Sorry, y'all; been unreasonably tired all day. So have some titles looking around for stories to belong to.
Serenading Mrs. Crumplebottom.
Sticky Threads: A Memoir
All the Cool Kids go to Frank's
I Never Promised You a Beer Garden
Shotgun Divorce.
How I Screwed Up This Week, and Why It's Not My Fault.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Brainstorming in Mid-Stream
I wonder...if I genderswapped some or all of the characters, would the WIP get any easier or more comfortable to write? Because I keep running up against plot stuff that clearly comes straight from my embedded place in the Patriarchy, but the setting has a different structure and conception of gender. For example, my villain was thinking the other day: "That's the trouble with letting men have power. You can't deal with them as rational beings. They're all about emotions and sex and status, and they love being manipulated so much!" Which is how most men look to me most of the time, but which is not how gender is constructed in modern America.
(Did you know that the brain chemistry of women and men is most similar when women are menstruating, by the way? 'S'true. And it explains a lot. From a standpoint of brain chemistry the most stable human beings are post-menopausal women. But all that's neither here nor there at the moment.)
Holey cheese - what if Pelin is intersex? In this setting? That would be...really...no that won't work because...oh, but then this - wait, how would that affect the triune? How would it be constructed in this society? Does it knock Pelin out of the running as heir completely?
(Wanders off, muttering.)
(Did you know that the brain chemistry of women and men is most similar when women are menstruating, by the way? 'S'true. And it explains a lot. From a standpoint of brain chemistry the most stable human beings are post-menopausal women. But all that's neither here nor there at the moment.)
Holey cheese - what if Pelin is intersex? In this setting? That would be...really...no that won't work because...oh, but then this - wait, how would that affect the triune? How would it be constructed in this society? Does it knock Pelin out of the running as heir completely?
(Wanders off, muttering.)
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Feasibility, Shmeasability
Yesterday I worked on the WIP, where again I'm having to write stuff from a point of view not the protagonist's, in order to figure out exactly what is really going on and how the villain will behave next. And I realize that I'm not going to be able to do it as originally envisioned - an awful lot of what makes me uncomfortable in this story is only worked out properly, and the assumptions behind the world are only illuminated properly, if these alternative points of view are included.
Which discourages me, because alternative points of view make everything more complex and, therefore, tougher to sell.
So, while I was being discouraged anyway, after I finished I decided to tackle the problem of whether it is even possible to translate the creative tangle of the Widespot material from a gaming context to a novelistic context. Leaving aside for the moment the knotty problem (which, if solved, will make everything else fall into place, I think) of the two alien characters, I asked myself what, if this were a modern realistic novel, would be the key peculiarity of the neighborhood, and what leaped out at me was the biracial couples. Almost everything about the setting and the characterization screams "mid-20th century south," one of the biracial couples is young and overtly political, and the other is specifically said in the family biography to have moved to Widespot because of its isolation, "to get away from parental disapproval," and in Homer's personal bio "because his folks objected to his doing right by Beulah."
So, run with that - what's the earliest either of them could have gotten legally married, assuming Widespot to be in Texas? I look up anti-miscegenation laws and find that they weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967, which is later than I expected, but then I'm an optimist. (And alas, yes, Texas was one of the laggards that didn't strike the laws down till forced to.) Homer and Beulah, however, could have run off and lived together earlier than 1967, when Beulah got pregnant with Mary; so let's say the Beeches, who I can easily see marrying partly as a political statement, married in 1967. When the neighborhood starts they have a teen-age daughter, so the earliest year it can be set is - 1981. And working out the relative ages, Mary and Penny would have been born in 1960. A year before me.
Which shouldn't, actually, surprise me...
