Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

We were driving down Hennepin, my dad behind the wheel and me in the passenger's seat and Lars, Henrik, and Sophie in the back. I was pointing out what various buildings were when they asked me, or else when I felt like it. We passed Franklin, and you can see the Scottish Rite temple behind Sebastian Joe's from Hennepin. "What is that?" they asked.

"That's a Masonic temple," I said. Brief conference in Swedish in the backseat; nobody knew. They asked, "What is that religion?" I said, "It's not really a religion, it's...have you seen the Stonecutters episode of The Simpsons?" I began to sing: "Who controls the British crown, who keeps the metric system down...?"

And immediately Lars and Henrik chimed in, right on cue and with enthusiasm: "We do! We do!"

My dad was greatly amused.

I said, "So that's who they were making fun of in that episode. The Masons or Freemasons, but they called it the Stonecutters." "This is a national club?" asked Lars. "International," I said, but it got me thinking: there appears to be some successful international conspiracy here, but it sure isn't the Masons. We're onto you, Matt Groening.

In other news, greykev brought me a Fodor's Scandinavia in 1952 with Finland and the Olympic Games, and the minute I opened it, I knew that any hopes I had of avoiding writing Laura's book were gone, gone, gone. (Laura, for those of you not keeping track of the cast of fictional people in this journal -- which really should be the vast majority of you, because you have better things to do with those brain cells -- used to be in Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain. I thought I was changing her name to Lucy, except that her behavior changed, and then it was suddenly clear to me that Laura, rather than not existing, was the other sister back home in England. And that she wanted a book. Quoth I, "Crap, crud, and corrosion." And now I know in somewhat more detail which book, as this lovely Fodor's is admonishing her that if she insists on traveling by air they will weigh her hatbox. I am going to have to exercise my not-writing-of-books skills to the utmost while I read this one. I'd put it off, but I'm going to want it for Copper Mountain revisions now that I have it. Bother. Ooh! But bother. But ooh! Etc.)

One of the things that has been on my perpetual to-do list for months now is a requested rewrite on a short story. Normally revision requests get my attention right away when they come from people with money and an audience and an inclination to share both with me -- the last one was I think a three hour turnaround -- but this was a much broader and more general revision request. It was basically a request for a story kind of like the one I'd submitted, but longer and with larger scope and more attention to the things I already thought were the most interesting parts of the story.

So in that sense it was the best rewrite request ever: give us more of this (and we'll pay you more, because we pay by the word), and focus more on the things you like best! Also have it be for a story related to (but not dependent upon) two novels you've written!

But it has not been easy. Surprise: the good things in this business are not always the easiest things? How astonishing! And how unlike any other business, where everything worthwhile falls like rain!

One of the things that has happened since I wrote this story is that I got much better, more obscure source material. This is an historical fantasy, and while it's a tiny obscure little corner of history, one that's not likely to make most people say, "Wait, but wasn't there a fourth brother who wound up a photographer in England?", I'll know. Also, I think the new source material allows for an entirely new plot, one which is similar to the old plot but has some of the melodramatic aspects of it surgically removed. (This is just a side benefit. The fact that I'll know was going to be enough to make this part worth redoing.) And hey, the second brother, who wasn't a photographer in London: guess where he goes at the end, in actual recorded history?

Helsinki. No, really. It's not that I couldn't make this stuff up, because of course I could -- I do, all the time. It's just that I don't have to. People can look this bit up after they've finished reading this part of the story and say, "oh, huh, guess it wasn't just her obsessing on Finland again after all." He really was a Helsinki-dwelling student of stamps and their history. This should help the new plot a lot. I think I know how to do the whole rewrite now.

Yes, that's right: it's one of those rare times when philately will get me everywhere.

(Of course I couldn't resist, because the pun is quite literally true! And the flesh is weak, and the spirit is really not all that willing in the restraint-from-puns direction. Really, you wouldn't have resisted. I feel sure.)

Two acceptances, two rejections. Not bad.

