Up the Escalator to Madness

A very quick conversation this morning opened a little window into that thing I call “My Life”, such as it is.  I wasn’t saying much, just what I did last night, and what I’ll do today.  Those things I spoke of?  Writing.  So for yesterday I blogged, wrote a couple of theme descriptions for Windows 8, edited some three thousand words, and wrote nine hundred word of an article before going to bed.  What will I do today?  Blog, edit a couple of thousand words, write a couple of Windows 8 theme descriptions, and finish my article.

Sounds like fun, no?

I made the joke, “When am I getting paid for this?” but I know that will come in time–so I hope.  I’m heading in the right direction, and eventually, maybe with this next novel I’ll get noticed, picked up, contacted, rich, buy an abandoned mansion, and become a Bond villainess, because if there’s one thing Bond needs it’s bad girls who screw him.  Got the cover coming, the editing and formatting is coming, and in a month or so the novel will be a reality.

(By the way, a friend turned me on to a rant by the same person who gets into fights with her fictional characters and loses, and said that she can’t self publish because she’s not rich.  Ummm, last time I checked you didn’t need to be rich to self-publish, you just had to be able to write, edit, work with someone who’ll give you honest criticism, maybe get a friend who’ll make you a cover for cheep, and then set up an account, format your book, then upload and wait.  But then, this person is one of those vampires who lives to suck the life out of you, so the moral of the story is laugh at these people, kiddies:  they deserve it all.)

There is the fear that I don’t have an idea ready for when all this is done.  The mind seems to have shut down with the ideas while I concentrate on getting stories ready.  I suppose that’s the way thing go; you concentrate on one thing, and the mind files everything down in the back until you need them.

There is the fear, however:  what if the new ideas never come?  What if I’m stuck writing lots of stuff I already have imagined out, and nothing else ever comes to mind.  Not that I don’t have a lot of stories to tell:  you’d have to see some of my time lines to know this.  Still, it does bother me a bit–

Which means I’m driving myself crazy with things I need not drive.  I’m on the up escalator to the crazy house, worried that I’m never gonna have a new idea in my entire life.  I already know this is bull, because my ideas have left me with a whole lot of material, and my other fear is I’ll never write it all before I shuck this mortal coil.

You think this keeps George R. R. Martin up at night?

 

Getting to the Future Without the Past

One day, sixteen hours until NaNo gets going, and people are starting to feel the pressure.  Or, I believe they are, because the comments are beginning to come fast and furious, asking things like, “What are you going to do?” or, “Do you have names for your characters?”  It’s all fun and games until you actually have to start writing, is that it?

Some people are jumping about with ideas that are coming from nowhere.  A few of these ideas are dealing with something often called “Future History”, and involve a lot of “what ifs?” that can’t be answered easily.  In particular, some of the ideas deal with things happening three thousand or more years down the line, which means you’re going to have to do some major research, and head scratching, if you want to come up with an idea that doesn’t suck sour air.

But that doesn’t stop some people.  That doesn’t stop them from taking what we have “now”, and saying something like, “Hey, what if everyone started dropping bombs on everyone?”  (Place pinkie in corner of mouth.)  “But–three thousand years from now!”  Oh, yeah:  that’s going to work.  Just take what we have now and dress everyone like an extra from “Logan’s Run”.  I mean, that’s how it’s done, right?

Wrong.

To put it bluntly, creating future history is a bitch.  I’ve done a bit with another set of stories, and I’m dreaming up one now. And while I can say that I’ve done a bit of homework so that my worlds seem realistic, I can’t say with any certainty that they’d hold up as anything but fantasy.  But I’ve at least given my world some thought, and I’ve tried to make it fit into the realm of possible.

Far too many people, however, begin pulling ideas out of their asses, and putting a different outfit on a well-worn idea won’t make it look any different.  If it’s a bad or ill-conceived idea at the start, it’s going to be a bad one in the end, and no amount of editing short of a rewrite is going to fix your story.

There is nothing wrong with this–if this is what you want to write.  Hey, some people enjoy writing things that don’t make sense.  And this is not to say that I’m completely correct.  One can take historical stories like The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and use that for inspiration for your future world.  The Project Rho site has a very good write-up on the development of future history, and this is something one should read again and again if you’re going to try setting your space opera off in the future.

But if you have no intention of learning anything, and feel you can keep America pretty much as if after several millennia have passed, you’ll probably have your women flying about in bra brassiere space suits, too.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, other than you’ll end up looking like a complete idiot–and people like me will come along and tell you what a doof you appear.

To put it bluntly, science fiction fans are hell.  After Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld was published, engineering students from MIT wrote papers about how his fictional creation was unstable.  Not impossible, mind you:  from an engineering standpoint, the Ringworld was nothing more than a self-supporting suspension bridge, a modified version of a Dyson Ring, which had been discussed in some circles before.  But there was instability inherent in the structure  and it was this instability that led Niven to use this as a major plot point in the sequel, The Ringworld Engineers.  Had this point not been addressed eventually, Niven–who has had a great deal of experience creating future history–would have come off looking like some hack from the 1930′s.

Creating any kind of future or alternate history involves some work.  Maybe you can get away with some basic ideas in a first story, and then expand upon those ideas in later stories.  But even then, you better have your chops down pretty pat, and be ready to defend your position, or you’ll get walked upon with heavy boots.  And not being able to defend your position does not mean running away, then asking other people the same questions, certain that they know as little as you about creating a new world, so they’ll tell you things like, “Oh, America wouldn’t attack first–it’s their policy never to start a first strike”–and you never feel a sense of shame believing this comment, because you believe that in three thousand years not one freakin’ think about the county’s first-strike policies will evar change . . .

