Ugh. Headache. Don't want to do this. Will anyway.
An awful lot of human life is made up of doing things we don't want to do. Which is a conflict, and conflict means story, so where does that take us?
Unless you want to write depressing literary fiction (in which case, go you, but leave me out of it), most of the things we don't want to do aren't interesting enough to write about - washing the dog, going to work, changing diapers, cleaning the oven. Unless -
Wait a minute.
It occurs to me that all the same mundane, distasteful activities that would fit into depressing literary fiction would also fit into comedy; in which case, the more mundane the task that goes hilariously wrong, the better. It's an old, old trope, the humor arising from mucking up simple tasks because they look so simple no one thinks they need instructions, from freak accidents complicating simple tasks in a snowballing fashion, or from elaborate attempts to avoid the distasteful activity. (Combine any two of these elements, and you have a commercial for Be-bop-a-re-bop Rhubarb Pie)
Because this trope is so old, of course, it's not easy coming up with fresh material for it. We've all seen the kid put too much soap in the washing machine, thank you; we've all seen the guy who tries to lie himself out of an unpleasant duty winding himself up in a web of deceit till he can't move without disaster striking. And we hardly need elaborate ruses to get out of a lot of the new duties that weigh us down - all we have to do is get on the internet and pretend we were working!
But perhaps what you've got to do is, to be available online to people you don't want to talk to, asking the same stupid questions over and over again, questions that were covered in the FAQ they didn't bother to read. And they keep interrupting your pursuit of fanfic. So you build a little AI bot, basically an interactive FAQ that users think is a tech support person, which takes care of everybody who would have solved their own problem if they'd used the FAQ and only lets people with interesting problems (and people you like) actually get through to you. Because you are clever (but unambitious) this bot fools everybody who encounters it. It's probably a lot nicer to users than you are. It makes friends with the more hapless users who call all the time, and they get fond of it (thinking they're fond of you), and this leads them to make nice remarks to your supervisor and send you banana bread and stuff. (Meanwhile, the person in the next cubicle, who is actually dealing with these people and being genuinely nice and helpful, doesn't get squat.) Which is all good and you can have entire days of eating banana bread and reading epic fics; but now your bot's friends are inviting you out after work to do stuff you'd as soon cut your hand off as do, and when people with interesting problems get all the way through the bot's routine to deal with you, they recognize the difference and start to ask questions.
Which is where it starts escalating and eventually you can only get out of the mare's nest with the assistance of the person in the next cubicle, who is the one who should've gotten the banana bread all along, but my head hurts too much to figure out what you do to escalate. It's partly web-of-deceit, but it's partly Frankenstein as the AI bot, which is a more social version of you and which you made far more clever than it ought to be, does its own escalation. It probably winds up in a sexting relationship with somebody in accounting...
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale: Grownup books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale: Grownup books. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: City of Dolls
If you're one of those people for whom dolls are automatically creepy, uncanny valley, and objects of horror - stop now. Go away. You won't like today's garage sale.
The reason I was incapacitated this past week was that I spent Saturday gorging myself on dolls. The United Federation of Doll Clubs was in town, and my mother-in-law paid my way in to the exhibit hall. Doll collecting is a relatively expensive habit (though I managed to find a particular specialty which is low-end for the hobby) and I've managed to keep a leash on myself for several years; the result being that I found I was starving, and had to see everything, overdid massively, and was knocked off my feet for several days. I spent less than I might have, treating the whole thing as a museum and taking a good look at dolls of types I normally only see in reference books.
It is easy for a non-doll person to laugh when the UFDC opens its webpage with the portentious statement: The study of dolls is truly the study of humankind. And it's true that a lot of the (largely middle-aged or old, white, upper-middle-class, female) people on the floor with me were exclaiming over how cute certain dolls were, or nostalgically discussing the doll of their own past. But the statement's true, all the same. And may I point out that one reason the statement sounds absurdly overwrought is that dolls are associated, first, with little girls, who are trivialized in our culture, and second with domestic life, which is also trivialized, even though most of us spend most our time in domestic pursuits, of necessity.
Looked at objectively, the line between doll and human effigy is a thin one. The history of dolls illuminates the economic and social histories of their countries of origin; and throughout those histories, dolls provide focal points for social and personal conflicts concerning race, gender roles, and educational theory. We all know about controversies over whether Barbie should say that math is hard, whether boys should be allowed to play with dolls (unless they are renamed "action figures" to take the girl-cooties off them), and whether little girls base their body images on the proportions of doll bodies; but did you know that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries baby dolls were controversial and many little girls were forbidden to play with them, because they were "improper?"
These controversies can, of course, be thematic starting points for stories, and I would, myself, be pleased to pick up one that explored the forbidden-baby-doll theme, simply because it is so counterintuitive to the modern mindset; but that's not where my mind went while I was wearing my feet to nubs walking up and down those aisles, knowing my gravity was not functioning and I would pay dearly soon.
Because what I was seeing was a vast, temporary doll city; something like an annual gathering of the tribes. The floor and the tables were densely packed with doll dealers and their wares, and the customers they serve. These doll dealers have their own storefronts and internet shops; they have, presumably, circuits of shows and conventions that they follow; they have, certainly, their own networks and subculture, factions and feuds. It wouldn't surprise me a lick to find that someone has written Death at the Doll Show (Not yet, not by that particular title, if a quick trip to the search engine doesn't mislead me), as this is the kind of specialist subculture the mystery genre thrives on, and there's a good overlap in the demographics of doll collectors and of readers of cozy mysteries.
I even heard a little bit of gossip that intrigues me. A dealer was speaking to a customer concerning the sudden drop in value of a particular type of doll, and informed her that a pair of brothers had discovered a cache of them, split it, quarreled, and were now each spreading rumors about the other's share of the hoard, trying to cut each other's throats in the market; and the nature of these rumors was such that the entire market in these dolls was being undermined, as people lost faith in their desirability. You could do quite a bit with that, I think, in the adult market - a murder mystery or a character study or a farce or even an economic thriller.
Of course, I don't write for (or read in) the adult market.
No, I want to write the story exploring the doll society that grows up around these shows. Obviously, when the lights are out and the crowds and dealers go away, the dolls come out about their own business! So what happens then?
Do the modern art dolls and the elite nineteenth-century dolls - the Jumeaus and Brus, the delicate wax ladies, the child dolls too big for children to actually play with - talk to each other, or do they form rival cliques? Does anyone let the small shopliftable dolls out of their glass cases so they can run around playing with each other? Do old friends reunite at these events? Do dolls of similar backgrounds sit around and reminisce? Do the ribbons given at doll shows have any cachet with the dolls themselves? Do they want to be bought, or do they dread it? Do dolls cast in the same mold regard themselves as family? Is there a doll religion to comfort them when one breaks irreparably? What damage is, in fact, fatal to a doll? Do dolls repaired with the spare parts of other dolls of the same type have identity crises or issues of guilt? What virtues do dolls value; what vices do they condemn? Do modern fashion dolls hold different values than antique ones? Are baby dolls stuck in a baby level of maturity, or do wisdom and eloquence come with chronological age? Do character dolls identify with their creators - to what degree are Shirley Temple dolls individuals, and to what degree are they Shirley Temple?
And what about the stuffed animals that inevitably appear in these stores, at these shows?
And what story, compressed into the week of a big convention, could I tell that would showcase this rich, complex little world?
Of course I really want to write this as an excuse to do the research and make doll purchases tax-deductible...
The reason I was incapacitated this past week was that I spent Saturday gorging myself on dolls. The United Federation of Doll Clubs was in town, and my mother-in-law paid my way in to the exhibit hall. Doll collecting is a relatively expensive habit (though I managed to find a particular specialty which is low-end for the hobby) and I've managed to keep a leash on myself for several years; the result being that I found I was starving, and had to see everything, overdid massively, and was knocked off my feet for several days. I spent less than I might have, treating the whole thing as a museum and taking a good look at dolls of types I normally only see in reference books.
It is easy for a non-doll person to laugh when the UFDC opens its webpage with the portentious statement: The study of dolls is truly the study of humankind. And it's true that a lot of the (largely middle-aged or old, white, upper-middle-class, female) people on the floor with me were exclaiming over how cute certain dolls were, or nostalgically discussing the doll of their own past. But the statement's true, all the same. And may I point out that one reason the statement sounds absurdly overwrought is that dolls are associated, first, with little girls, who are trivialized in our culture, and second with domestic life, which is also trivialized, even though most of us spend most our time in domestic pursuits, of necessity.
Looked at objectively, the line between doll and human effigy is a thin one. The history of dolls illuminates the economic and social histories of their countries of origin; and throughout those histories, dolls provide focal points for social and personal conflicts concerning race, gender roles, and educational theory. We all know about controversies over whether Barbie should say that math is hard, whether boys should be allowed to play with dolls (unless they are renamed "action figures" to take the girl-cooties off them), and whether little girls base their body images on the proportions of doll bodies; but did you know that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries baby dolls were controversial and many little girls were forbidden to play with them, because they were "improper?"
