Interlude

Some days, all you can do is read stuff.

And I better hurry, because my order came in at the indie bookstore.

Idea Garage Sale: The Right Foot of Light, or Something Like That

Hi, y'all, there was computer crap and it was Game with People Day and I'm tired, so just real fast here's a high concept garage sale idea that came up at WorldCon.

You've read Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, right? (If the answer is "no," go read it as soon as you get off the net.) Personally I prefer Lathe of Heaven, but I'm the only one who does and that's okay. The point is -

Tell yourself the same story. With a human in the POV slot who isn't straight cis male. Any of the alphabet soup of alternate sexualities (and remember the A stands for Asexual, not "allies," don't be silly), or straight female, will do.

How does that kemmer scene on the ice work with the change?

Where does that take you?

I Know, It Looks Like I'm Goofing Off...

See, here's the thing. My brain keeps on working, making stories, regardless.

But it doesn't always work on stories I know how to sell, or that the market will treat kindly if I do sell them; and sometimes I find myself returning constantly, obsessing over, a story I know I can tell, but which I also know would be read wrong by half the people who read it and 90% of the people who didn't if it ever actually sold and somehow picked up buzz and folks did in fact read it.

Like the story dealing with how women are socialized into not recognizing that all the sexual power naturally belongs to us, with an extra layer of misleading us into believing (when we discover that fact) that it's the only power we have (and that it's wrong to use it); which is spinning itself out of the Widespot backstory for me -

It'd be a risk to write that, but hey, I can't sell the stuff I know how to sell right now, either, so what am I risking, really? I could tell that story and maybe somebody'd get it and that would be all to the good so who cares if I have to go to new places in the writing to do it, right?

Except that the way it's shaped now almost everyone would think of it as "that story where the girls are dating a father and son." Which, ick, who'd pick that up? Nobody who'd enjoy, understand, and benefit from the story I'd actually write, for sure.

So I'd have to back it right out of the Widespottian origins (which I'd have to do anyway because not only the names holey cheese the names but Penny Weiss, as is, is firmly embedded in the Sims2 alien offspring concept, with mpreg and green skin and the whole nine yards), which leaves me with themes and no characters, which is not a place I can start from. (Diagram that sentence. I dare you.)

And I'm too much a child of the 20th century to feel comfortable writing a book that is front and center about sexual mentorship, which is what the Mary/Valentine story turned into as I played my own version of the hood, and which deeply impacts even what I'm doing with Penny, because Penny and Mary tell each other everything and Rhett (whose bio I'd write differently if I did it now; instead of Rhett believes in male privilege so thoroughly he doesn't even know he believes in it, it'd just read Mommy Issues) is at the beginning of a road Valentine's already been down. So it'd have to be about something else.

And you know, there could be worse B plots than the sexual mentorship one for a story about an alien/human hybrid who regards herself as an anthropologist among the humans, if I could come up with some alternative to Penny's origins which would still leave her with the asexual hermit father and the BFF down the road. And if Penny's actually bi and in love with Mary while experimenting with Rhett (only it can't be Rhett because the father/son angle is too distracting for the audience)...Changeling, fairy child, alien, isolation, the isolation is essential as is Mary's biracial status - hey, that actually ties in with Penny's anomalous birth, too, at a metaphorical level...

So, it's a jungle in here, rampant undisciplined growth threatened by the napalm of self-censorship, the occasional tiger roaming around, beautiful and dangerous and threatening to eat me alive. I'll work it out or I won't. And it's less than a month to the Paleoamerican conference anyway, which could send me spinning in a completely different direction.

Excuse me, I probably need to clean something. Isn't it wonderful how the brain keeps chewing away at this stuff while you're cleaning?

Random Thought

This is not directed at anyone in particular who I have any reason to think might be listening. It's just a thought.

You know how many wrong people have changed their minds because someone who was right yelled at them?

None. In the history of the world.

It's important to keep up the good fight. But even shutting your mouth and walking away, leaving Them feeling like they've won, is a more effective tactic, in the long run, than shouting. Because if you shut your mouth and walk away and they feel like they've won, their guard comes down and you can sneak your point into their brains after you've calmed down. But shouting just keeps their adrenaline strong.