Also, I must have been a very, very good writergirl, because my next book has a peasant uprising in it. I love peasant uprisings. I am just irrationally fond of them. I just have to figure out what Lover #2 does other than being a miller and a baker.* I mean, not that people who bake aren't automatically just plain fascinating, but there's something else. It tickles in the corner of my brain, on the opposite bit from where the librettist and composer live. And the protag doesn't know what it is, but then she doesn't even know about the cook's proto-socialist connections to begin with, so there's no use relying on her for any of this stuff. I will sneak up on it sideways while they're not-fighting** about her departure for the palace and see if it helps.

Oh, oh, there's another body exerting gravitational pull on him. I will sit very quietly and see if I can deduce what it is by the shape of the deformation of his orbit.

Girl. Lab. You know the drill.

*I mean what he does other than being the Orvokki for this book. Not that his name is Orvokki, but that he is the one who is sensible throughout, which no one else is, entirely, although the protag tries a good deal harder than anyone in Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain ever did. (See how casually I called it that? Just like it had been named that all along? I tell you what: if it actually works and Sampo is noticeably better-behaved as Cu Mt., I will tell those of you who are parents, and you can start referring to your adolescents as Morris and Cynthia when they get uppity. Unless you actually did name them Morris and Cynthia, in which case you're on your own.)

**Yes, they have the kind of relationship where they have not-fights. Very quiet, courteous not-fights.

I just got spam offering me "Charity or Pamela?" I like there being charity in the world -- I think it's a good thing. But I'm also fond of pameladean. So it's another example of not letting Them sucker you into Their binary worldview. Screw you, spammer! I choose both!

Ahem.

I am in a good mood this morning. I'm still pretty dizzy, but I slept like the dead, and yesterday felt like progress on more than one front: I got some medical stuff handled and also managed to do some of the (very extensive) Sampo revisions while I was lying on the couch. Little stuff, but it's little stuff that's done now and wasn't before. And I like feeling useful, even if it's just a little bit. And I have horizontal-friendly projects in mind for today.

My mom continues to be immeasurable amounts of help. They have the bop with them again from last night, which again put my mind at ease extremely. So considering how crappy yesterday was in some ways (being put on a table that moves around for an X-ray, while your head is already spinning? not fun), it was a very good day. So I'm going to go lie down, as I mostly have been after posting for the last week and a half, but I will lie down in a good mood, and that makes all the difference, no matter what the man says about roads diverging in a yellow wood.

Two pieces of toast. One mug of juice. A bunch of water.

I really hope that's not the tally for tomorrow, too, or I will cry. I mean, not that I haven't. I've been feeling like Jo March weeping over J. Robert Oppenheimer's biography, and anachronisms be damned.

I still can't believe I named them Edward and Robert and didn't notice. And sided with Teller! Oof.

That five-question meme has come around again on the guitar, this time from songwind. If you have questions for me or want me to have questions for you, post in the comments; you know the drill. songwind asks:

( about writer's block, why I like him, retellings, and what he should read )

One of the editors who bought a story of mine has asked for a blurb about its inspiration and difficulties in writing it. And I'm sitting here going, "uhhh...it came from my head...and then I wrote it down on the page...and now you're publishing it. Good story, huh?"

Look, this is what my brain does, all right? Pattern recognition, pattern creation. There was a guy wearing a funny hat on BART once, and that's why I wrote the story in question. The series of stories in question, actually. It wasn't a really ultimately strange hat with cuckoo-clock mechanisms and solar power. It was just a hat that was shaped slightly strangely and cast a slightly pointy shadow, and this is the third story in that series I've sold, and I've written a fourth, and I can promise there will be more. Because of a hat. Does this make sense? No, of course it doesn't make sense. You can't ask writers to go around making sense all the time. Inspiration is breathing. You learn to see story things the way you breathe. It's not the only way, but it's certainly one way, and then you come back and say, "Well...I read this book about Russian art...and two of the Fabergés' assistants were Swedish Finns...and now I have two books and three short stories and more on the way." Do you think I've skipped a step there? Because that's roughly how the brain worked, with "and then a miracle occurs" right smack in the middle there. And I think that's always how the writerbrain works. A big leap happens somewhere, or you never get to secret planets of predictive mathematicians in the kinda-Roman Empire or to Trollopian dragons or to aliens whose gender isn't the same for very long. Sometimes you can say something like, "Oh, I thought that it was a scorpion on the back of CJ's bathroom door, but actually it was a lobster. It was the hanging hook that made me think it was a scorpion, you see?" And then you smile as though you've said something helpful, and everyone else smiles as if you might get loose at any minute, and you try, with a wrench, to restart the conversation with no one understanding the essential step any better than they did before.