What it means, though, is that this would not be a YA story. It was always problematic, anyway, because in the neighborhood Mary and Penny - who are the characters I want to explore in book form - are both full adults. However, they are remarkably innocent, inexperienced adults, both by nature and by upbringing, and anyway a lot of what interests me is their shared childhood, so it has always seemed probable, and natural, that the book would skew young. But there is no way I am taking characters roughly the same age as me, and working out big chunks of their life experience, coincident in time with my own life experiences, and maintaining the immediacy of the YA viewpoint. Whatever I do, I doubt I'll be able to avoid the "remembered in tranquility" attitude, accessing the specific places in my brain I would need to access.
And I hate adult realism, for the most part. When I read books marketed to adults, they're almost always genre, and genre is almost always "really YA" in my private classification system. Which doesn't mean I can't write adult realism, or New Adult, or however the industry would categorize this; but does mean I'll be handicapped when it comes to marketing it. As if I weren't bad enough at that for YA and MG.
Besides, it has to be multi-POV. That's a given. I can't possibly pare the Widespot material, whatever it turns out to be, down to "Mary's Story" or "Penny's Story." It has to be the community's story, with Penny and Mary as flagship characters at most. And here I am back where I started, exhausted from fighting my tendency to write stuff that is just too damn hard for me to sell.
And it was time to quit anyway, so I went and caught up on my tumbler dashboard, where the agents-and-editors wishlist pops up with this gem of hope: I'm on the lookout for YA, NA, or Adult that alternates POVs like a boss. Character development, perspective, & voice.
Hurray! I'll send her - um - I'll send her - um.
Dadgum it.
I've been fighting this tendency so long, I don't actually have anything like that ready to go right now...No, wait, maybe Astral Palace will do. I need to look at her accepted genres.
And that, brothers and sisters, is why exhausting your strength fighting your native tendencies is a bad idea. When the opportunity arises, you want to be ready to jump on it.
Which discourages me, because alternative points of view make everything more complex and, therefore, tougher to sell.
So, while I was being discouraged anyway, after I finished I decided to tackle the problem of whether it is even possible to translate the creative tangle of the Widespot material from a gaming context to a novelistic context. Leaving aside for the moment the knotty problem (which, if solved, will make everything else fall into place, I think) of the two alien characters, I asked myself what, if this were a modern realistic novel, would be the key peculiarity of the neighborhood, and what leaped out at me was the biracial couples. Almost everything about the setting and the characterization screams "mid-20th century south," one of the biracial couples is young and overtly political, and the other is specifically said in the family biography to have moved to Widespot because of its isolation, "to get away from parental disapproval," and in Homer's personal bio "because his folks objected to his doing right by Beulah."
So, run with that - what's the earliest either of them could have gotten legally married, assuming Widespot to be in Texas? I look up anti-miscegenation laws and find that they weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967, which is later than I expected, but then I'm an optimist. (And alas, yes, Texas was one of the laggards that didn't strike the laws down till forced to.) Homer and Beulah, however, could have run off and lived together earlier than 1967, when Beulah got pregnant with Mary; so let's say the Beeches, who I can easily see marrying partly as a political statement, married in 1967. When the neighborhood starts they have a teen-age daughter, so the earliest year it can be set is - 1981. And working out the relative ages, Mary and Penny would have been born in 1960. A year before me.
Which shouldn't, actually, surprise me...
What it means, though, is that this would not be a YA story. It was always problematic, anyway, because in the neighborhood Mary and Penny - who are the characters I want to explore in book form - are both full adults. However, they are remarkably innocent, inexperienced adults, both by nature and by upbringing, and anyway a lot of what interests me is their shared childhood, so it has always seemed probable, and natural, that the book would skew young. But there is no way I am taking characters roughly the same age as me, and working out big chunks of their life experience, coincident in time with my own life experiences, and maintaining the immediacy of the YA viewpoint. Whatever I do, I doubt I'll be able to avoid the "remembered in tranquility" attitude, accessing the specific places in my brain I would need to access.
And I hate adult realism, for the most part. When I read books marketed to adults, they're almost always genre, and genre is almost always "really YA" in my private classification system. Which doesn't mean I can't write adult realism, or New Adult, or however the industry would categorize this; but does mean I'll be handicapped when it comes to marketing it. As if I weren't bad enough at that for YA and MG.