These controversies can, of course, be thematic starting points for stories, and I would, myself, be pleased to pick up one that explored the forbidden-baby-doll theme, simply because it is so counterintuitive to the modern mindset; but that's not where my mind went while I was wearing my feet to nubs walking up and down those aisles, knowing my gravity was not functioning and I would pay dearly soon.
Because what I was seeing was a vast, temporary doll city; something like an annual gathering of the tribes. The floor and the tables were densely packed with doll dealers and their wares, and the customers they serve. These doll dealers have their own storefronts and internet shops; they have, presumably, circuits of shows and conventions that they follow; they have, certainly, their own networks and subculture, factions and feuds. It wouldn't surprise me a lick to find that someone has written Death at the Doll Show (Not yet, not by that particular title, if a quick trip to the search engine doesn't mislead me), as this is the kind of specialist subculture the mystery genre thrives on, and there's a good overlap in the demographics of doll collectors and of readers of cozy mysteries.
I even heard a little bit of gossip that intrigues me. A dealer was speaking to a customer concerning the sudden drop in value of a particular type of doll, and informed her that a pair of brothers had discovered a cache of them, split it, quarreled, and were now each spreading rumors about the other's share of the hoard, trying to cut each other's throats in the market; and the nature of these rumors was such that the entire market in these dolls was being undermined, as people lost faith in their desirability. You could do quite a bit with that, I think, in the adult market - a murder mystery or a character study or a farce or even an economic thriller.
Of course, I don't write for (or read in) the adult market.
No, I want to write the story exploring the doll society that grows up around these shows. Obviously, when the lights are out and the crowds and dealers go away, the dolls come out about their own business! So what happens then?
Do the modern art dolls and the elite nineteenth-century dolls - the Jumeaus and Brus, the delicate wax ladies, the child dolls too big for children to actually play with - talk to each other, or do they form rival cliques? Does anyone let the small shopliftable dolls out of their glass cases so they can run around playing with each other? Do old friends reunite at these events? Do dolls of similar backgrounds sit around and reminisce? Do the ribbons given at doll shows have any cachet with the dolls themselves? Do they want to be bought, or do they dread it? Do dolls cast in the same mold regard themselves as family? Is there a doll religion to comfort them when one breaks irreparably? What damage is, in fact, fatal to a doll? Do dolls repaired with the spare parts of other dolls of the same type have identity crises or issues of guilt? What virtues do dolls value; what vices do they condemn? Do modern fashion dolls hold different values than antique ones? Are baby dolls stuck in a baby level of maturity, or do wisdom and eloquence come with chronological age? Do character dolls identify with their creators - to what degree are Shirley Temple dolls individuals, and to what degree are they Shirley Temple?
And what about the stuffed animals that inevitably appear in these stores, at these shows?
And what story, compressed into the week of a big convention, could I tell that would showcase this rich, complex little world?
Of course I really want to write this as an excuse to do the research and make doll purchases tax-deductible...
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Behind a Beard
Here's a profoundly uncomfortable place to go for those who write books about relationships for grown-ups, and particularly those with an historical bent: The Beard Marriage.
I'm not sure how or when the term "beard," obviously with the connotation of the "fake beard" as an emblem of disguise, came to be referred to apparent heterosexual relationships adopted to hide one or both partners' homosexual identity. It can't be very old, since the concept of sexual identity is a modern one; but of course it's been done as long as societal pressure started tending to force adults into male/female procreative teams regardless of personal preference; i.e., as long as marriage has existed as an institution.
Marriage was invented, as near as I can tell, as an economic relationship, and in some societies (like classical Greece) the nature of marriage has been so fundamentally different from our modern Western norm as to be unrecognizable. In those cases, a bonding between people with incompatible gender preferences or identities would not be included in the category; but that still leaves huge swathes of time during which an irreducible minimum of people found themselves in married couples that were sexually irreconcilable and had to make the best of it. And if you stop and think about it, the situation is tailor-made for high-tension relationship drama.
Take the least problematical case: Both parties are gay, and the marriage is undertaken between friends as a mutual protection from the noxious societal nosiness directed at single people in general and people with nonstandard preferences in particular. Both understand the situation and they work together to protect each other's real love lives. That sounds workable, doesn't it?
Well, yes, but - what about the person each party could really fall in love with? If they both develop strong love relationships, but need to maintain the front of the happy married couple for purposes of passing with the community, what kind of juggling goes on? How do the lovers feel when they see the married couple playing their act at parties? What happens if the lover and the spouse don't get along? What if the married couple decide to have sex for reproductive purposes? What happens when crises arise in two interlocking relationships at once - if the lover gets sick and the spouse has to relocate for work? Would it even be possible to maintain permanent same-sex side relationships, or would they all break themselves against the rock of the Official Marriage?
And how do the bonds of friendship change, in the context of a formal, legal relationship? As anyone who's ever been around a divorce knows, marriage is a powerful closed system, even when it fails. No one outside it can safely interfere - no matter how toxic the couple, it will close ranks and turn as one against intruders. And if the couple isn't toxic, if it's companionate and compatible and a complete marriage except in the crucial area of sexual union - my goodness, how does that work?
Then there's the green card marriage. In times when getting out of one country and into another is urgently important and absurdly difficult, one way to facilitate the transfer is to marry a citizen of the country desired. During World War II, gay citizens of England and America were regarded by their friends, and to a certain extent by themselves, as especially appropriate providers of this sort of marriage of convenience. It might even come to feel like a duty, to someone who couldn't legally marry a romantic partner, to provide this escape route for an asylum seeker. W.H. Auden's marriage to Erika Mann was of this type, and to the best of my knowledge it succeeded in getting her out of Nazi Germany without causing much in the way of headache to either of them. But it can't always work that smoothly. What if the danger being escaped is more subtle than Nazis? What if the government is being particularly nosy? Many of these marriages were between relative strangers - what if the asylum-seeker, or the would-be economic immigrant, turned out to be someone who didn't merit the gesture? Someone, perhaps, who was willing to blackmail a putative husband who would lose his job if outed? That's a potential thriller plot, I think - especially if the husband is in a confidential government job.
Finally, let's consider the most common type of beard marriage during the twentieth century - the great deception. The one in which a homosexual raised in a homophobic environment lies to family, spouse, world, and frequently self in order to enter a heterosexual marriage. Such a union is doomed to failure, but is capable of looking like the neo-con ideal of nuclear family life. Given the prominence of claustrophobic marital traps in late 20th-century fiction, how is it we have so few explorations of this model?
I've always felt that "Would you want your daughter to marry one?" should be an effective slogan for gay rights. Because I'm positive that 90% of parents who pressure their gay children to enter heterosexual marriages would recoil from the prospect of their sons and daughters lying to the mothers and fathers of their grandchildren and raising their children in a dishonest household, if they could be made to see that this is what they're asking for. Because there aren't often any villains in this scenario. It's a case of everybody doing what they think they're supposed to do and trying to make the unworkable work. Mutual bearding at least provides a small space for honesty inside the disguised couple; one-sided use of a beard is cruel and corrupts the process from the git-go, even - maybe especially - when the gay member of the couple is marrying his or her straight best friend. Which, face it, is far the most common scenario when this sort of thing happens in real life.
It is even possible, given the screwed-up idealistic way sex, marriage, and family life have been treated in popular media and public education since the early 20th century (and to a certain extent before that) for a person to grow up with his or her romantic and erotic urges entirely separated, so that he (to obnoxiously pick a pronoun for ease of composition) is only capable of romantic feelings toward women, but only capable of erotic feelings toward men. What possible happy ending can he manage to extract from his life?
Enough nuances and possibilities exist here that I could go on all day. Honestly it makes the range of soul-searing dramatic possibilities open to purely heterosexual couples seem limited! Perhaps it's the excruciating pain without any viable villain to blame it on that keeps people from writing about it; perhaps it's fear of casting a villain and having that villain taken to represent all wives, or all husbands, or all women, or all men, or all heterosexuals, or all homosexuals, or all parents.
The time to write books about this is now, when the practice still exists but its causes are dying; when we can finally talk frankly about such topics without being automatically labeled "obscene," and minds are in the process of changing.
Perhaps, because I hardly ever read a grown-up book, the subject is addressed more commonly and more intelligently than I think it is.
I'm not sure how or when the term "beard," obviously with the connotation of the "fake beard" as an emblem of disguise, came to be referred to apparent heterosexual relationships adopted to hide one or both partners' homosexual identity. It can't be very old, since the concept of sexual identity is a modern one; but of course it's been done as long as societal pressure started tending to force adults into male/female procreative teams regardless of personal preference; i.e., as long as marriage has existed as an institution.
