you write. None of the first three are finished and done in one go. No, not even ideas. They are all improved by reading your work, thinking about it and experimenting.

I don’t think you end up writing if all you have is flexibility. Maybe you get involved in some other aspect of novel-production?