And it may take a long time for your point to work, and you may never see the result. So don't assume you've lost and things are hopeless. Even when your blood sugar's low and it really seems that way.

Anyway, queries for me. And it really is past time I started thinking about what the next book should be. Because I can make myself write stories when I can't make myself write queries.

Idea Garage Sale: Spies?

So in the middle of the week I had a dream with a plot. Not the illusion of a plot, which is common in dreams. You wake up thinking you have a whole novel, but on reflection, when you try to lay it out for yourself, it's full of gaps and logic lapses and transitions that don't work, so all you're left with is a handful of images that haunt you, or don't. (That bit with the frog, the river, the library, and the pageboy, from college - it's still there and I still can't do anything with it.) But this one kept its shape when I reviewed it, consistent characters and situations and the whole nine yards.

This was probably, however, because it was a cliche. Its beats were set in a familiar rhythm; the shape of the story matched up exactly to thousands of short stories in hundreds of anthologies. Yes, the details were distinctive, as far as they went, but I knew I would never write it because the most it would ever be would be a well-crafted, workmanlike piece and though that's worth doing as a small part of an overarching career that requires steady output, I wouldn't enjoy writing it and I couldn't sell it in this market, not without putting a lot more charisma into it than I ever have. I don't suck but I don't dazzle and I don't have the energy necessary to sell a pedestrian short story. But I figured I'd use it for the garage sale, as that's part of what the garage sale is for.

But now I can't remember it. At all.

It was a mystery, but not a murder mystery and I don't think a theft. Maybe a spy story? Does anybody write spy short stories? (You know, I don't think they do. I don't think that's a genre at all. I wonder why not.) It was suspense of some kind, anyway. Was there a ghost? I don't think there was a ghost...

And the moral of that story is, write stuff down even when it's simple and clear and plain and cliched and you know you'll remember it.

Maybe it wasn't even suspense. Maybe I'm influenced by the misreading I also did during the week, when I was skimming movie descriptions and saw one in which the character finds work as an assassin in a department store and has an affair with her manager, which made me sit up and take notice. But of course it was "assistant," which is boring. An assassin in a department store is absurd, but at least it isn't boring. Maybe trained assassins are the next level of escalation in corporate espionage.

So the garage sale idea for today would be a short story about an assassin/spy in a department store, playing a high-stakes game among the escalators, between Lingerie and Housewares. There's a ringer in the Catalog Department, and the proof sheets in the photo studio's secret file drawer are too dangerous to see the light of day...

Creativity as a Civic Duty

So yesterday I was at jury duty. I did not get picked, although I was well up in the numbers (#10), which means I was specifically un-chosen. This did not surprise me, and does not hurt my feelings, because I probably shouldn't be on a jury. It's just way too easy for me to identify imaginatively with everybody in a case. And of course there's the whole issue of my two modes, Silent and Can't Shut Up.

But it boggled my mind, the number of people who said they couldn't think why, if you were innocent and accused, you wouldn't testify. That's just a failure of the imagination. I wouldn't do it - I talk too much and I annoy people and I bewilder them because my honest emotional reactions fall at the extremes of the bell curve and if I happened to be cross-examined when hungry - holey cheese, no! Just, no. And what if you have a stutter, or English is your second language, or you're self-conscious about your voice, or think poorly on your feet, or the opposing counsel reminds you of your abusive dad, or - I could come up with innocent reasons for silence all day long. (And I think everybody in that courtroom knows that now.)

Why is it so hard to bend their minds around the idea that the presumption of innocence includes the presumption that if the defendant doesn't testify there's an innocent reason for it?

Why do people assume that everything they're mildly curious about is their business?

I hear this sort of thing all the time, directed at me and at people around me. Why are you in a wheelchair? How did your spouse get HIV? If you're still friends with your ex why did you divorce? Why don't you have any children?

The answer to all these questions, and others like them, is: None of your business. Yet if you give this reply, the questioner is likely to treat you as the rude one.