And the difficulties in writing it? This question really baffles me. I had to think of the right words and put them in the right order. Like you do. That is as hard and as easy as it ever gets.

Perhaps I am just obtuse. This is a possibility never to be neglected.

Progress, or just a fluke? Well, you decide: Ista did not attempt to gnaw the monkey underwear that was lying well within her reach on the bathroom floor. Did not even bite it once. Just sniffed the laundry about to go into the hamper from a comparative distance and then let it be.

Ohhh, the things we consider notable with small mammals in the house.

Someone wanted me to talk about Flying Squirrel Divas of the Jovian Moons. Someone is scottjames and has found the Flying Squirrel Divas of the Jovian Moons a source of endless amusement for years now. timprov suggested that Flying Squirrel Diva of the Jovian Moons might be the next award to give to people who have already been Hero of the Revolution several times. I am dubious: we haven't even gotten our caramel-filled, foil-wrapped chocolate Hero of the Revolution medals. I should think that it would be even harder to find chocolate flying squirrels in spacesuits.

This is the internet, so I could be wrong.

Someone asked me if I wrote alternate history, what country or countries would I pick, and what would the story be. Umm. Some would say that I already do write alternate history, since Thermionic Night is set in Finland in 1950, and to the best of my knowledge there was not magic in Finland in 1950. However, I try not to contradict recorded history (just recorded science), so some people would categorize these books as secret history, not alternate history.

Anyway, my big problem with alternate history is that if the story isn't really, really close to the change -- and even most of the time when it is -- I don't think the author changes enough. (To compound this problem, stories further from the change may well be more interesting. Much, much, much harder. But more interesting.) A major historical change two hundred years ago means that most of the people who are currently alive might well not have been. Very minor policy changes in the US in history would result in vastly different immigration and settling patterns. If different people settled here -- or if population pressures in the Old Country for all sorts of values of "the Old Country" were not relieved -- the world goes very different directions very quickly. And I'm supposed to believe that the author's favorite historical figures exist anyway? That's a much more major suspension of disbelief for me than it seems to be for most people, and the story has to be a corresponding lot of fun to make it worth my energy. Any appearance of John Dee or Benjamin Franklin requires a lot of effort for me not to just close the book and walk away quietly.

The alternate history ideas I get rely heavily on the kind of history I read. This means that they tend to be the sorts of ideas that would make it difficult for most people to spot the turning point, and as such I think it would be harder for them to care about the result. "What if something you didn't know happened had never happened? Wouldn't that be weird and interesting?" Umm, gosh. How fascinating. I know that the right story can be fascinating that way -- I'm certainly hoping that people manage to find themselves interested in mid-20th century Finland in ways they had not expected to be -- but it takes a lot more work from the author to establish why anyone should care about this obscure historical change, and often it seems less worth my time than other, equally shiny ideas.

As this book is not a New Age seminar, my characters can all stop $#&@% finding themselves! Okay, sure, the skalds have knocked you out, you can maybe wake to find yourself in a featureless room, but generally you can just be impressed with something rather than finding yourself impressed, go to the forest rather than finding yourself in the forest.

Grumblegrumbledeletedeletedeletediedie.

ETA: gaaneden was asking us for brags, and I have to say, with all the stuff I'm revising out of this draft, I really do like some bits of it. I don't want to quote too many bits so it's like a movie trailer that shows the only worthwhile parts of the movie so then there's no point to going. But I really like some of the stuff I'm doing here. And it's not even all Orvokki.

It's mostly Orvokki, though.

Dischism: The unwitting intrusion of the author's physical surroundings, or the author's own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision -- when this is actually the author's condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. "Dischism" is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch) -- Turkey City Lexicon

"Eetu, just put it down for a minute and go get something to eat," said Orvokki.

"And will someone make sure Eetu stops working for five whole seconds?" [Sohvi]

"Let me do it, Eetu; you get some rest." [Jatta]

"Back away from the circuit, Eetu, and no one gets hurt." [Sohvi again]

Umm. It is Edward's condition within the story. Still.