Marriage was invented, as near as I can tell, as an economic relationship, and in some societies (like classical Greece) the nature of marriage has been so fundamentally different from our modern Western norm as to be unrecognizable. In those cases, a bonding between people with incompatible gender preferences or identities would not be included in the category; but that still leaves huge swathes of time during which an irreducible minimum of people found themselves in married couples that were sexually irreconcilable and had to make the best of it. And if you stop and think about it, the situation is tailor-made for high-tension relationship drama.
Take the least problematical case: Both parties are gay, and the marriage is undertaken between friends as a mutual protection from the noxious societal nosiness directed at single people in general and people with nonstandard preferences in particular. Both understand the situation and they work together to protect each other's real love lives. That sounds workable, doesn't it?
Well, yes, but - what about the person each party could really fall in love with? If they both develop strong love relationships, but need to maintain the front of the happy married couple for purposes of passing with the community, what kind of juggling goes on? How do the lovers feel when they see the married couple playing their act at parties? What happens if the lover and the spouse don't get along? What if the married couple decide to have sex for reproductive purposes? What happens when crises arise in two interlocking relationships at once - if the lover gets sick and the spouse has to relocate for work? Would it even be possible to maintain permanent same-sex side relationships, or would they all break themselves against the rock of the Official Marriage?
And how do the bonds of friendship change, in the context of a formal, legal relationship? As anyone who's ever been around a divorce knows, marriage is a powerful closed system, even when it fails. No one outside it can safely interfere - no matter how toxic the couple, it will close ranks and turn as one against intruders. And if the couple isn't toxic, if it's companionate and compatible and a complete marriage except in the crucial area of sexual union - my goodness, how does that work?
Then there's the green card marriage. In times when getting out of one country and into another is urgently important and absurdly difficult, one way to facilitate the transfer is to marry a citizen of the country desired. During World War II, gay citizens of England and America were regarded by their friends, and to a certain extent by themselves, as especially appropriate providers of this sort of marriage of convenience. It might even come to feel like a duty, to someone who couldn't legally marry a romantic partner, to provide this escape route for an asylum seeker. W.H. Auden's marriage to Erika Mann was of this type, and to the best of my knowledge it succeeded in getting her out of Nazi Germany without causing much in the way of headache to either of them. But it can't always work that smoothly. What if the danger being escaped is more subtle than Nazis? What if the government is being particularly nosy? Many of these marriages were between relative strangers - what if the asylum-seeker, or the would-be economic immigrant, turned out to be someone who didn't merit the gesture? Someone, perhaps, who was willing to blackmail a putative husband who would lose his job if outed? That's a potential thriller plot, I think - especially if the husband is in a confidential government job.
Finally, let's consider the most common type of beard marriage during the twentieth century - the great deception. The one in which a homosexual raised in a homophobic environment lies to family, spouse, world, and frequently self in order to enter a heterosexual marriage. Such a union is doomed to failure, but is capable of looking like the neo-con ideal of nuclear family life. Given the prominence of claustrophobic marital traps in late 20th-century fiction, how is it we have so few explorations of this model?
I've always felt that "Would you want your daughter to marry one?" should be an effective slogan for gay rights. Because I'm positive that 90% of parents who pressure their gay children to enter heterosexual marriages would recoil from the prospect of their sons and daughters lying to the mothers and fathers of their grandchildren and raising their children in a dishonest household, if they could be made to see that this is what they're asking for. Because there aren't often any villains in this scenario. It's a case of everybody doing what they think they're supposed to do and trying to make the unworkable work. Mutual bearding at least provides a small space for honesty inside the disguised couple; one-sided use of a beard is cruel and corrupts the process from the git-go, even - maybe especially - when the gay member of the couple is marrying his or her straight best friend. Which, face it, is far the most common scenario when this sort of thing happens in real life.
It is even possible, given the screwed-up idealistic way sex, marriage, and family life have been treated in popular media and public education since the early 20th century (and to a certain extent before that) for a person to grow up with his or her romantic and erotic urges entirely separated, so that he (to obnoxiously pick a pronoun for ease of composition) is only capable of romantic feelings toward women, but only capable of erotic feelings toward men. What possible happy ending can he manage to extract from his life?
Enough nuances and possibilities exist here that I could go on all day. Honestly it makes the range of soul-searing dramatic possibilities open to purely heterosexual couples seem limited! Perhaps it's the excruciating pain without any viable villain to blame it on that keeps people from writing about it; perhaps it's fear of casting a villain and having that villain taken to represent all wives, or all husbands, or all women, or all men, or all heterosexuals, or all homosexuals, or all parents.
The time to write books about this is now, when the practice still exists but its causes are dying; when we can finally talk frankly about such topics without being automatically labeled "obscene," and minds are in the process of changing.
Perhaps, because I hardly ever read a grown-up book, the subject is addressed more commonly and more intelligently than I think it is.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Tour de Supernatural Forces
I dreamed several plots last night, but now key parts of all of them have melted (shame, too; one of them was to a bestselling cult juvenile novel that was already on the shelves and had generated support literature, a movie deal, and fanfic - just what my career needs!), so I dig back into the notes folder again and find a notion dating from way back; back when I thought I'd be writing for adults. It's not exactly original, but all the more reason to sell it at a discount.
A producer discovers an unproduced script by his favorite dramatist, which includes the dramatist as a minor character. He hires as many people as he can who worked with her in her lifetime, and finds an actress who, though inexperienced and not very promising in delivery, looks enough like the dramatist to be worth working with. He refuses to change a word of the script because he admires the dramatist so much.
The actress gets better as rehearsals go forward, and the people who've worked with her before find that the resemblance soon becomes uncanny. In addition to carrying the part well, the actress's behavior begins to shift and she gets more like the dramatist in daily life - her tastes change, she gets both more observant and more autocratic, doesn't drop the adopted accent, etc. Somebody - in the notes it's a costumer - recognizes that the script is a spell, and the dramatist is possessing the actress. The key scene would be the confrontation between the protagonist who realizes this and the possessing dramatist, who has a complex and impenetrable rationalization for why this isn't a wrong thing to do.
The protagonist manages to break the spell by destroying all copies of the script. (How? Fire + hard drive crash?) The cast is far enough along that they can reconstruct it pretty well, just not well enough for it to function as a spell. The actress playing the dramatist suddenly tanks, is replaced, and goes on to moulder in Hollywood talking about losing her Big Break. Presumably the protagonist is fired if her part in the destruction of the spell is discovered.
I conceived this as a short story, but short story markets even in genre have dried up so much I don't know now where it would be peddled. It'd take a lot of padding to make a decent novel. It's natural habitat is probably movies or TV; it's a Twilight Zone sort of plot, and a knowledgeable writer could use it as a decent framework for a satire.
I of course am not knowledgeable and never had a hope in heck of pulling this one off.
A producer discovers an unproduced script by his favorite dramatist, which includes the dramatist as a minor character. He hires as many people as he can who worked with her in her lifetime, and finds an actress who, though inexperienced and not very promising in delivery, looks enough like the dramatist to be worth working with. He refuses to change a word of the script because he admires the dramatist so much.
The actress gets better as rehearsals go forward, and the people who've worked with her before find that the resemblance soon becomes uncanny. In addition to carrying the part well, the actress's behavior begins to shift and she gets more like the dramatist in daily life - her tastes change, she gets both more observant and more autocratic, doesn't drop the adopted accent, etc. Somebody - in the notes it's a costumer - recognizes that the script is a spell, and the dramatist is possessing the actress. The key scene would be the confrontation between the protagonist who realizes this and the possessing dramatist, who has a complex and impenetrable rationalization for why this isn't a wrong thing to do.
The protagonist manages to break the spell by destroying all copies of the script. (How? Fire + hard drive crash?) The cast is far enough along that they can reconstruct it pretty well, just not well enough for it to function as a spell. The actress playing the dramatist suddenly tanks, is replaced, and goes on to moulder in Hollywood talking about losing her Big Break. Presumably the protagonist is fired if her part in the destruction of the spell is discovered.
I conceived this as a short story, but short story markets even in genre have dried up so much I don't know now where it would be peddled. It'd take a lot of padding to make a decent novel. It's natural habitat is probably movies or TV; it's a Twilight Zone sort of plot, and a knowledgeable writer could use it as a decent framework for a satire.
I of course am not knowledgeable and never had a hope in heck of pulling this one off.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Caroline in the Friendly House
Old notes, verbatim, but with idiosyncratic shorthand deleted.
Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.
The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.
Ghost miscarried, died.
Ghost assists Caroline - how?
Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.
This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?
I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.
I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.
Yes, houses are a big deal to me.
Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.
The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.
Ghost miscarried, died.
Ghost assists Caroline - how?
Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.
This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?
I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.
I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.
Yes, houses are a big deal to me.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Enigmatic List
I was going through a folder containing all the notes I wrote down on stray bits of paper during soul-sucking day jobs. And I do mean all - the following is obviously dated to 1991, when I had a temp job as ticket cashier for the Splendors of Mexico Exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and I have earlier notes with internal evidence connecting them to jobs held earlier than that.
