Being immersed in Worldcon is re-raising all my fanac urges. I was at one point nominated for 'Best New Fanzine Fan' ... and then I fell off the face of the planet, relatively speaking.

I even think I know what title and theme I'd want to go with this time (it would allow for guest pieces/other authors).

And I have some pieces part-written that were blogposts and could be beaten together into content ....

I frequently have really vivid, plot-filled dreams while lying half-awake nursing the kid; this was last night's. It was more complete and emotionally rounded than most, and felt kind of like the setup for a fantasy novel or several, so I thought I'd write it down before it fades.


There was a guy, not unlike Corwin of Amber or Mark Vorkosigan -- born to one powerful family/situation, suddenly adopted by a much nicer one.

Only it turns out that the beloved Alice-figure of his new Brady Bunch, the seneschal of the white castle, did something that led to something else that led to the guy swearing blood oath to kill whoever caused it. So he had to kill him.

Insert one-man ninja assault raid on the castle, complete with cursing at the myriad (very beautiful, fluffy, rainbow-colored) cats living on the premises, sneaking up on the seneschal, and killing him. Right before the periodic family gathering for The Holiday was due to occur. The seneschal always did the castle up right for it, and included personal touches for each member of the family.

The guy finds his folder of personal stuff, and sees the piles of Yummy Wonderful Party Stuff, and remarks offhandedly to the one family member actually present (who, fumingly, is Escorting Him Out, because (a) he's family and (b) it's forbidden to kill people on this day ... and who otherwise would've killed him) that he wishes he could stay, looks like a heckuva party.

And in retrospect, he really didn't want to kill the seneschal, but he had a blood oath. "It was like having a poisoned wound. Y'know, the aching throb that gets worse and worse and will kill you unless you lance it? Actually, I've had a poisoned wound; it was worse than that." And he leaves.

Unfortunately, the seneschal was in charge of keeping various spells whole, so now the family member who's Johnny-on-the-spot (who didn't know about most of the details, and is only here early by random chance ["I wasn't even supposed to BE HERE today!"]) gets to cut the arms off a pinioned djinn to free it from its wall in the donjon and take it over to the Meadow in the Basement, because it can see the stuff that's invisible to most, that is kept in the cupboard whose dimensionality was held whole and secure by the seneschal's will.

They end up spraypainting a bunch of invisible stuff so it can be rescued. But what they don't know is that there's been a 'mousehole' chewed into the pocket dimension being used as a safe locker, and now the people and creatures that live over there can see the door into the Castle's basement ...

... Which joined it over to another sequence of plotty dreams I've previously had, in a thin pretense my subconscious threw up to get me to change plotlines.

I had a new setting stampede into my half-awake mind this morning, leave muddy footprints all over the place, and rearrange all the furniture, but despite it having left all the necessary ingredients of a compelling short story scattered about, I lack the skill to reconstruct them and hand 'em to you.

However, on a friend's recommendation (Hi, dormouse_in_tea! *waves*), I'm going to be posting at-least-one-and-maybe-many snippets set in that world over on the 100treasures writing-prompt community in an attempt to solve some of the unanswered questions in my mind about how, exactly, said new world works.

Here's the first installment.

This will likely be far more episodic and broken-up than last year's NaNovel pieces were, so no promises ... but the more people talk back to my work, the more of it tends to get written, so feel free to drop a comment on the entry if you like it. Or hate it. Or think it's incoherent. Or whatever. :->

This concludes today's Shameless Promotion Special.

For those of you celebrating any special days this week, Merry Happy Joyous ones to you! And to everyone else ... all the best anyway, since there's just not enough Merry Happy in the world, as far as I'm concerned.

Why obligatory? Because I adore her livejournal and the discussions therein. Because reading about her writing about ... writing, the process of creation and the mechanics of How Books Work, has forever changed how I read.

So I've read all three of the Jenny books[1], and loved them to varying degrees. I've seen her talking about her upcoming books, and antici ... pated. Therefore, when the Chicago Public Library finally got in Blood and Iron, I immediately put it on hold, and when it came in I read it right away.