When you're tempted to ask a question like that, stop and think a minute. Imagine a few scenarios that might result in the condition about which you are curious (or feel genuinely sympathetic and concerned) and ask yourself: "If that happens to be the reason, and it were me, how would I feel on being asked about it? And even if it's not - how often does she get asked about this? How annoying will this question be?" And then you won't ask.

Sure, the person might need to talk about it - but there's a thousand different ways to let someone know you're there to listen without asking personal questions that might have painful answers. And the people who demand information in this way aren't going to be good listeners. They're mildly curious, and a lot thoughtless, and that's all. Far from helping, they are part of the problem of coping - irritation on a wound.

Writing stories and drawing pictures and making music are refinements and developments of our basic creativity. We are all creative because we are part of a social species, and dealing productively with other members of our species requires that we be able to imaginatively identify with them.

Probably the lawyers wrote me off as being too easy with this facility. We all know people who become too enamored of the stories they tell themselves about the world to deal with the world itself when it differs from that story; and though I don't routinely do that, this is a reasonable reservation to have about me as a juror. I am professionally primed to read between the lines and fill in the gaps between the facts in the way that makes the best story, which is not necessarily the most just way to render a verdict. But other people in the same courtroom were undoubtedly written off for their professed inability to extrapolate at all - because that's not conducive to justice, either.

I hope they found the happy medium of that ability in the twelve people chosen.

Feedback

Pleasantest dream I’ve had in a long time.

Someone had approached me to write a Widespot-like book, and made a movie at the same time, to premiere the same day the book came out. It wasn’t exactly Widespot, because it was setting up a murder plot, but I used similar characters. I had to work to parameters but the packager and filmmaker both understood the point of Widespot and the openness so it had been a great experience making these things.

The day the movie came out my husband and I were in some sort of resort right after a big con of some kind, but the resort had a small movie theater and was showing it, so we went. The movie was well received, but the projector broke, so we went walking around and my husband was telling me his theories about how the story should work out. He thought Chester was the obvious person for the lovers to frame for the upcoming murder, and I had to explain that Chester wasn’t in the book. I wasn’t sure how the director had gotten permission to use him or why he wanted to.

Somehow word got out (I hadn’t been going around telling anybody) that the author of the book of the unfinished movie was there and I was approached by some people with a mutual acquaintance from the con, who had “some questions,” which were really their theories about what would happen. And then somebody overheard and joined us and started in with their own “questions,” then another person, until finally I’m in the theater listening to theory after theory and it’s wonderful! They had all these creative plot developments based on what had gone before and what they knew but didn’t know they knew about how story works, each one different and perfectly logical - I wish I could remember any of them, but you know how it is with dreams.

Until finally everyone had their say and clamored for me to get up and tell them the “real” story, and I got up to explain that there isn’t a “real” story, that they had each made the real story themselves because that was the whole point -

And woke up, which was good, because they'd have lynched me.

Artistic vision and public requirements don't necessarily synch perfectly. Games can be open-ended. Books and movies require closure.

This, I think, is why fandom thrives on series. You get the satisfactions of closure episode-by-episode, but the ongoing nature of the work invites the sort of active imaginative engagement that breeds fanfic, fanart, and ongoing water cooler discussion of issues. Unfortunately, the creative team can't afford to listen to this sort of thing too much - it's likely to make them self-conscious, tempt them into profitless discussion, distract them, or even potentially open them up to nuisance lawsuits if a fan proposes a storyline similar to one the creators come up with on their own.

It's a shame, because creators so seldom get the satisfaction of hearing their work discussed, or the extreme pleasure of seeing it in action, interacting with the audience. We're a social species. We like feedback. I don't think it's even ego-gratification - well, not all the way down - so much as it is creative satisfaction, and the wonder and surprise of seeing a work you know intimately in a completely different light.

On the other hand, if you're paying too much attention to feedback, you're not moving forward with the next work. So there's that.

Everything's a trade-off.

If you really crave audience reaction, volunteer to do storytime at the library. Just don't overload your schedule with your own work.