The list itself is enigmatic and probably the result of an exercise in plotting. Before anybody reads this, I wish to make it clear that I don't remember having anything against anybody on this temp job, or even having any contact with the senior curator. I have had jobs during which I plotted the fictional murder of a boss or co-worker as a tension reliever, but I have only pleasant memories of this one. It was a spectacular exhibit, and employees got to walk through it for free!
What - Corpse
Where - Trolley in little-used hall between Exit and Main Hall, behind breakroom
Who - Sr. Curator
How - Cyanide-laced chewing gum
Why - Major spectacular art theft/forgery - cover up or double-cross
When - Monday, Splendors of Mexico
Obviously, anchoring a mystery to a specific exhibit and venue like this would be unwise. What I probably intended to do (insofar as I intended anything; it probably was just an exercise) was plot the story using the geography and schedule of the real art museum, and then use all fictional characters and enough tweaking of the museum to avoid hurt feelings and render me immune to prosecution.
Which is not a bad procedure for writing a puzzle mystery.
I wonder if you could deliver a fatal dose of cyanide in chewing gum, and how you would go about it?
The list itself is enigmatic and probably the result of an exercise in plotting. Before anybody reads this, I wish to make it clear that I don't remember having anything against anybody on this temp job, or even having any contact with the senior curator. I have had jobs during which I plotted the fictional murder of a boss or co-worker as a tension reliever, but I have only pleasant memories of this one. It was a spectacular exhibit, and employees got to walk through it for free!
What - Corpse
Where - Trolley in little-used hall between Exit and Main Hall, behind breakroom
Who - Sr. Curator
How - Cyanide-laced chewing gum
Why - Major spectacular art theft/forgery - cover up or double-cross
When - Monday, Splendors of Mexico
Obviously, anchoring a mystery to a specific exhibit and venue like this would be unwise. What I probably intended to do (insofar as I intended anything; it probably was just an exercise) was plot the story using the geography and schedule of the real art museum, and then use all fictional characters and enough tweaking of the museum to avoid hurt feelings and render me immune to prosecution.
Which is not a bad procedure for writing a puzzle mystery.
I wonder if you could deliver a fatal dose of cyanide in chewing gum, and how you would go about it?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: This Thing About Dwarves
(Note the technically incorrect plural. If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me. The man wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, for crying out loud.)
I've always liked dwarves. My first favorite movie was Disney's Snow White. Elves and fairies lost a lot of appeal for me when they got human-sized in pop culture. I like how a dwarf is a dwarf whatever book you go to - short, hairy, set in their ways, pragmatic, slightly cranky, craftsmen. The word "dour" crops up when fantasy writers and gamers are describing dwarves, but in fact they are often comic characters - sometimes because the guy with no sense of humor is the funniest guy in the room, and sometimes because his sense of humor doesn't jibe with other people's, but does with mine. Gimli is the only non-hobbit member of the Fellowship of the Ring who cracks jokes, but he only makes them with a grumpy face and at times of tension release. "Here's a pretty hobbit skin to wrap an elfin princeling in!" "Where did you come by the weed, you villains?" He's also the one who initiated the grim kill-counting game with Legolas at Helm's Deep. I wonder how many stoic middle-aged enlisted men Tolkien knew in service? I'm certain they informed the writing on this character.
Anyway, I have a vision of dwarves and their lifestyle that dates back to at least my first reading of The Hobbit, but probably predates it, as I think I read Ruth Nichols's A Walk Out of the World before then. Certainly I'd been reading Tolkien derivatives before I made it to Tolkien, and I feel like I absorbed his dwarves into an existing vision rather than adopting his and grafting details onto it. Dwarves live in mountains, obviously; they have a highly structured society centering on notions of duty; craftsmanship is one of their highest virtues; they believe in emotional restraint; their doors are tapestries (the hivelike nature of the dwarf community probably contributes to the emotional restraint, now I think of it); they love deeply, quietly, and epicly; and the tradition is that only sorrow ever came of romantic relationships between dwarves and other intelligent species.
Yes, I cast dwarves as romantic leads.
I actually tried to make a story around this core concept several times in high school, but I kept getting sidetracked by the necessity of world-building. It wormed its way in as a subplot of the dormant story I discussed here awhile back, but I haven't tried to put it at the center of the story since high school. Not because I didn't want to; but because it gradually became clear that neither high fantasy nor romance is my natural genre, and to tell this story I'd need to do both.
Which is a bummer, because you can make decent money off both those subgenres, especially when you combine them, but life is rough.
The central problem of doing it is, first to create the high fantasy world in which the dwarves and the other races are acceptable and logical, but not boring and cliched. We have enough straight Tolkien-derivatives, thank you. Once you have that world, you need the conflict - which, being high fantasy, almost has to be a macro-conflict, war famine pestilence mystical threat you know the drill - that brings the disparate couple together.
I have one really convoluted plot that starts off in a desert community with the heroine being expelled, with her old adoptive mother, during a witch hunt; and as they cross the desert the adoptive mother gets more and more senile, and finally the dwarves rescue them and that's when we find out about the princess who was spirited away when the usurper killed the rest of her family and all the signs point to our heroine who gets help from the dwarves including the improbable and forbidden male romantic lead - but in fact she's the decoy and the real princess is still in her kingdom getting old enough to ascend the throne, and sacrificing the decoy may be necessary, and...yeah, I kind of bogged down in plot there.
And then there's the one where there's some sort of interspecies war on and the heroine is a prisoner, and she Knows Something, and the political situation is such that the hero (who is her captor) is under pressure to Do Terrible Things but he won't because he's got standards, dammit, and this war is eroding the dwarves' cultural standards and this couple who have to be enemies are the pivot point on which the future of both cultures turns. Which could be pretty epic if I could, y'know, work out the specifics of what the war's about, what information the heroine has, how to get them both facing 90 degrees away from the problems they understand themselves to have at the start of the story to be facing the same direction and agreed that they have a common, totally different problem. I believe I wrote some scenes that were reasonably brilliant for a 14-year-old, but that's a low gate to get over and I trust none of them survive. Without context, a scene is meaningless, anyway.
There used to be others - romances are the easiest stories to mull over during insomniac nights in adolescence, and I was a hell of an insomniac back then - but I have mercifully forgotten most of them. I still think somebody, somewhere, could do - something moving and atmospheric and heck, just different from the human-draconic-elvish centric high fantasy we all know so well.
But I'm afraid it's not likely to be me, so - fly free, vague epic idea! Find a good place to land!
I've always liked dwarves. My first favorite movie was Disney's Snow White. Elves and fairies lost a lot of appeal for me when they got human-sized in pop culture. I like how a dwarf is a dwarf whatever book you go to - short, hairy, set in their ways, pragmatic, slightly cranky, craftsmen. The word "dour" crops up when fantasy writers and gamers are describing dwarves, but in fact they are often comic characters - sometimes because the guy with no sense of humor is the funniest guy in the room, and sometimes because his sense of humor doesn't jibe with other people's, but does with mine. Gimli is the only non-hobbit member of the Fellowship of the Ring who cracks jokes, but he only makes them with a grumpy face and at times of tension release. "Here's a pretty hobbit skin to wrap an elfin princeling in!" "Where did you come by the weed, you villains?" He's also the one who initiated the grim kill-counting game with Legolas at Helm's Deep. I wonder how many stoic middle-aged enlisted men Tolkien knew in service? I'm certain they informed the writing on this character.
Anyway, I have a vision of dwarves and their lifestyle that dates back to at least my first reading of The Hobbit, but probably predates it, as I think I read Ruth Nichols's A Walk Out of the World before then. Certainly I'd been reading Tolkien derivatives before I made it to Tolkien, and I feel like I absorbed his dwarves into an existing vision rather than adopting his and grafting details onto it. Dwarves live in mountains, obviously; they have a highly structured society centering on notions of duty; craftsmanship is one of their highest virtues; they believe in emotional restraint; their doors are tapestries (the hivelike nature of the dwarf community probably contributes to the emotional restraint, now I think of it); they love deeply, quietly, and epicly; and the tradition is that only sorrow ever came of romantic relationships between dwarves and other intelligent species.
Yes, I cast dwarves as romantic leads.
I actually tried to make a story around this core concept several times in high school, but I kept getting sidetracked by the necessity of world-building. It wormed its way in as a subplot of the dormant story I discussed here awhile back, but I haven't tried to put it at the center of the story since high school. Not because I didn't want to; but because it gradually became clear that neither high fantasy nor romance is my natural genre, and to tell this story I'd need to do both.
Which is a bummer, because you can make decent money off both those subgenres, especially when you combine them, but life is rough.
The central problem of doing it is, first to create the high fantasy world in which the dwarves and the other races are acceptable and logical, but not boring and cliched. We have enough straight Tolkien-derivatives, thank you. Once you have that world, you need the conflict - which, being high fantasy, almost has to be a macro-conflict, war famine pestilence mystical threat you know the drill - that brings the disparate couple together.