To be honest, I'm kind of underwhelmed. It's not a bad book, in any sense of the word, but it's a difficult book, and not the book I was expecting (not that that's her fault in any way!).

The prose is so dense, and yet so pared-down at the same time, that it reminded me of the many women in the novel whose cheekbones are described as 'sharp enough to cut yourself on'. By halfway through the book, I learned to just roll with it when a character said something like, "Here, I redeem my oath to you, *does something*" because I couldn't remember what A had promised B four chapters ago.

What really disconcerted me, though, is that I never felt like I knew or understood a single character in the entire book. Looking back, I think it's because I didn't sense any actual emotion in the entire book. There were plenty of very specific details of description, but most of them were 'telling[2]' rather than 'telling[3]', if that makes any sense. She TELLS you they feel pain, she TELLS you they love, but it was just this wham-bam-boom roller-coaster ride of visuals and sensory detail and headlong plot and at the end of it, I am honestly unable to extrapolate any behavior at all as being 'characteristic' or 'uncharacteristic' of any of the characters. The soulless fae can fall in love? Sure. The ordinary humans can kill and maim and never feel remorse? Fine. Mothers and children do the most intricately complicated (and unfollowable) betrayals? Sure, why not, but what happens next in the PLOT?

Which I guess is really why I was unsatisfied. There was cool worldbuilding. I really liked the lion in particular, and some of the underpinnings of Faerie. But none of the characters ever gave me enough to know whether I cared about them or not, and slipping other people's minds on like a glove is a major reason I read in the first place, so.

Which doesn't mean I'm going to swear off her books; anyone who writes in her blog the way she does is bound to pop out a book I'll enjoy sooner or later. And the plot was, I guess, kind of cool (when I could follow it -- it was like trying to read billboards out the window of a speeding train).

---

1. the Jenny Books: Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. Collect the whole set. VR, hightech bodymods, geopolitical maneuverings, and leftover super-advanced alien tech.
   
2. tell transitive verb: 2 a : to relate in detail : NARRATE (told the whole story to us) b : to give utterance to : SAY (could never tell a lie)
   
3. tell intransitive verb: 3 : to have a marked effect (the pressure was beginning to tell on him);
   4 : to serve as evidence or indication

Blame cadhla. She keeps posting those enticing poetry tutorials. This one is a 'Mason sonnet,' after Marilyn Mason, who devised the particular idiosyncratic rhymescheme.

( I call it, 'Blocked.'Collapse )

Delivered (ok, GOING to be delivered, if we're going to be picky) 7PM, September 24th, 2001.

     When the time came to write up a little something to read here, I was daunted by the impossibility of the task. What could I possibly say in five minutes that would sum up what my grandfather meant to me? I know I saw a different side of him than many of you. He helped to raise me, really. Before I entered high school, it was a rare week that didn't see me spending at least one night with him and grandma. Whenever I needed to go someplace for school, or a friend's house, he was right there, providing cheerful chauffeur service. I used to sit in the back seat. "Home, James," I'd say, and off he'd drive with a grin.

     That same playfulness ran through our whole relationship. He showed me that it was ok to not take things too seriously, to make fun of even the soberest matters - because everything is better by the presence of truly vile puns. Likewise, he loved to catch me off my guard, and surprise me into laughter. One of my earliest memories is being taken on a walk in the snow, riding in a little red wagon he was pulling. He pointed out wonderful things all around, and I was happily talking with him about all of them. Suddenly he glanced up, and said, "Oh, look!" I did, of course, as he tapped the side of the awning we were half-under ... causing an immediate cascade of the last several days' accumulation of snow, burying me to the shoulders. You had to watch yourself, around grandpa; his deadpan could fool a nun. He could always 'accidentally' detour a dinner trip past a used bookstore, no matter where in the city the restaurant happened to be. He kissed my boo-boos, and smiled at my accomplishments. He was my favorite grandpa.