Besides, it has to be multi-POV. That's a given. I can't possibly pare the Widespot material, whatever it turns out to be, down to "Mary's Story" or "Penny's Story." It has to be the community's story, with Penny and Mary as flagship characters at most. And here I am back where I started, exhausted from fighting my tendency to write stuff that is just too damn hard for me to sell.
And it was time to quit anyway, so I went and caught up on my tumbler dashboard, where the agents-and-editors wishlist pops up with this gem of hope: I'm on the lookout for YA, NA, or Adult that alternates POVs like a boss. Character development, perspective, & voice.
Hurray! I'll send her - um - I'll send her - um.
Dadgum it.
I've been fighting this tendency so long, I don't actually have anything like that ready to go right now...No, wait, maybe Astral Palace will do. I need to look at her accepted genres.
And that, brothers and sisters, is why exhausting your strength fighting your native tendencies is a bad idea. When the opportunity arises, you want to be ready to jump on it.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Away
A family at their wits end - a mother and two daughters, say - driving from an untenable situation to an unknown, uncertain, undesirable future - get onto the wrong farm-to-market road at night, and the car breaks down. Their cell phone has no service. So they sleep in the car till it's light enough, and when they wake up see, what they couldn't see at night, that they are right outside a small town called Away.
It's a peculiar town, but not in a frightening way. The fact that they don't have any money to pay the guy at the garage doesn't keep him from hauling it in: "S'okay, no guarantee I can fix it anyhow. May as well take a look." The lady who runs the diner has a sign in her window for a waitress that's so old it's sun-faded; may as well give the mother the job. The pay's lousy, but is in cash (worn silver and gold and paper with odd designs and old, old dates on it, but the local storekeepers accept it and in fact it all circulates all over town over and over and over again, the same coins recognized as they go from hand to hand) includes use of a little walk-up apartment out back, so they have a roof over their heads.
Not every house has electricity; those that do, use generators ingeniously designed to be fueled by a number of different fuel types. The garage is also a blacksmith's and has facilities for fixing horse-drawn vehicles and flivvers, and the mechanic himself drives a '57 Chevy. Nobody delivers gasoline to his ancient pump, and yet if anyone needs gas it always has some. The old lady at the diner cooks on a wood stove. The whole place is a cobbled-together hodgepodge, people with odd accents, individuals from many different backgrounds but no identifiable ethnic subpopulations, technology and styles and attitudes from different eras, and yet it all meshes together, somehow, peacefully.
The car never gets fixed, the phones are all landline and all connected through a central switchboard that isn't on the national network, nobody's heard of WiFi, nobody takes a newspaper; the little circulating library has a limited number of books from incunabula to paperbacks; but the mother ceases to care. Her kids are fed. She has a roof. Maybe she starts dating the mechanic. She's able to relax and takes up something that used to interest her.
But the girls are the only kids in town; or, if there is another kid, he was born here. What to their beleagured mother looks like a refuge, to them feels like, and is, a trap.
Away is where people go when they're at the end of their ropes and need a place to stop stressing and just be.
Away is the opposite of where kids need to be.
Kids always leave Away. Or else they stop growing.
But once you leave, you can't get back. Until and unless you're at the end of your rope...
I kind of needed Away myself, when I thought of this, and couldn't put a plot together because I personally needed a rest, not a plot. I had a certain amount of fun planning the households, though.
It's basically a Twilight Zone episode; but a TZ episode would be ending right at the point that the kids need to start the crux of the plot.
It's a peculiar town, but not in a frightening way. The fact that they don't have any money to pay the guy at the garage doesn't keep him from hauling it in: "S'okay, no guarantee I can fix it anyhow. May as well take a look." The lady who runs the diner has a sign in her window for a waitress that's so old it's sun-faded; may as well give the mother the job. The pay's lousy, but is in cash (worn silver and gold and paper with odd designs and old, old dates on it, but the local storekeepers accept it and in fact it all circulates all over town over and over and over again, the same coins recognized as they go from hand to hand) includes use of a little walk-up apartment out back, so they have a roof over their heads.