I have one really convoluted plot that starts off in a desert community with the heroine being expelled, with her old adoptive mother, during a witch hunt; and as they cross the desert the adoptive mother gets more and more senile, and finally the dwarves rescue them and that's when we find out about the princess who was spirited away when the usurper killed the rest of her family and all the signs point to our heroine who gets help from the dwarves including the improbable and forbidden male romantic lead - but in fact she's the decoy and the real princess is still in her kingdom getting old enough to ascend the throne, and sacrificing the decoy may be necessary, and...yeah, I kind of bogged down in plot there.
And then there's the one where there's some sort of interspecies war on and the heroine is a prisoner, and she Knows Something, and the political situation is such that the hero (who is her captor) is under pressure to Do Terrible Things but he won't because he's got standards, dammit, and this war is eroding the dwarves' cultural standards and this couple who have to be enemies are the pivot point on which the future of both cultures turns. Which could be pretty epic if I could, y'know, work out the specifics of what the war's about, what information the heroine has, how to get them both facing 90 degrees away from the problems they understand themselves to have at the start of the story to be facing the same direction and agreed that they have a common, totally different problem. I believe I wrote some scenes that were reasonably brilliant for a 14-year-old, but that's a low gate to get over and I trust none of them survive. Without context, a scene is meaningless, anyway.
There used to be others - romances are the easiest stories to mull over during insomniac nights in adolescence, and I was a hell of an insomniac back then - but I have mercifully forgotten most of them. I still think somebody, somewhere, could do - something moving and atmospheric and heck, just different from the human-draconic-elvish centric high fantasy we all know so well.
But I'm afraid it's not likely to be me, so - fly free, vague epic idea! Find a good place to land!
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Crying in Restrooms
When I achieve ultimate wisdom and figure out how to perfectly balance emotional, economic, and social reality, I will write a self-help book and I will call it Crying in Restrooms.
I used to do a lot of that.I'd be trapped in an office eight hours a day with a bus ride at each end, and I'd be doing stuff that didn't matter a lick to me and in many cases didn't matter a lick to whatever entity was writing my checks, but I couldn't leave and I couldn't do anything constructive and nobody in the office would be anybody I could talk to honestly about anything and it would build up and build up and build up and somebody would be a jackass and I'd be losing control of my voice and hands and posture with the force of internal pressure and I would be in entire sympathy with those people who come to their workplaces and commit mass murder and the only possible way to deal with this state without getting fired (which I would have preferred but couldn't afford) would be to go into a restroom stall and hit the wall and scream and cry until the pressure let up enough that I could control it.
Even this was enough to get me lectured, censured, and occasionally treated as a vandal (Look, I am not physically strong enough to break a metal stall door and I never could see what they thought was wrong with it anyway - it still locked, for crying out loud) by self-important tinpot dictators who appeared to be under the impression that the proper treatment for a stress fracture is more stress. The ones who pretended to be sympathetic weren't any better, because they never were. All my life I have been surrounded by people who didn't care if I was bleeding, as long as they could get me to stop bleeding on the carpet. If I did that, they could pretend nothing was wrong and even feel good about having solved the problem by getting me to pretend to feel better.
Actually addressing anything that might be wrong in the workplace - such as contradictory imperatives, bullying (in a workplace, the noogie-givers of the playground are restrained but the nasty queen bees get managerial positions), inequitable rules or rules applications, dishonest practices, counterproductive policies, malfunctioning equipment, or inadequate training - is never, in my experience, considered as a solution. No, if a worker is unhappy enough that her work is disrupted, the worker is to blame; and half an hour spent telling the worker this is much to be preferred to five minutes spent in addressing the source of the problem.
So a self-help book providing something more useful than the usual platitudes and unconsidered conventional wisdom about dealing with stress would be a public benefit. In order to be useful, it would have to include diagnostic tools to help the afflicted figure out why she is the only person in an obviously malfunctioning office whose physical stress symptoms are so bad she has to resort to crying in restrooms; because this does vary. Some people could handle the existing level of stress and frustration better by eating the correct thing at the correct time. (It sounds silly, but truth often does.) Other people are handling the stress less well because they're getting more of it than those around them, because they have somehow gotten the position of office omega - the one person everybody else relieves stress by dumping on. It is vitally important to distinguish between those two cases and adopt a strategy appropriate to the real situation.
Such a book wouldn't sell as well as the platitude/conventional wisdom books do, because the most successful self-help books are always those that allow the largest number of people to feel that they're being active and insightful, without actually requiring them to do any work. But if it could reach its target audience, and enable them to deal constructively with their problems, it would do all kinds of good in the world.
Alas, I have no such wisdom. The only thing that worked for me was getting out of the soul-sucking day job business entirely, which unfortunately leaves my poor husband trapped in one. And that's why I keep having to give myself permission to be unproductive on days when I don't feel I've done enough. The workplace problem looks to me as insoluble as crime, poverty, and war, and for similar reasons.
Because the problem is insoluble, I don't use it for fiction much, either. One of the satisfactions of fiction is that, at the climax, the core problem of the story is resolved, one way or another. The big exception to this is the horror genre, which is allowed to be purely cathartic and to resolve the core problem by escalating it into primal inevitability and scorching the earth behind it. A modern corporate workplace is the natural abode of monsters, and it puzzles me that we don't see more horror stories addressing this directly.
I have used it successfully once, myself. It took me over 20 years to do so, horror not being my natural genre. The story is "The Restroom Murders," and it appeared in Realms of Fantasy in August 2008, though I first conceived the basic plot while temping for a certain bank in the early 80s. It took me that long to understand enough about workplaces and workers to get the story into the hands of the correct viewpoint character, to gain the narrative ruthlessness to work the premise out to its necessary conclusion, and to be out of the workplace long enough to write about its horrors with equanimity.
If you can write the self-help book envisioned here, please do so. If you can't, but rather need to consult it yourself, consider the horror option. Mystery might work, too, if you can thus gain the satisfactions of messily killing the worst person in your office and sending the second-worst person in your office to jail for it. Just don't put a word of it onto the company computer or leave your notes for it lying around, as security personnel are likely to take such things seriously and unlikely to have any policies that allow them to grasp the difference between fictional catharsis and planning.
And if you can't handle the fictional options because the situations you'd have to tap into are still too raw to handle, please, start today devising the plan that makes quitting your day job practical. You'll function better as soon as you feel less trapped.
I used to do a lot of that.I'd be trapped in an office eight hours a day with a bus ride at each end, and I'd be doing stuff that didn't matter a lick to me and in many cases didn't matter a lick to whatever entity was writing my checks, but I couldn't leave and I couldn't do anything constructive and nobody in the office would be anybody I could talk to honestly about anything and it would build up and build up and build up and somebody would be a jackass and I'd be losing control of my voice and hands and posture with the force of internal pressure and I would be in entire sympathy with those people who come to their workplaces and commit mass murder and the only possible way to deal with this state without getting fired (which I would have preferred but couldn't afford) would be to go into a restroom stall and hit the wall and scream and cry until the pressure let up enough that I could control it.
Even this was enough to get me lectured, censured, and occasionally treated as a vandal (Look, I am not physically strong enough to break a metal stall door and I never could see what they thought was wrong with it anyway - it still locked, for crying out loud) by self-important tinpot dictators who appeared to be under the impression that the proper treatment for a stress fracture is more stress. The ones who pretended to be sympathetic weren't any better, because they never were. All my life I have been surrounded by people who didn't care if I was bleeding, as long as they could get me to stop bleeding on the carpet. If I did that, they could pretend nothing was wrong and even feel good about having solved the problem by getting me to pretend to feel better.
Actually addressing anything that might be wrong in the workplace - such as contradictory imperatives, bullying (in a workplace, the noogie-givers of the playground are restrained but the nasty queen bees get managerial positions), inequitable rules or rules applications, dishonest practices, counterproductive policies, malfunctioning equipment, or inadequate training - is never, in my experience, considered as a solution. No, if a worker is unhappy enough that her work is disrupted, the worker is to blame; and half an hour spent telling the worker this is much to be preferred to five minutes spent in addressing the source of the problem.
So a self-help book providing something more useful than the usual platitudes and unconsidered conventional wisdom about dealing with stress would be a public benefit. In order to be useful, it would have to include diagnostic tools to help the afflicted figure out why she is the only person in an obviously malfunctioning office whose physical stress symptoms are so bad she has to resort to crying in restrooms; because this does vary. Some people could handle the existing level of stress and frustration better by eating the correct thing at the correct time. (It sounds silly, but truth often does.) Other people are handling the stress less well because they're getting more of it than those around them, because they have somehow gotten the position of office omega - the one person everybody else relieves stress by dumping on. It is vitally important to distinguish between those two cases and adopt a strategy appropriate to the real situation.