     It's been so hard to be playful during this past week. You never really realize how deeply your life is entwined with someone else's until they're gone. But all the ways I'm dealing with this, he taught me. I'm carrying on with my life ... because he would have wanted me to; he never wanted to be fussed over, even when he had every right to it. I'm finding funny things, and joyful things, to share with my loved ones, because that's what he'd be doing for me, if it had been someone else who died and left this hole in my heart. So, please, remember him. You're all here because you loved him, because he loved you. Be good to each other. And laugh a little, now and then, because Grandpa's heaven is a used bookstore full of kids, pretty girls, and laughter.

     How do I do this? Especially, how do I do this in a noisy office when I can't hear myself think, and even if I could, some part of my subconscious is yanking boxes of memories out from under my mental hands, saying, "No, no, dearie, not THAT box. You never want to go in THAT box. Just stare off into space like a good girl and everything will be fine." The words aren't here, yet.

     Before I can write this, I really need to write three or four entries about my conflicted feelings about the whole thing. The entries I've been too rushed to get to for the past week, or too nonverbal to be able to get out. But I have to have something to say, so I suppose I'll end up coming up with something. It just won't be as good as I want it to be.

     God, though, I want it to be good. I just can't ... sigh. Ok. Here's the thing. I'm trying to structure it around Things Grandpa Taught Me. Ways that I'd be different, if he hadn't helped raise me. Impacts he made on my life. Here's the bulleted-list sort of thing I have so far:

reverence for/love for books
whimsical outlook on life (everything's better with puns)
Dream big, and worry about implementation later
Creative thinking towards your goal

     See what I mean? It's not only so incomplete as to be offensive, it's impersonal, cold, and cliched. I need to make this personal. I need to connect to my past. When, really, a big issue I've been having lately is how little of it I remember. :-/ Grandma and Grandpa kind of went out of my life out over the past several years, and they almost feel like strangers - strangers with the faces and names of people who used to be central in my life. I don't remember why, or how, they used to be central - not in detail. But I remember that they were, and feel guilty as hell for not remembering. :-<

     I need to get into my memories. I need to get specific. Even just relating a couple of particular memories, that seem to encapsulate the heart of him, for me, would be good enough. Told vividly, or something. Damn, now I'm crying again. Any time I try to get close to specifics, to trying to figure out how to tell people what he meant to me, I get this odd blankness paired with tears. Which, of course, isn't helping me get the job done. :->

     Ahh, I thought a few months ago, a new book from Diane Duane in the world of her lovely novel, So You Want To Be A Wizard. I decided to support the author and my local SF bookstore by buying it hardcover, though I've been starting to get kind of disenchanted with the series.

     I found the first three books in a compendium, when I was a kid, and devoured them. The first I loved - and still do. The second was kind of more obvious in the plotting (in the sense that not only did I figure out what they'd need to do to Win about half a book before the characters did, but it was laid out so simply and straightforwardly that they'd have had to be idiots to miss it). The third was kind of interesting, in that it was a new character, with a new viewpoint on the magic thing, and the sheer scale of the plot was interesting (multiplanet, meeting aliens, etc). I kind of liked the fourth, with its new characters and the details of Irish wizardry. Book of Night with Moon was neat because the wizards were (very well written) cats, not people, but I didn't feel any real urge to read its sequel.

     The Wizard's Dilemma was better than I was expecting, but still not a book I think I'll reread often. The surprising part was the almost total lack of plot. The book takes place in a single week, and almost entirely inside the head of Nita Callahan (with forays into her friend Kit's mind). It's a mood piece, and an emotional piece, and not really much like the other Wizard books. Instead of fighting the Lone Power (evil, death, entropy, etc) with massive ritual spells or universe-spanning efforts, Nita must resist strong temptation of a far more personal kind.

     Like the other books, it telegraphs its punches pretty obviously, and I really don't believe the teenage characterizations, unfortunately (they felt like cardboard people written by someone who's read Sweet Valley High, to be honest). It has a couple interesting concepts, but they're either tossed off and forgotten, or explained in such detail that I stopped caring. I must admit, I personally find 'mood pieces' fairly boring unless there's plot to keep it going (contrast, for example, 'Felicity' with 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' - both show the love lives of college freshmen, but in Buffy there's OTHER things going on, and in Felicity it's all angst, all the time). Perhaps I'm just too old for this book, now.

