mrissa | Entries tagged with space guthrie

I know one more thing about Deportees than I used to: I know its chord structure. Specifically, I know which POV character is the tonic, which the sub-dominant, and which the dominant.

Yes, I realize that this is a space opera and not a twelve-bar blues. But trust me: this really does help.

(I thought it might be in the key of E, because that is, as we all know, the people's key. But no, it's E-flat. Which explains a lot; you can write space opera in sharps, but it's sort of awkward.)

(Perhaps I should have an icon for bits of self-recognized fruit-battitude.)

So. Space opera. I've been referring to this thing as "the space opera" or sometimes as "Deportees." See those nice tidy little quotation marks around it? That means that, since it is for adults, it is to be less than 40,000 words long.

Except...I am not so sure that this is a reasonable thing any more. I am closing in on 10K at the end of this week, and the things I haven't even started doing yet, just from a plot standpoint, are legion. I am nearly a quarter of the way to the maximum word count on a novella. Am I a quarter of the way done with the stuff going on here? Not hardly. That means one of two things: 1) I am writing a novella incompetently; or 2) I am writing a novel.

It still could be #1. If things wrap themselves up unexpectedly tidily (example of necessary wrapping-up: "And then there was an earthquake; so anyway, they got people out, some of them."), I will go through and prune some of what I have now so that it is more suited to novella-length. Fewer digressions of interest, fewer developments of sub-themes, that sort of thing. But I suspect #2. I strongly suspect #2. I've done this sort of thing before. It feels like that.

And my brain is behaving exactly as it ought for #2, with the ability to sit down and rattle off a bunch of words without much effort early on. Books fall on my head. That's what they do. And eventually I crawl out from under them long enough to squint critically at them and notice that they are books and that they are going to need a heck of a lot more work before they're done, and that's fine, it's all part of the process, and we trust the process, right? Of course right.

But this thing wasn't really on my radar when I was sitting down and thinking carefully what to write next, and yet here we are. Books, she said with fond exasperation.

(I actually do sometimes tag my dialog like that in conversation. It sometimes startles people who have just met me in person but have been reading my lj. Also, people are surprised when I call

timprov "Timprov," which they shouldn't be, because it's his lj name because it's his name, not vice versa.)

So. Deportees, here we are. And it may change title between now and its ending, because I think "Deportees" is a better name for short fiction than for a novel, but it may suffice. We'll find out.

This is good. If you were wondering about the goodness of this? Yes. There is goodness. Whether it ends up being good to read is still up in the air, but it is good for me to be writing this right now.

There is an earthquake in my space opera.

(See: fly, soup.)

Sooooo...once upon a time there was a certain woman who had a habit of writing stories that had cliffs in them. Or cliff-like objects: high city walls, that sort of thing. It was a recurring theme, if you will. Possibly a trope. (Tropes are what you get when you are a finalist for the Nebula Award. For the rest of us they are merely freaky obsessions. Not so for Nebula finalists! They have tropes.)

And this woman had some very mean friends who teased her about the cliff thing. And one of them made her an icon, and some others just made fun of her, and two of them went so far as to suggest that if she was having trouble with a story that didn't have a cliff in it, she could just name a character Cliff, and then all her troubles would be over.

Ha ha, laughed the mean friends. Ho ho, laughed the mean friends. We are so funny, said the mean friends. Name a character Cliff! Ha. The funniness of us.

Until one day one of the mean friends realized that one of the protags in her space opera -- the only story she'd written recently that had no opportunity for tons and tons of snow -- was named Winter.

Um, said the mean friend. Gosh, said the mean friend. Golly, said the mean friend. How transparent these walls look, and I wonder what I should do with this conveniently placed stone?

One of the phrases that was gender-indiscriminate in household parlance in my childhood was, "You're a gentleman and a scholar." It was up there with "being a trooper" in phrases of general approval. And so it doesn't seem odd to me that I would describe one of the space opera characters by saying, "She is a true gentleman." I don't mean that she's "mannish." She's not mannish. But she's not femmey, either, and being a true lady is a very, very different thing. This character struggled over the equivalent of Latin as an adolescent, not the equivalent of teacup-painting.

This is...look, this is behaving like my own house, in my head here. I know where things are in this story, because they're where I left them, and if I know that we have plenty of those weird new peach crisps, it's because I stocked up. So to speak. It's being like the Carter Hall stories that way. And it's worthwhile to write stuff that doesn't occupy that kind of headspace, but -- this is worthwhile, too, and it's fun.