Not every house has electricity; those that do, use generators ingeniously designed to be fueled by a number of different fuel types. The garage is also a blacksmith's and has facilities for fixing horse-drawn vehicles and flivvers, and the mechanic himself drives a '57 Chevy. Nobody delivers gasoline to his ancient pump, and yet if anyone needs gas it always has some. The old lady at the diner cooks on a wood stove. The whole place is a cobbled-together hodgepodge, people with odd accents, individuals from many different backgrounds but no identifiable ethnic subpopulations, technology and styles and attitudes from different eras, and yet it all meshes together, somehow, peacefully.
The car never gets fixed, the phones are all landline and all connected through a central switchboard that isn't on the national network, nobody's heard of WiFi, nobody takes a newspaper; the little circulating library has a limited number of books from incunabula to paperbacks; but the mother ceases to care. Her kids are fed. She has a roof. Maybe she starts dating the mechanic. She's able to relax and takes up something that used to interest her.
But the girls are the only kids in town; or, if there is another kid, he was born here. What to their beleagured mother looks like a refuge, to them feels like, and is, a trap.
Away is where people go when they're at the end of their ropes and need a place to stop stressing and just be.
Away is the opposite of where kids need to be.
Kids always leave Away. Or else they stop growing.
But once you leave, you can't get back. Until and unless you're at the end of your rope...
I kind of needed Away myself, when I thought of this, and couldn't put a plot together because I personally needed a rest, not a plot. I had a certain amount of fun planning the households, though.
It's basically a Twilight Zone episode; but a TZ episode would be ending right at the point that the kids need to start the crux of the plot.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Not Missing Ingredients
A couple of weeks ago I made a sweet potato pie, but when I opened the can of evaporated milk it was all yellow and separated. Somehow this particular can, the last one in the pantry, had survived ten years of baking and Kitchen Sanitation Months - its sell-by date was in 2004!
So, onto the compost heap with that mess and here I was, with the oven on, the shell ready, the eggs and spices mashed into the sweet potatoes, Damon had the car so I would have had to bus to the grocery store, and I thought - oh, what the heck? We eat mashed sweet potatoes, right? And I scooped the mixture into the shell, and baked it for 35 minutes.
It was the best sweet potato pie I'd ever made. It didn't take forever to set. It was light and fluffy and tasty. It did not seem to be trying to pass itself off as a pumpkin pie. It was great!
So yesterday, I made another one, again without the evaporated milk. (In fact I keep forgetting to put evaporated milk onto the grocery list.) And it's still good.
Did I ever tell you about the bananafanafofaser bread? We had friends over for board games and I was making chocolate chip banana bread, but I accidentally dumped in half a bag of butterscotch chips instead of chocolate chips. So I polled the audience - should I scrap the batch, keep it and start a second one, or throw in half a bag of chocolate chips as well and see what happened? The vote was unanimously for dumping in the chocolate chips. The result was gooey but good, and one of the guests insisted on getting the recipe because the banana bread recipe she uses never came out this well. We dubbed it bananafanafofaser bread because we were playing Star Munchkin and it seemed obvious. The situation on one level is the opposite of the pie; on another level, it is identical.
This is pretty much how I bake. And write. And live. Just because the recipe, or the literary formula, or the TV tropes list, or one of the cultures in which you are imbedded, includes an ingredient, doesn't mean it's necessary, to you, in this case. I substitute all the time; I leave stuff out; I throw stuff in because it sounds tasty; I screw up and I deal with it.
Sometimes you get an unuseable mess. Sometimes you get a supreme success you can never repeat. Sometimes you change your standard mode of operation. Sometimes you inspire somebody else to greatness - or to a new dish in their repertoire.
So, onto the compost heap with that mess and here I was, with the oven on, the shell ready, the eggs and spices mashed into the sweet potatoes, Damon had the car so I would have had to bus to the grocery store, and I thought - oh, what the heck? We eat mashed sweet potatoes, right? And I scooped the mixture into the shell, and baked it for 35 minutes.