     So I was going through some threads on ChickLit, and I ran across their book clubs. Wow, I thought, a place to talk about books! And then I read through their selections. Admittedly, one was A Christmas Carol, but I don't feel like talking about that. And another was The Madman and the Professor (about the OED), and I've meant to read that for a while, but don't have a copy. But almost all the rest were things I've either tried to read and gotten horribly bored with, or never even tried (based on reading book jackets, leafing through it, etc). Then I realized that I have the same problem with almost every book-reading club I've run across. Their choices don't interest me.

     It's not like I'm some aliterate philistine, honest. I've gone through at least two books a week since I learned to read, about twenty years ago. I read a LOT. And I'm opinionated about what I read. And most of what bookstores shelve in 'Fiction' (no adjective, just 'fiction,' as if Romance, SF, Mystery and Horror aren't fictional) bores the crap out of me. I was trying to think of why, today, and came up with some commonalities. Be warned - Opinions Ahoy, with specific examples. :->

( My Literary Kisses of Death: No Plot, Masturbatory Writing, Coy References, Angst from Nowhere, Generic Tropes, Way Too Darn Long, Soberly Serious.Collapse )

     I don't know what it is about Mercedes Lackey's writing that I enjoy so much. Her plotting, though tight, is often repetitive (cf. all the Valdemar novels). Her characters, indubitably, have a lovely depth and truth to them. And the way she writes about the things that happen to them makes me cry far more often than not.

     Her latest, The Serpent's Shadow, only reinforced this feeling, for me. It seems to be of at least a similar world as her previous The Fire Rose - elemental magic in a just-post-Victorian England. There seems to be a little upsurge in Victoriana lately - Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, the Girl Genius series of comic books by Phil Foglio et al. It's a charming setting, though its stilted sexual mores and customs are almost funny, in a dramatic-irony kind of way. Can you imagine being stared at on a bus because you're chastely holding hands with your beau? :->

     The world of The Serpent's Shadow is deep and rich, and without fear of spoiling I can share that the plot involves the conflicts around the life of a biracial young lady, trained as a doctor by her English father in India's Raj; born to magic through her high-caste (and outcaste, after marrying her father) mother. A powerful enemy still seeks to revenge that betrayal, and has followed our protagonist Maya to England to wreak bloody evil. Maya, however, brought powerful protections with her, and soon meets a Western mage who can train her and (in a plot twist completely unsurprising to anyone who's read two Valdemar books) win her heart.

     The magic is well-described, and rich; the setting comes to life in Lackey's writing, the more so because Maya is also a doctor, and a woman, half-breed doctor in those times, in London, is triply cursed and at a disadvantage. She has a suffragette friend, and works in charity clinics among the poor and criminal. I've read of this period before, and this is a fair portrait, similar to what you would see in a Sherlock Holmes story, or the biography of one of the early woman doctors.

     Ultimately, the story is entertaining, but not deeply meaningful in any lasting sense. Like most Lackey I've read, actually. Worth a read, and a lovely way to spend several hours, but don't expect your life to be changed. While you're at it, read The Fire Rose, too - which I'm not spoiling one bit by saying is an imaginative retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Both it and Serpent are richly textured, well-imagined bits of pulp pap.

     Sit down here beside me, best-beloved, and let me tell you a story. It happened not so very long ago, in a place not so very far away; it is a story of how people live and love now, and how the government has not yet learned to deal with it.

     Once Upon A Time, there was a little girl. Her parents met in college, and had a bit of an accident, and so there was a little girl. If all were told true, the parents were probably a bit young to be having kids yet; but that is neither here nor there. They couldn't live with each other, so they got divorced when the little girl was quite small. This was back in 1979, when 'nobody' got divorced. The judge said that the mother couldn't go back to her maiden name, because then the poor little girl would confuse her teachers all her life long; the father didn't want the little girl to not have his name anymore. So the mother proposed a compromise: both the mother and the daughter would hyphenate their names, and become Boyle-Davis. The father agreed to it, and so it was; only the divorce decree never formally changed the names, for reasons that later became very obscure.