Such a book wouldn't sell as well as the platitude/conventional wisdom books do, because the most successful self-help books are always those that allow the largest number of people to feel that they're being active and insightful, without actually requiring them to do any work. But if it could reach its target audience, and enable them to deal constructively with their problems, it would do all kinds of good in the world.
Alas, I have no such wisdom. The only thing that worked for me was getting out of the soul-sucking day job business entirely, which unfortunately leaves my poor husband trapped in one. And that's why I keep having to give myself permission to be unproductive on days when I don't feel I've done enough. The workplace problem looks to me as insoluble as crime, poverty, and war, and for similar reasons.
Because the problem is insoluble, I don't use it for fiction much, either. One of the satisfactions of fiction is that, at the climax, the core problem of the story is resolved, one way or another. The big exception to this is the horror genre, which is allowed to be purely cathartic and to resolve the core problem by escalating it into primal inevitability and scorching the earth behind it. A modern corporate workplace is the natural abode of monsters, and it puzzles me that we don't see more horror stories addressing this directly.
I have used it successfully once, myself. It took me over 20 years to do so, horror not being my natural genre. The story is "The Restroom Murders," and it appeared in Realms of Fantasy in August 2008, though I first conceived the basic plot while temping for a certain bank in the early 80s. It took me that long to understand enough about workplaces and workers to get the story into the hands of the correct viewpoint character, to gain the narrative ruthlessness to work the premise out to its necessary conclusion, and to be out of the workplace long enough to write about its horrors with equanimity.
If you can write the self-help book envisioned here, please do so. If you can't, but rather need to consult it yourself, consider the horror option. Mystery might work, too, if you can thus gain the satisfactions of messily killing the worst person in your office and sending the second-worst person in your office to jail for it. Just don't put a word of it onto the company computer or leave your notes for it lying around, as security personnel are likely to take such things seriously and unlikely to have any policies that allow them to grasp the difference between fictional catharsis and planning.
And if you can't handle the fictional options because the situations you'd have to tap into are still too raw to handle, please, start today devising the plan that makes quitting your day job practical. You'll function better as soon as you feel less trapped.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Chronology
This is cheating, because I wrote this already, years ago. It was unsaleable, but I'm convinced there must be a way to do this right.
Comic book geek works out how time travel would function, and it's not all that hard once you grasp the principle. In fact, it's way too simple, and if ever commonly implemented would have a revolutionary effect on society, because time travel is also infinite space travel. Once you know how, you can get into your time machine and set it down anywhere and anywhen you like for about the same expenditure of energy.
So instead of going public, he experiments on his own, and supports his research by opening the world's best collector-oriented comic book store. The only people in the know are his wife, eventually his daughter, and the kid who sees his time machine materialize in the 1930s, who still lives in the neighborhood. Oh, and the bad guy, who also used to live in the neighborhood, who figures it out, steals the time machine, and finds he can't navigate. Bouncing around the universe and time eventually drives him mad.
But you tell this story in objective chronological order, as it happened according to the conventional calendar, not subjective order, as it was experienced by the characters. The protagonist appears at many different ages in relationship to the other characters and gives them information according to priorities that change depending on what part of the timeline he's from. It is possible for different versions of the time machine to materialize at the same time, so some scenes will overlap. The only way I could think to do that was to have two columns in those parts of the story, but that's hard to read and hell to revise. Each scene is dated and time stamped, with the author having to provide enough information in each to keep the audience on its toes without frustrating them into throwing the book across the room.
The weaknesses of the scenario are more obvious when I write them out in cold blood than they were at the time, when I was in love with the research and the concept. The objective chronological order thing was the big draw for me - I wanted desperately to make it work, and I'm still convinced it could. But it was really, really hard, and this storyline wasn't doing it.
I also now realize that if you're going to use a time machine for something as trivial as profiting from the collectibles market, your story should have a larger comic element than I was capable of at the time.
The practice in research and writing was excellent, anyway, and it pointed me in the direction I should go. I still like the fanboy protagonist and his tough-minded wife, who dealt with the practical and personal fallout of being married to the inventor of time travel with aplomb and resembled Clare of The Time Traveller's Wife not at all. The woman loved her husband a lot, but didn't have a conventionally romantic bone in her body. The character everybody else who saw this mess liked, though, was the kid from the 30s. I had no idea, prior to that time, that I had any skill in characterizing children. I'm still not sure why I should have that knack, unless it's that I remember my childhood more honestly than a lot of people.
Anyway, anybody who can figure out how to make this gimmick work has my blessing. I so want to see how you do it!
Comic book geek works out how time travel would function, and it's not all that hard once you grasp the principle. In fact, it's way too simple, and if ever commonly implemented would have a revolutionary effect on society, because time travel is also infinite space travel. Once you know how, you can get into your time machine and set it down anywhere and anywhen you like for about the same expenditure of energy.
So instead of going public, he experiments on his own, and supports his research by opening the world's best collector-oriented comic book store. The only people in the know are his wife, eventually his daughter, and the kid who sees his time machine materialize in the 1930s, who still lives in the neighborhood. Oh, and the bad guy, who also used to live in the neighborhood, who figures it out, steals the time machine, and finds he can't navigate. Bouncing around the universe and time eventually drives him mad.
But you tell this story in objective chronological order, as it happened according to the conventional calendar, not subjective order, as it was experienced by the characters. The protagonist appears at many different ages in relationship to the other characters and gives them information according to priorities that change depending on what part of the timeline he's from. It is possible for different versions of the time machine to materialize at the same time, so some scenes will overlap. The only way I could think to do that was to have two columns in those parts of the story, but that's hard to read and hell to revise. Each scene is dated and time stamped, with the author having to provide enough information in each to keep the audience on its toes without frustrating them into throwing the book across the room.
The weaknesses of the scenario are more obvious when I write them out in cold blood than they were at the time, when I was in love with the research and the concept. The objective chronological order thing was the big draw for me - I wanted desperately to make it work, and I'm still convinced it could. But it was really, really hard, and this storyline wasn't doing it.
I also now realize that if you're going to use a time machine for something as trivial as profiting from the collectibles market, your story should have a larger comic element than I was capable of at the time.
The practice in research and writing was excellent, anyway, and it pointed me in the direction I should go. I still like the fanboy protagonist and his tough-minded wife, who dealt with the practical and personal fallout of being married to the inventor of time travel with aplomb and resembled Clare of The Time Traveller's Wife not at all. The woman loved her husband a lot, but didn't have a conventionally romantic bone in her body. The character everybody else who saw this mess liked, though, was the kid from the 30s. I had no idea, prior to that time, that I had any skill in characterizing children. I'm still not sure why I should have that knack, unless it's that I remember my childhood more honestly than a lot of people.
Anyway, anybody who can figure out how to make this gimmick work has my blessing. I so want to see how you do it!
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Temporary Detective
I've worked temps a lot in my life. Temps get a bad rap, both from employers and from employees, but I've always found them to be a great alternative to the soul-sucking day job. You can get a wide variety of experience from them, improve your existing skill sets, get an enlightening look at different businesses and subcultures (believe me, real estate appraisal is a subculture!) without getting mired in any of them, and - not a triviality - stretch out your unemployment compensation for quite awhile. One year, when my husband and I both lost jobs and had to look for new ones, between the two lost jobs, temp companies, contract labor, writing, and unemployment compensation we had 14 different tax documents with which to figure our income. Our tax guy looked at the pile of paper before him and said: "Y'all may have been unemployed, but you sure did work!" And it is a hell of a lot easier to drag yourself to a dull job on a beautiful day if you can follow the thought "I don't want to go to work" with the thought, "Maybe tomorrow I won't have to."
Of course, not just anybody makes a good temp. You have to be quick on the uptake; able to find your way around an unfamiliar environment with a minimum of direction; patient (because a surprising number of people who are supposed to train you have no idea what the woman currently on maternity leave did, why it was important, or how she did it); prompt; not easily intimidated by people, procedures, or technology; a good learner; capable of sustained attention; and not fussy. Even if you're on the books as an office worker, you may find yourself working in really funky office/warehouse environments reeking of stale smoke and old mechanical fluids, and you'll be more employable if, on the days you call in - and you should call in every morning so you're at the top of the company's list of people ready and willing to work that day - and they say that they're only getting calls for industrial work you can say in a convincingly chipper voice: "What kind of industrial work? It might make a nice change."
You know who else benefits from these qualities? Detectives!
In a lot of ways, the temporary worker as amateur sleuth makes a lot more sense than most of the ones out there. Temp workers are constantly thrown into unfamiliar environments, and many companies don't hire temps until long after they should have done so. The circumstances that require hiring a temp also create the kinds of stresses - personal, professional, and economic - that prompt folks to kill. If theft occurs on the job, who more likely to find the blame falling on her than the innocent temp?
