Dichroic Johnson Is Right.

(Never mind the subject line; I'm having a "Blazing Saddles" moment.)

In a comment to my last entry, dichroic says: You know how you always say you're really a novel writer rather than a short-story writer? Is that really correct, or are you really a *novels* writer, as in sequels and trilogies and serials, at heart? Seems like you get issued a lot of very big stories to tell.

Crud.

I think the lady's onto something.

I think the essential problem is with how I think of stories in the first place. I've talked about this before, how I am not a "plot" writer or a "character" writer but a relationship writer. I see (and "see" is wrong; "feel" is the verb, but that carries connotations of "emote" when what I want is "perceive") fiction as a gravitational system. A relativistic gravitational system, not a Newtonian one: spacetime warps around characters to different degrees. (You can take the girl out of the lab....) I've said all this before, I know, so I won't go into it much more unless someone has questions about what the heck I mean.

The problem -- and in terms of starting to write, of having stories to write, this is not a problem at all -- is that this is not a static system. When you start them up, you're pretty much going until the heat death of the universe. Or at least until the sun goes kerblooey. There are lots of interesting stories to tell before the sun goes kerblooey, in most situations. ("Kerblooey" is a technical physics term.) I don't tend to show up five seconds before a star goes nova and write the last five seconds of the solar system. Relationships do interesting things after they've averted disaster once, or after they haven't. Which is why I'm writing the Carter Hall stories: yes, the Tam Lin story is an interesting one, and I will enjoy writing The True Tale of Carter Hall when I get to it, but -- for heaven's sake, those people are still wandering around with each other, only now there's a baby born to save her (or his, but in this case, Jessica's) father from the Queen of Air and Darkness's tithe to hell, and you can't tell me the way the parents relate to that baby, the way that baby relates to the world, is of no interest. Shoemaker-Levy 9 was very dramatic, but what Jupiter did afterwards was fascinating.

So I think I am more prone to committing series because of this. Because I don't think in terms of plot arcs so much as plot conic sections in a gravitationally warped spacetime. I think this may be an inherent feature of how I deal with story. Even when I know where to stop telling the specific novel -- which I think I do pretty well -- it's still a dynamic system in my head.

I'm not entirely sure how this relates to ksumnersmith and matociquala's entries about stories and how they spin, because the snapshots of these dynamic gravitational entities -- or, in normal language, these novels -- feel like rocks in my head. The rocks are really representative of at least four dimensions of system. But also they are rocks. That are novels.

Umm. Maybe I will go sit in the corner and sing quietly to myself now.

Eight random things

buymeaclue tagged me, so I guess I'm listing eight random things about myself. If you want to do like this, please do, but I don't tend to tag people for memes, even though I don't mind being tagged myself.

1. Eight is my favorite number. First cube! Well, first cube that isn't one. Or zero, I suppose. I am also fond of 27, in theory. As a number. In practice, well...I won't be sorry to see what 28 is like, come July, let's say that much.

2. In retrospect, the worst year of my childhood was the year I was 9, and the best year was the year I was 12. I define "childhood" as "period before I left for college" for this particular purpose. Different subjects of discussion require different definitions -- I was startled, when talking to a 15-year-old at Minicon, to hear her refer to herself in a conversation about what kids are reading. I said, "What? No, no, in literary terms you're a grown-up." This is not universally true, I suppose, but the odds seem good. Anyway, 12 may vary a lot, but I think 9 is hard across the board. You're no longer a cute little kid in the same way as you were before, but people only want to treat you as a "big kid" when it's something that's convenient for them, never when it's convenient for you.

3. I hate shoes. My feet are very bad at keeping callouses (so I also hate going barefoot), so it's always more of a process of breaking my feet in than breaking my shoes in. Stupid shoes. I am theoretically very easy to fit in shoes, not to one end or another of length or width. American women's 7.5 regular. Easy, sort of. Except for the part where my feet bleed. Boots, boots are the answer.

4. I love to feed people. Mostly I love to cook for people, but it does go beyond that: when some of my younger friends didn't really much care for the soup I'd made, they were thrilled to be offered peanut butter sandwiches, and I was thrilled to be able to get them something they wanted. (I'm not always as keen on people getting into my pantry/fridge and utterly ransacking it without consulting me or without listening to what I said -- sometimes I had plans for that stuff! -- but that's not as much an issue as once it was.)

5. Related thereto -- and I thought everybody who knew me already knew this, but then someone I consider a dear friend had not made the connection -- I don't actually enjoy eating all that much. I enjoy baking, and cooking, and smelling food. But putting it in my mouth and chewing and swallowing? Meh. I get resentful of people who say "never trust a skinny cook." I have smelled the dish in great detail before I serve it to you, and probably have tasted it in multiple stages, but the kinds of tastes I get before I serve people food are not meals in themselves. Not even close. I don't need bigger pants to smell well.

6. I don't really mean to accrete people. It just happens. I used to mean it a lot more, because I used to think that if I didn't make superheroic efforts, people would just evaporate. Now I trust you-all a good deal more than that. Well, okay, not you-all. But at least you-some. I am often surprised at what kind of people I have gotten handed sort of matter-of-factly by the universe. "Thought you might want someone to Noel Streatfeild geek with." "Uh...okay. Thanks, universe." Etc.

7. I have periods when short stories are attempting to cascade out of me and are getting a big bruised in the crush. Right now is one of those times -- or rather, it feels like the beginning of one. I haven't had one for awhile, so this is probably okay.

8. I don't have nearly so many short stories that are quiet, subtle, decorous ways of yelling at one specific person any more. Most of the people who were going to be able to hear that have already had their stories written, and most of the rest probably won't be able to hear it. I do get obscurely wistful in stories that are not themselves wistful at all. They are outlets for my wist, in tiny pieces, sometimes. Not always. The more I go along, the more the stories are self-sustaining and self-defining, and the less they're object lessons or target practice. This seems like a fine thing to me.