It was the best sweet potato pie I'd ever made. It didn't take forever to set. It was light and fluffy and tasty. It did not seem to be trying to pass itself off as a pumpkin pie. It was great!
So yesterday, I made another one, again without the evaporated milk. (In fact I keep forgetting to put evaporated milk onto the grocery list.) And it's still good.
Did I ever tell you about the bananafanafofaser bread? We had friends over for board games and I was making chocolate chip banana bread, but I accidentally dumped in half a bag of butterscotch chips instead of chocolate chips. So I polled the audience - should I scrap the batch, keep it and start a second one, or throw in half a bag of chocolate chips as well and see what happened? The vote was unanimously for dumping in the chocolate chips. The result was gooey but good, and one of the guests insisted on getting the recipe because the banana bread recipe she uses never came out this well. We dubbed it bananafanafofaser bread because we were playing Star Munchkin and it seemed obvious. The situation on one level is the opposite of the pie; on another level, it is identical.
This is pretty much how I bake. And write. And live. Just because the recipe, or the literary formula, or the TV tropes list, or one of the cultures in which you are imbedded, includes an ingredient, doesn't mean it's necessary, to you, in this case. I substitute all the time; I leave stuff out; I throw stuff in because it sounds tasty; I screw up and I deal with it.
Sometimes you get an unuseable mess. Sometimes you get a supreme success you can never repeat. Sometimes you change your standard mode of operation. Sometimes you inspire somebody else to greatness - or to a new dish in their repertoire.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
The Difference Between Fiction and Real Life
If it happened in a story, dropping a three-pound handweight on my foot would have had an aesthetic purpose.
It'd be symbolically or thematically appropriate; it would coincide and resonate with some other element of my life; it would be some sort of message or warning or trigger or - it would have meant something.
But because I live in real life and not in a story, it just means I had to spend two days with a baggie full of ice on my foot. Do you know how difficult it is to accomplish anything with a baggie of ice on your foot? Even intellectual work - "Yeah, since I'm sitting here anyway just open the damn file and focus, that's all I have to - oh, for crying out loud it fell out of the towel again better not leak all over the cables - Ow ow ow - oh, look, the color's really starting to come in now..."
We like narrative because it's structured and tidy, and isn't as full of irrelevant bits and distractions as real life. This is satisfying on a primal level; so satisfying, that people make up meanings for their real lives, in the teeth of the evidence, and try to structure Life so that it makes some kind of sense. Which leads to cruel absurdities like the theory that natural disasters are divine punishments for trivial manufactured "sins," or that bad things happen to us because we "deserve" them.
That's the big problem with "realism" as a genre. A truly realistic story would not be satisfying because it would have to be structureless, full of arbitrary boring meaningless crap that would anger the audience. If they wanted real life they wouldn't be reading the story, now, would they? Do not, ever, get so carried away with creating a slice of life that you forget to provide the primary pleasure of narrative.
All the writing advice you get about killing your darlings, not putting in anything that doesn't contribute to the effect, Chekov's gun on the mantelpiece - that's what it boils down to. Even stuff that's interesting or humorous or beautiful in itself, if it doesn't advance the story, interferes with the narrative tidiness and has to go. You can get away with more in a loosely-structured domestic novel than in a tightly-plotted thriller or a short story, but if you push the limits too far you lose the audience. It'll get bored or it'll get mad. One or the other.
You probably think you know an author who gets away with it, but it's an illusion. Even the great stream-of-consciousness works, the ones that swim in and out of your eyes as you read and make you feel like you're living in somebody else's head - take a step back and look at them. Mrs. Dalloway is as rigidly-structured as any Agatha Christie plot. It's just that the structure is cleverly designed to look structureless.