I know some of you find that the fun stuff turns out to be better writing, and some of you find that the stuff that makes you sweat blood and bullets is better writing. I'm calibrated on an orthogonal axis, I think, because I have not once been able to determine a connection between quality and difficulty -- not any connection, negative or positive. And that being the case, I'm enjoying enjoying writing for awhile, if that doubling makes any sense. I like having the fun while the fun is to be had, in part because I know it'll wander off sooner or later and leave me with the tough bits where everyone is standing around smelling of cardboard and saying things like, "Err...I'm almost sure someone left a plot around here somewhere...."

I am going to get this rewrite done this week, dammit, and that's the long and short of it. Mostly the short of it: it's a short story. I am bigger than it. When I was drafting Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain, there was some question as to whether I was bigger, stronger, and/or tougher than those books (or, for the delusional part of the process, that book). But I am. This week. Really. Even though

jmeadows sent me to my room for my characters breaking the Russian Empire.

I am also writing space opera, though, because: zapzapBOOM! P'chiew p'chiew p'chiew! I mean. I hardly ever get to do stuff like this, and it has the dialog as well as the swashing, buckling, and laser weaponry. (Get to do = allowed by brain. No one else is stopping me.) And it's got running jokes about the translation of poetry. And, like I said, Alexandre Dumas and Patrick O'Brian and Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly. (By influence, not appearance.) And biochemistry and neuropsychology and revenge and underground resistance and spies and long-lost relatives.

Umm. Well, that transition snuck up on me as much as it did on you, actually: I was wondering when to mention this, and I guess now burbling about my fiction has given me the moment. I have a long-lost relative who has come into my life this year. Nothing so close nor dramatic as a sibling, which is what my character has got. A step-aunt, whose absence from my life is not her fault nor the fault of anyone important to me, but...it's a curious thing, thinking about meeting new people one of these days and thinking of the alternate history in which the full-fledged teenage people you are supposed to meet one of these days were babies you hauled around on your hip at family gatherings when you were half-grown yourself. (I was definitely the kind of 9-year-old and even more the kind of 11-year-old who hauled babies around on one hip telling them about the world as she understands it so far. I explained about non-Euclidian cosmologies to my cousin Joe when I was in high school and he was in diapers. Most babies, if you give them a chance, incline definitely towards either the Big Crunch or the heat death of the universe. It's just most people don't give them a chance. Joe was a heat death sort of kid.) So...yeah. We haven't figured out a time for that meeting yet, but it sounds like it'll be fun and remarkably free of dire prophecies, enchanted objects, stolen birthrights, and all the other sorts of things that make long-lost relatives entertaining in fiction and a bit fraught in real life.

So, in honor of the space opera that fell on my head and the step-aunt who found us, tell me about surprises. Tell me what would have surprised your 10-year-old self about your life right now, or what surprises your current self, or just about a good surprise you had once.

When you realize that you have been blithely assuming a second POV character, you may get a bit uneasy: short stories rarely have two POV characters. There's just not a lot of room to be in two different tightly focused heads. You can do it, but it's not all that common.

It's when your hindbrain declares that such-and-such an event has to happen in one of a third character's chapters that you think, hey, wait a minute, short stories don't have chapters!

Sections, you correct yourself. It will happen in one of that character's sections.

And the hindbrain shrugs and says, Suit yourself. I thought you wanted me to learn to do chapters? And you did, so really you can't much complain.

Still and all. Oof. Do I have time to write a schemey political fantasy and a blaster-toting space opera simultaneously? I do not. Something will have to give. Guess it'll be interesting finding out what.

(One of them has

elisem sparklies helping the brain. The other has Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly. Uff da.)

Also, if you're reading and catch yourself thinking, Hey, isn't there some laundry I could be folding instead?, possibly it means that you should stop reading the book in question. Even if sometimes you're thinking, That's annoying. Hey, what would really annoy my characters is.... That level of utility is easily overrated.

So on I go with one thing and another, none of which is what I expected of today, but that's all right.

Ah! I remember what I was going to ask you lot now.

Can you think of Athos- or D'Artagnan-like characters elsewhere in literature? (The Phoenix Guards and further volumes do not count because I've already thought of them.) Gender is no object if the author doesn't make it one. Half-credit for Porthos- or Aramis-like characters. Quarter-credit for a) other characters that remind you of specific Dumas characters; b) other characters that seem like they belong in Dumas, even though you can't quite say where; or c) comparisons that make me giggle madly.

ETA: It occurs to me that my internal automatic mappings of this question onto Margaret Cho's proclamation about "The Sweet One, The Smart One, and then there's The Ho" may say very disturbing things about what I consider sweet.