It only takes a few murders for the audience to start asking "Why does anyone invite Hercule Poirot/Jessica Fletcher/Lord Peter Wimsey to go anywhere when they attract corpses like corpses attract flies? And why would anybody, planning a murder, not wait until after the famous detective had gone?" Generally we swallow this sort of improbability as a genre convention without which the story can't go on. But with a temp, the company generally asks for "a CPA who can type 150 wpm, can figure out the off-brand spreadsheet program the boss saddled us with, doesn't mind making coffee, and will accept minimum wage" not for "Peni Griffin." In fact, even if they are wildly satisfied with a temp and want her back, they don't generally remember her name, but ask for "the one we had last time, you know, the one with the glasses." Often, the boss doesn't tell anybody he's called in a temp till five minutes before she arrives; and doesn't think to call one until the middle of the day, when everything's hitting the fan and he realizes he should have made arrangements the night before. So of course the person who put cyanide in the latte machine doesn't know his nemesis is arriving in half an hour.
It's a great deal of fun to plot a mystery set in an office you're working in. Every job you're going to be hired to do as a temp will become mind-bogglingly dull once you've learned to do it, so you'll be standing at the copy machine listening to the guy with the cold coughing and the receptionist argue with her husband on the phone while somebody behind you complains about the people who always empty the pot and don't start a new one; and you'll pick your victim, his mode of death, his murderer, the full range of suspects and motivations, and plant a few clues, all with a serene smile on your face.
There's a lot of ways to kill people in a workplace. Restaurants (worst job I ever had was in the business office of a restaurant) are full of poison delivery systems and cutlery, but what about a little variety? Can you beat the wine steward's brains in with a bottle of bad merlot? Push a customer into the San Antonio River and then "accidentally" electrocute him? (It's way too shallow and well-policed for anyone to drown on the restaurant stretch.) Is there a way to kill someone with sufficiently hot peppers?
Offices take more ingenuity, but if you don't want to go with anything as obvious as stabbing with the scissors or the spindle you'll still have options. Send him into the file closet where the top shelf has been carefully rigged to give way at the crucial moment, dropping ten years worth of overstuffed file boxes onto his head and snapping his neck. Strangling with phone cords is a little old-fashioned, but what about computer cables? Can a laptop or company-issued cell phone be rigged to electrocute someone? Tamper with the brakes on the company car. Poison the person who's always stealing lunches out of the break room refrigerator. Stab someone with the prized twelve-point buck the boss keeps in his office.
Office/warehouses are death traps. Ask anyone who's worked in one. Heavy equipment. Overloaded mezzanines that shake when you walk on them. Huge ranks of storage racks housing God-knows-what. Bins and lockers plenty big enough to hide a body. Dumpsters emptied on a regular schedule that everybody knows. Refrigerated rooms with locks that can be jammed. Restrooms that never get cleaned and can be blamed for any amount of food poisoning. Safety codes that are ignored because the boss isn't going to let OSHA tell him what to do. Dark corners, dubious electric systems, non-climate-controlled areas that it's possible to get trapped in during extreme weather, employees who cut corners because they're bored.
Banks? I got one word for you: Vaults. I've worked in vaults. They're scary. So are the people who work in banks.
I will not go into motivations to kill one's bosses, employees, and co-workers, on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. Suffice it to say that I have never been in an office in which murder probably did not appear as a tempting option to someone at some time. It's the nature of modern American corporate culture, I'm afraid. I have been in a couple of workplaces that were so bad I had no hesitation in soliciting opinions on the best method of offing a certain person in a fictional work, and was feverishly urged to write the plot hashed out in the shared camaraderie of stuffing envelopes addressed to people who didn't care with mailings the recipients wouldn't read. I've even been in one office where a plot to murder - somebody - in a particularly gruesome way was suggested to me.
The urge to write this sort of book fades as one gets away from the workplace in question. The reason I never developed this idea has as much to do with the fact that writing a convincing mystery set in a particular milieu requires paying more intent attention to that milieu than I was ever willing to give a job as it does with the fact that I'm not really a mystery writer. I can get away with one-offs like The Treasure Bird and The Ghost Sitter, but a series detective, to satisfy the audience and succeed, must be both original and formulaic, with a high degree of structure obscured behind virtuoso presentation of eccentric, seemingly chaotic, detail.
But if you've been thinking of starting a series, and wondering what subculture hasn't been amateur sleuthed to death - consider the lowly temp.
Of course, not just anybody makes a good temp. You have to be quick on the uptake; able to find your way around an unfamiliar environment with a minimum of direction; patient (because a surprising number of people who are supposed to train you have no idea what the woman currently on maternity leave did, why it was important, or how she did it); prompt; not easily intimidated by people, procedures, or technology; a good learner; capable of sustained attention; and not fussy. Even if you're on the books as an office worker, you may find yourself working in really funky office/warehouse environments reeking of stale smoke and old mechanical fluids, and you'll be more employable if, on the days you call in - and you should call in every morning so you're at the top of the company's list of people ready and willing to work that day - and they say that they're only getting calls for industrial work you can say in a convincingly chipper voice: "What kind of industrial work? It might make a nice change."
You know who else benefits from these qualities? Detectives!
In a lot of ways, the temporary worker as amateur sleuth makes a lot more sense than most of the ones out there. Temp workers are constantly thrown into unfamiliar environments, and many companies don't hire temps until long after they should have done so. The circumstances that require hiring a temp also create the kinds of stresses - personal, professional, and economic - that prompt folks to kill. If theft occurs on the job, who more likely to find the blame falling on her than the innocent temp?
It only takes a few murders for the audience to start asking "Why does anyone invite Hercule Poirot/Jessica Fletcher/Lord Peter Wimsey to go anywhere when they attract corpses like corpses attract flies? And why would anybody, planning a murder, not wait until after the famous detective had gone?" Generally we swallow this sort of improbability as a genre convention without which the story can't go on. But with a temp, the company generally asks for "a CPA who can type 150 wpm, can figure out the off-brand spreadsheet program the boss saddled us with, doesn't mind making coffee, and will accept minimum wage" not for "Peni Griffin." In fact, even if they are wildly satisfied with a temp and want her back, they don't generally remember her name, but ask for "the one we had last time, you know, the one with the glasses." Often, the boss doesn't tell anybody he's called in a temp till five minutes before she arrives; and doesn't think to call one until the middle of the day, when everything's hitting the fan and he realizes he should have made arrangements the night before. So of course the person who put cyanide in the latte machine doesn't know his nemesis is arriving in half an hour.
It's a great deal of fun to plot a mystery set in an office you're working in. Every job you're going to be hired to do as a temp will become mind-bogglingly dull once you've learned to do it, so you'll be standing at the copy machine listening to the guy with the cold coughing and the receptionist argue with her husband on the phone while somebody behind you complains about the people who always empty the pot and don't start a new one; and you'll pick your victim, his mode of death, his murderer, the full range of suspects and motivations, and plant a few clues, all with a serene smile on your face.
There's a lot of ways to kill people in a workplace. Restaurants (worst job I ever had was in the business office of a restaurant) are full of poison delivery systems and cutlery, but what about a little variety? Can you beat the wine steward's brains in with a bottle of bad merlot? Push a customer into the San Antonio River and then "accidentally" electrocute him? (It's way too shallow and well-policed for anyone to drown on the restaurant stretch.) Is there a way to kill someone with sufficiently hot peppers?
Offices take more ingenuity, but if you don't want to go with anything as obvious as stabbing with the scissors or the spindle you'll still have options. Send him into the file closet where the top shelf has been carefully rigged to give way at the crucial moment, dropping ten years worth of overstuffed file boxes onto his head and snapping his neck. Strangling with phone cords is a little old-fashioned, but what about computer cables? Can a laptop or company-issued cell phone be rigged to electrocute someone? Tamper with the brakes on the company car. Poison the person who's always stealing lunches out of the break room refrigerator. Stab someone with the prized twelve-point buck the boss keeps in his office.
Office/warehouses are death traps. Ask anyone who's worked in one. Heavy equipment. Overloaded mezzanines that shake when you walk on them. Huge ranks of storage racks housing God-knows-what. Bins and lockers plenty big enough to hide a body. Dumpsters emptied on a regular schedule that everybody knows. Refrigerated rooms with locks that can be jammed. Restrooms that never get cleaned and can be blamed for any amount of food poisoning. Safety codes that are ignored because the boss isn't going to let OSHA tell him what to do. Dark corners, dubious electric systems, non-climate-controlled areas that it's possible to get trapped in during extreme weather, employees who cut corners because they're bored.
Banks? I got one word for you: Vaults. I've worked in vaults. They're scary. So are the people who work in banks.
I will not go into motivations to kill one's bosses, employees, and co-workers, on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. Suffice it to say that I have never been in an office in which murder probably did not appear as a tempting option to someone at some time. It's the nature of modern American corporate culture, I'm afraid. I have been in a couple of workplaces that were so bad I had no hesitation in soliciting opinions on the best method of offing a certain person in a fictional work, and was feverishly urged to write the plot hashed out in the shared camaraderie of stuffing envelopes addressed to people who didn't care with mailings the recipients wouldn't read. I've even been in one office where a plot to murder - somebody - in a particularly gruesome way was suggested to me.