     The little girl went to school, happy with her double-barreled last name. It was special. Nobody else had one. This was the early eighties, and parents didn't *get* divorced, didn't you know? Everybody's mommies and daddies *always* stayed married. The little girl got accustomed to having to spell all her names constantly, and to running out of space on standardized forms. She used to joke with her friend and schoolmate, Rochonda, that they should swap names. Rochonda always ended up being called ROCHON KNOX on the Iowa Basic result sheets, and the little girl's first name was the right length, but her last name was too long.

     Time passed, and the little girl (who wasn't really so little anymore) turned eighteen. She decided to go to the government offices downtown and get a State ID, because it makes life ever so much easier in this country we live in, best beloved. To get a State ID, you need to bring a copy of your birth certificate, which showed her last name as only Davis, and of her social security documentation ... which also showed, only Davis. What had happened to her name? She knew her name. It was longer than that. It had two parts. It confused telemarketers no end. She wanted her special name back.

     The little girl went to her mother for help, because her mother is good with bureaucracy, and furthermore can get her own way with anyone. Investigation was done, and it was discovered that to prove that a name has been in use, and request that it become the legal name, one must show the use of the name for at least five years on at least three different kinds of legal documents. The little girl retrieved all her old report cards from her mother's file cabinets (repositories of history and wonder, those file cabinets, and filled with everything one might ever need to know). The high school report cards were unfortunately not admissable, as they were not at least five years old, but she had all her grade school and preschool records, so she went back to the government office. She decided further to get her passport first, as once she had a passport with the proper name, none could ever again doubt its validity, not even the people who give out state IDs.

     The little girl laid out all the papers, going back to 1979, before the lady at the government office. The lady (who at the time seemed like a mean, ugly ogre, but was only doing her job, best beloved) said firmly that each school only counted as one kind of documentation, and that therefore, we had two, but not three, and she could not change the name, because the rules were stupid.

     Luckily, however, the little girl's mother (who had a horrendous mad on by now) had done political work for many many years, and had a friend who worked for the little girl's senator. The mother and the little girl marched upstairs to talk to the mother's friend, laying out the records of 15 years of use of the name, stretching back to before the little girl could even write it. The friend agreed that this was a very silly situation, and that the rules were indeed stupid, and that she'd see what she could do. She spoke with her boss, the kindly Senator (who looked an awful lot like Orville Redenbacher, though that doesn't come into this story), and he managed to pull strings. The passport was finished in a few days, and delivered to the little girl's house to treasure and cherish.

     And that, best beloved, is how I got a hyphen on my passport. And thank god I don't have to go through that again. :-> However, when I went to get my state ID, I discovered that the software that Illinois' Department of Motor Vehicles uses to store names and information for driver's licenses and IDs does not, in fact, permit hyphens as legal characters in names. Therefore, my state ID says that my last name is 'Boyle Davis,' confusing many people who later try to send me packages, or paper spam. I think that as the children of the eighties grow up and hyphenated last names become more popular, many of these things will change, but until then, I get to be a trailbreaker and agitator for equal rights for long last names. :->

     So I've been sucked into this thing called the Rockstar Game [By the way, if you want to join, and would like to make sure I get points for referring you, click here. Gratuitous plug? Of course :-> ]. Premise? A text-interface, web-based game where you get to be the frontman/lead singer/songwriter/manager of a rock band, and record singles and albums, tour concert venues, and try to make the charts. It's actually more complex than that; a resource-management game. Nicely designed, though still only in beta. A group of my friends and I are playing it in friendly competition/cooperation, and most of us actually think up flavor text for the bands and consider what our music is about, and the like. There's clearly a lot of folks there who don't care, or are only playing it as a game. I find myself fascinated by the completely uncoded roleplaying element.