Personally I'm not very clever and have to do this largely by writing the story and then taking things out. And sometimes it's real hard to tell where to draw the line. Yeah, I can (and did) take out most of Len's food appreciation remarks in the lesbian western. I can convey the fact that Len's appetite is enormous without describing every meal she ate. That's pretty straightforward. But that bit where she gets lost on first coming into San Antonio - is the level of humorous detail I go in for there the right one for illustrating thematically how she has to feel her way through her life as a man, with the directions she gets from other people mostly confusing her? Or do I keep it because, as a San Antonian, I find it all so hilariously familiar?
I think it's the former, because every time I contemplate taking it out I feel like the manuscript has a big hole in it that can't be bridged by a sentence about nobody in San Antonio being able to give decent directions and what is up with the dang river? But will an audience feel that way?
(Will an audience ever get a chance to find out? She wonders, sighing and returning to the agent search.)
It'd be symbolically or thematically appropriate; it would coincide and resonate with some other element of my life; it would be some sort of message or warning or trigger or - it would have meant something.
But because I live in real life and not in a story, it just means I had to spend two days with a baggie full of ice on my foot. Do you know how difficult it is to accomplish anything with a baggie of ice on your foot? Even intellectual work - "Yeah, since I'm sitting here anyway just open the damn file and focus, that's all I have to - oh, for crying out loud it fell out of the towel again better not leak all over the cables - Ow ow ow - oh, look, the color's really starting to come in now..."
We like narrative because it's structured and tidy, and isn't as full of irrelevant bits and distractions as real life. This is satisfying on a primal level; so satisfying, that people make up meanings for their real lives, in the teeth of the evidence, and try to structure Life so that it makes some kind of sense. Which leads to cruel absurdities like the theory that natural disasters are divine punishments for trivial manufactured "sins," or that bad things happen to us because we "deserve" them.
That's the big problem with "realism" as a genre. A truly realistic story would not be satisfying because it would have to be structureless, full of arbitrary boring meaningless crap that would anger the audience. If they wanted real life they wouldn't be reading the story, now, would they? Do not, ever, get so carried away with creating a slice of life that you forget to provide the primary pleasure of narrative.
All the writing advice you get about killing your darlings, not putting in anything that doesn't contribute to the effect, Chekov's gun on the mantelpiece - that's what it boils down to. Even stuff that's interesting or humorous or beautiful in itself, if it doesn't advance the story, interferes with the narrative tidiness and has to go. You can get away with more in a loosely-structured domestic novel than in a tightly-plotted thriller or a short story, but if you push the limits too far you lose the audience. It'll get bored or it'll get mad. One or the other.
You probably think you know an author who gets away with it, but it's an illusion. Even the great stream-of-consciousness works, the ones that swim in and out of your eyes as you read and make you feel like you're living in somebody else's head - take a step back and look at them. Mrs. Dalloway is as rigidly-structured as any Agatha Christie plot. It's just that the structure is cleverly designed to look structureless.
Personally I'm not very clever and have to do this largely by writing the story and then taking things out. And sometimes it's real hard to tell where to draw the line. Yeah, I can (and did) take out most of Len's food appreciation remarks in the lesbian western. I can convey the fact that Len's appetite is enormous without describing every meal she ate. That's pretty straightforward. But that bit where she gets lost on first coming into San Antonio - is the level of humorous detail I go in for there the right one for illustrating thematically how she has to feel her way through her life as a man, with the directions she gets from other people mostly confusing her? Or do I keep it because, as a San Antonian, I find it all so hilariously familiar?
I think it's the former, because every time I contemplate taking it out I feel like the manuscript has a big hole in it that can't be bridged by a sentence about nobody in San Antonio being able to give decent directions and what is up with the dang river? But will an audience feel that way?
(Will an audience ever get a chance to find out? She wonders, sighing and returning to the agent search.)
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Talking Animals of the Apocalypse
No way I'll ever use this one, but I bet somebody could do it right.