Good luck with that story.  I’m certain your hard drive will keep it warm for years to come.

Coffee and Imagination

Let me get this out of the way:  coffee usually doesn’t wake me up.  Yes, I know, the caffeine should have me bright eyed and ready to rock, but isn’t how it work most of the time.  I’ve been up about an hour, and two cups in my eyes are still half-masting.

Don’t know the reason for this.  A few times I’ve poured on the coffee and came away shaky and sick to my stomach.  Sometimes I’ve had one cup and been ready to tear up the world.  I don’t think it’s so much the caffeine, but more how my mind is handling the situations laying before me.

I do believe that it limbers up something for me, though, because my imagination can take off once I’ve downed a couple of cups in the morning.  Notice I said I’m not thinking; no, that’s something different.  Having your cognitive abilities online and working is not the same thing as letting yourself daydream about events which exist only in your mind.

I have one major thing to do for my NaNo Novel 2012.  I need to do it today.  Yesterday was a busy day, and I didn’t get around to writing anything.  No, all the writing and editing took place over the preceding weekend, but yesterday all about thinking and dreaming.

Besides the work I need to finish today for my novel, I was off thinking about another of my characters who have nothing to do with the characters in my upcoming story.  This story would take me back into the future, take me back into space, and take me into a place that started out with a dead body on the floor of a woman’s billet.  Yeah, you had to be there.  I guess the instructor who was teaching the writing class had to be there, too, since she didn’t get it, either.

I’m such a mystery, ain’t I?

I like heading into that which is fantasy–though I don’t consider my stories about space and the future fantasy, per say.  I know there are no happy, singing elves, and dangerous dragons flying about–though in this one line of stories I have ideas for, it might be possible.

After I’ve put NaNo behind me, I believe I will move towards this new story that keeps bopping about in my brain.  It keeps pulling at me, and it lets me get out there, lets my mind expand and churn, and gives me the chance to play with things–like putting a future history together.  Which is something I need to do for my Transporting universe.  I have no future history for that place–and why not?  That’s something I usually do just because.

See?  I’m getting lazy in my old age.

The clock on the NaNo Wall says 8 Days, 14 hours, and 30 minutes until The Crazy Train leaves the station.  I’ve got my ticket; all I need right now is to finish packing.  I’m setting today aside for that.  Then all I have to do it wait around until after the witching hour on Halloween night, crank out my prologue, then head off to bed after I update my word count.  Oh, and start laughing at people who, a couple of days later, are saying, (a) “I need help!  I need a name for a town in Kansas that has 2,000 people living there (which was one of the statements I saw last year)”, or, (b) “I’ve finished; I wrote 100,000 words in the last three days,” in which case, I wanna look at that manuscript, ’cause I’m guessing most of it says, “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.”

Coffee is cold.  Oh, well.

At least the imagination is perking.

World Builder Pretend

Last night I was back in the groove.  Last night I was typing like it was nobody’s business.  Last night, it was like it had been a few months back, when I was cranking out fifteen hundred words a night.

Yeah, I like that feeling.

Part Thirteen, Diners at the Memory’s End, and it was world building time.  I had to start in on Meredith’s secret, why she may have done what she did, and to do that I had to slink all the way back to the end of the 21^st Century–you know that one, right?–and the early days of the 22^nd Century.  Sure, it meant making up a lot of stuff, but I’ve been getting myself ready for that–

See, if there’s one thing I love doing, it’s making history, particularly future history.  I love coming up with things that have yet to happen, and then building my worlds around that.  And the more history you have, the greater the result somewhere down the line.

Now, I’ll admit, I’ve been a little shaky on this one.  I’ve been in a sort of, “Damn, do I have to do this?” mood since Wednesday, and Thursday’s mad rush back to The Real Home after work did little to help.  Not to mention I was tired as hell when I reached the homestead.

So, rather than write, I read.  I had already made a couple of notes about past events in my stories, but in my case, “notes” really means, “about five thousand words on a couple of events that happened in the distant past”.  Wordy, remember?  That’s me.

I read, and got things in my head yesterday, just to get a feel for what I wanted to set up.  I try to do that, too.  I’ve actually spent a couple of weeks thinking about what I’m going to write in this section.  I know about the most important event in Meredith’s life, how it’s going to happen, and when, and sorta why, and how that may color how she feels about Albert . . . but I also know how her culture sort of got there.

Yes, it might be a little convoluted, but those are fun convolutions.

With that in mind, I started writing with some of my notes opened in a Word document.  I wrote it as a conversation, with as little interaction between Cytheria–the teller of the tale, because she is a historian–and Albert, who is somewhat happy that he didn’t have his brains melted by Cytheria.  At this point she’s telling Albert about the meltdown of the superpowers at the end of the 21^st Century, how the world state came into being during said meltdown–and how, in the middle of all this, Wales became a totally independent country.

When I was finished, there were just over twelve hundred words in the Scrivener note card.  That was a pretty good start, in my opinion.  And it came pretty effortlessly; there was little sense that I was struggling to get the words out.

I haven’t felt that way in a long time, let me tell you.

So, more today.  More history.  I’ll get Meredith’s ancestors out into space, over to their new home–and then let the fun happen.  I’ll build everything up to “present day”, and then . . . more fun.  Believe me, Meredith will find herself getting new knickers before it’s all over.

Yeah, I love world building.

‘Cause without a strong world, you’re never going to have a strong foundation for your stories.