     But then, I put a roleplaying element into a lot of things I do. Jack made a comment (when our car was not-stolen) about how trucks don't shrink in the rain, and I immediately said, facetiously, "Yeah, but imagine if our truck had fallen in the Spring of Drowned Girl, when it rained we'd have to go running out there with hot water to turn it back into a truck!" Gratuitous Ranma 1/2 reference, there, for those of you that don't watch anime.

     So my band is Mirrorshade and the Spinning Shards (I keep getting this feeling that that name sucks somehow, but I'm not sure I know a better one yet). Our first single is called 'Breaking Away,' and has sold decently despite the fact that I can't afford promotion :-> Mirrorshade is a slim, originally dark-haired girl of twenty-something who comes on stage in black leather with bright-colored fringe, hair dyed a color-of-the-week, wearing wraparound silvery-mirrored Matrixesque sunglasses and sings her heart out about loss and pain and twisted hopes. Yeah, it's gothy, but hey, angst sells, right? :-> I think of the music as being stylistically a sort of bastard mix of mid-eighties Bowie, NIN, and Bjork. Our next single is going to be called Reflections (Break the Mirror).

     I also roleplay online; I have in the past been MUCH more active with that than I am now, but now I'm actually holding down a job and having hobbies and stuff, which cuts into my online time. I started out on Perns, back in 1993; well, technically, I started out on DragonMUD, but that place died shortly after, so then I moved to PernMOOs. It's funny - Pern doesn't appeal to me anymore, really. I feel like I've already done all the stories I care to do in that setting. I enjoyed the heck out of it when I was 17, though. Lots of angst, epic love, tragic loss (because the player of my IC weyrmate had a political issue and quit the game, ICly dying in Threadfall), etc. Much politics, as well; I built an entire version of Nerat Hold for a new game once, and had it nuked by the goddess (the chick running the game) for space without even warning me 24 hours ahead of time so I could save a copy ... that hurt. I'd put an awful lot of work into that place. But all online games have upsides and downsides.

     Then I got into World of Darkness roleplaying, and went nuts on that (having as many as five active PCs and several NPCs, and my staff character, at once). Burned out, due to several things online as well as RL depression, and dropped off the net for three or four years. I stumbled across some of my old logs in dead storage on my account, eventually, and while reading through them realized (a) I'd really been good at it, and I often find it hard to find things I'm Good At, (b) I really missed doing it, even aside from achievement or showing off for an audience. Slipping into a character's head and being someone else for a while fulfills some deep itch of mine.

     So I came back. I'm keeping it low-key, because I tend to volunteer for far too much and then burn out (it's a repeating cycle in my life and hobbies), so I'm trying to take it a little at a time and go from there. But I'm liking it. I've currently got two active characters on two different World of Darkness games. One's a werewolf, and the other's just a regular guy, if a bit repressed. :->

     I suppose some of the appeal of roleplaying (RP) for me is the pure escapism of not having to be ME for a while, just being THEM. But I'm also fascinated by the evolution of the character. At least for me, the initial thinking-up is quite hard (or has been since the bitch-goddess nuked Nerat), but once I start playing, I try things randomly or let the character tell me what to do, and pretty soon they start thinking for themselves and it gets both easy and fascinating. I know that sounds neurotic. But I can hold a part of myself separate enough to BE the character, to react as they would. Even to the point where I find myself wanting to slap them because they're acting like an idiot - or completely unlike *I'd* act in the situation. That's the payoff for me, the fun part - when they get their own subconscious and start doing stuff without telling me about it.

     My mom kept asking me, back when I was RPing a lot (I sent her a couple logs) why I didn't write a novel or something, since I was obviously creative. I had a hard time explaining it until I realized that I didn't truly think of what I was doing as 'original' - I was just responding to what other people, or the wizstaff, gave me. Bouncing it off them, as it were. It's not the same as writing a book or a story - there, it all comes from one person, pours out in a stream. I don't know that I could write a scene with three or four characters in it if they were all me. I wonder if that's weird, or if it's deep. Hard to tell. :->