This was a story-dream. The post-apocalyptic dystopia was going on, and one of the features was, that anthropomorphic animals societies were A Thing. The totalitarian rulers were all what the dream was calling cis-humans (I know I'm appropriating the term cis here, way out of original context of contrasting the cisgender from the transgender, but it works pretty well to express the idea of "what society treats as the norm"!) while the oppressed classes were both the cis-human poor and modified animals much like the Talking Animals in Narnia - larger than their non-talking counterparts, with humanlike intelligence that didn't interfere with the specializations of their animals from which they derived. I specifically remember wild foxes and domestic goats. The "wild" talking animals lived separate from humans and the "domestic" talking animals were integrated as equals into the poor human communities, who regarded them as human equivalents; but the ruling classes regarded both kinds of talking animals as animals. So that at one point, for instance, one of them shot and skinned an intelligent fox because she wanted to wear the fur. At another point, the protagonists were saved from patrolling oppressors because the goats fooled them into overlooking the humans they were looking for - the goats were not considered seriously as intelligent agents.
So the oppressed are all working together, right? Not quite. It turned out that the Resistance had a number of different factions, all made up of cis-humans and intelligent animals (hmm, does tranimals work as a term here?) working independently and with little knowledge of each other. Something was preventing them from communicating and coordinating. Not from cooperating - the main thrust of the dream involved following the attempts of two parties who crossed paths in the field and jeopardized each other's missions to clean up the resultant mess, carry out both missions, and keep everyone safe from the oppressors who were suddenly swarming everywhere.
And there was some sort of boarding school that was becoming the locus of resistance because it was one of the few places that people from different communities could meet face to face? But the boarding school taught only cis-humans and was run by the oppressing class. (Think, Indian boarding schools of 20th century America, where Indian children were taken to be brainwashed out of their culture.)
I will never use this, because I don't even like dystopian fiction as a rule. Real life is as dystopian as I care to get and a little more, thank you! But if you came up with a premise that made the tranimals work, the whole story would work, and would fall into place.
BTW, the cis-humans? Should all be brown. Because in the future, we will all be brown.
This was a story-dream. The post-apocalyptic dystopia was going on, and one of the features was, that anthropomorphic animals societies were A Thing. The totalitarian rulers were all what the dream was calling cis-humans (I know I'm appropriating the term cis here, way out of original context of contrasting the cisgender from the transgender, but it works pretty well to express the idea of "what society treats as the norm"!) while the oppressed classes were both the cis-human poor and modified animals much like the Talking Animals in Narnia - larger than their non-talking counterparts, with humanlike intelligence that didn't interfere with the specializations of their animals from which they derived. I specifically remember wild foxes and domestic goats. The "wild" talking animals lived separate from humans and the "domestic" talking animals were integrated as equals into the poor human communities, who regarded them as human equivalents; but the ruling classes regarded both kinds of talking animals as animals. So that at one point, for instance, one of them shot and skinned an intelligent fox because she wanted to wear the fur. At another point, the protagonists were saved from patrolling oppressors because the goats fooled them into overlooking the humans they were looking for - the goats were not considered seriously as intelligent agents.
So the oppressed are all working together, right? Not quite. It turned out that the Resistance had a number of different factions, all made up of cis-humans and intelligent animals (hmm, does tranimals work as a term here?) working independently and with little knowledge of each other. Something was preventing them from communicating and coordinating. Not from cooperating - the main thrust of the dream involved following the attempts of two parties who crossed paths in the field and jeopardized each other's missions to clean up the resultant mess, carry out both missions, and keep everyone safe from the oppressors who were suddenly swarming everywhere.
And there was some sort of boarding school that was becoming the locus of resistance because it was one of the few places that people from different communities could meet face to face? But the boarding school taught only cis-humans and was run by the oppressing class. (Think, Indian boarding schools of 20th century America, where Indian children were taken to be brainwashed out of their culture.)
I will never use this, because I don't even like dystopian fiction as a rule. Real life is as dystopian as I care to get and a little more, thank you! But if you came up with a premise that made the tranimals work, the whole story would work, and would fall into place.
BTW, the cis-humans? Should all be brown. Because in the future, we will all be brown.
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