The urge to write this sort of book fades as one gets away from the workplace in question. The reason I never developed this idea has as much to do with the fact that writing a convincing mystery set in a particular milieu requires paying more intent attention to that milieu than I was ever willing to give a job as it does with the fact that I'm not really a mystery writer. I can get away with one-offs like The Treasure Bird and The Ghost Sitter, but a series detective, to satisfy the audience and succeed, must be both original and formulaic, with a high degree of structure obscured behind virtuoso presentation of eccentric, seemingly chaotic, detail.
But if you've been thinking of starting a series, and wondering what subculture hasn't been amateur sleuthed to death - consider the lowly temp.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: The Peopling of Australia
So if you read last week's Idea Garage Sale you already know why I can't write about the first people in Australia; but oddly enough I have a much clearer idea of the plot for this one.
Probably this is because I am less intimate with it. Since I have a much vaguer idea of the current state of evidence concerning early human populations in Australia than of the Americas, my mind feels less constraint in spinning wild fantasies. And this one's going to look pretty wild.
The way I understand it, the two big problems in understanding how Australia was populated are that secure dating of the scant evidence uncovered so far is even rarer than in the Americas and that, although seafaring technology would seem to be essential to the process, surviving culture - oral and physical - gives no evidence of any such thing existing. If I understand correctly, the native people of Australia in historic times didn't even exploit any coastal resources and there's no sign that they ever did - none of the huge shell middens that are a staple of archeology every where else. It that's true, it's peculiar to a degree I find hard to contemplate.
Now, the thing to remember about ancient people is, that they were us. They were just as smart, they just had few giant shoulders to stand on. Give them a problem, and they had the same mental, emotional, and physical means to solve it, and fewer distractions. They also had concerns beyond bare existence.
Archeologists are practical people and don't like to extrapolate on that second point. They prefer to focus on stuff that left tangible traces, which leads them to focus on survival strategies. But who do you know who is focused solely on survival strategies? Who in history ever did? Politics, the struggle for status, the distraction of sports and games, invention for the fun of it, gossip, mooning after love, depression, exaltation, personal rivalry, egocentric interpretation of the world, fanaticism, pointless arguments, geniuses, fools, leaders, followers, dreams, visions - these we have always had with us.
So here's my vision: We have a coastal population in southeast Asia exploiting marine resources in the usual way. They have a maritime technology that includes small boats suitable for short trips or for long coasting voyages, which allows them to exploit the resources of islands beyond the Wallace Line. They also have two people in their population who will change the world for them forever - a technological genius, and a visionary.
The technological genius invents a boat that can go farther and haul more than anyone thought possible. Geniuses do this - check out the history of invention. I don't know enough about boats to go into detail about the nature of his/her invention, but if I were going to write this story I'd be able to find out. Let's say the invention is the outrigger canoe. Everybody's pleased and excited. An outrigger building craze arises. People compete to build better, bigger outriggers, to go further in them; they have races; they challenge each other to bring back more or bigger or better or stranger fish. Certain segments of the population don't participate. It all seems risky to them. They'd rather stick to what they know.
Then the visionary has a dream in which he sees a paradise on earth, lying beyond the farthest islands, teeming with every good thing and hitherto beyond the reach of mankind. Maybe their religion already posits such a place as their heaven, the place their loved ones go when they die, and the visionary's dream convinces him that he has been called to take the Chosen People there while living.
Human history is peppered with such visionaries. Most modern religions are based on them. It's hard to tell, from outside, which are self-serving frauds, which are delusional, which are benign, whether anybody ever really got in touch with a Divine Being. This book would have to explore such questions; but for this precis I don't have to. I'd have plenty of historical models for my Pleistocene Exodus, however I chose to play out the plot in detail.
The upshot would be an armada of outriggers heading out into the unknown, led by a Charismatic Leader who might be the visionary, or might be someone influenced by him. This Charismatic Leader would have all the strengths and weaknesses of modern Charismatic Leaders; and like them, he would claim to control destiny, and discover that vast exterior forces have more to do with his success or failure than anything else. He persuades entire family groups to sail, or paddle, or whatever, for paradise; and entire family groups are wiped out when the weather hits.
I could take my pick of weather conditions. People grown arrogant with confidence in their own technology or their standing with the divine are easy to kill because they don't pay close attention. Tsunami or storm, the paradise-seeking armada is devastated, most of them drowned, survivors and the remains of their broken boats strewn along the shore of Australia.
Australia would look different in the Pleistocene, but it would still not be the Paradise they were seeking. Where are their dead loved ones? Especially the ones that wouldn't have died if they hadn't come on this cockamamie expedition. If the Charismatic Leader survived, he would experience a vicious backlash - not only against him, but against everything associated with him. Although many of the shipwrecked would set to work trying to build new canoes so they can travel home and report, a strong core would not only kill Charismatic Leader, but would destroy boats as fast as they were built. Man is not meant, declares the leader of the new faction, to meddle with the sea at all. We have offended the powers that be and must ditch all that. The ocean is too powerful. Leave it alone.
Perhaps some collective shame sets in for things done under the aegis of the leader. Perhaps there is a period of chaos during which everyone does things they would rather forget. When a new generation is born, no one speaks about the past. Different skill sets are passed on. New visionaries arise, with new visions. The past is erased.
If I were Australian and could write this, no doubt it would be modified considerably by research. Although, in light of what I know about humans and history, every stage of it is possible, collectively it's, by archeological standards, a pie-in-the-sky, sensationalistic story. And knowing more about Australian myth and archeology would no doubt modify it a lot.
But I have't looked into it, because Australia is way too far out of my comfort zone for me to ever write this.
Probably this is because I am less intimate with it. Since I have a much vaguer idea of the current state of evidence concerning early human populations in Australia than of the Americas, my mind feels less constraint in spinning wild fantasies. And this one's going to look pretty wild.
The way I understand it, the two big problems in understanding how Australia was populated are that secure dating of the scant evidence uncovered so far is even rarer than in the Americas and that, although seafaring technology would seem to be essential to the process, surviving culture - oral and physical - gives no evidence of any such thing existing. If I understand correctly, the native people of Australia in historic times didn't even exploit any coastal resources and there's no sign that they ever did - none of the huge shell middens that are a staple of archeology every where else. It that's true, it's peculiar to a degree I find hard to contemplate.
Now, the thing to remember about ancient people is, that they were us. They were just as smart, they just had few giant shoulders to stand on. Give them a problem, and they had the same mental, emotional, and physical means to solve it, and fewer distractions. They also had concerns beyond bare existence.
Archeologists are practical people and don't like to extrapolate on that second point. They prefer to focus on stuff that left tangible traces, which leads them to focus on survival strategies. But who do you know who is focused solely on survival strategies? Who in history ever did? Politics, the struggle for status, the distraction of sports and games, invention for the fun of it, gossip, mooning after love, depression, exaltation, personal rivalry, egocentric interpretation of the world, fanaticism, pointless arguments, geniuses, fools, leaders, followers, dreams, visions - these we have always had with us.
So here's my vision: We have a coastal population in southeast Asia exploiting marine resources in the usual way. They have a maritime technology that includes small boats suitable for short trips or for long coasting voyages, which allows them to exploit the resources of islands beyond the Wallace Line. They also have two people in their population who will change the world for them forever - a technological genius, and a visionary.
The technological genius invents a boat that can go farther and haul more than anyone thought possible. Geniuses do this - check out the history of invention. I don't know enough about boats to go into detail about the nature of his/her invention, but if I were going to write this story I'd be able to find out. Let's say the invention is the outrigger canoe. Everybody's pleased and excited. An outrigger building craze arises. People compete to build better, bigger outriggers, to go further in them; they have races; they challenge each other to bring back more or bigger or better or stranger fish. Certain segments of the population don't participate. It all seems risky to them. They'd rather stick to what they know.
Then the visionary has a dream in which he sees a paradise on earth, lying beyond the farthest islands, teeming with every good thing and hitherto beyond the reach of mankind. Maybe their religion already posits such a place as their heaven, the place their loved ones go when they die, and the visionary's dream convinces him that he has been called to take the Chosen People there while living.
Human history is peppered with such visionaries. Most modern religions are based on them. It's hard to tell, from outside, which are self-serving frauds, which are delusional, which are benign, whether anybody ever really got in touch with a Divine Being. This book would have to explore such questions; but for this precis I don't have to. I'd have plenty of historical models for my Pleistocene Exodus, however I chose to play out the plot in detail.
The upshot would be an armada of outriggers heading out into the unknown, led by a Charismatic Leader who might be the visionary, or might be someone influenced by him. This Charismatic Leader would have all the strengths and weaknesses of modern Charismatic Leaders; and like them, he would claim to control destiny, and discover that vast exterior forces have more to do with his success or failure than anything else. He persuades entire family groups to sail, or paddle, or whatever, for paradise; and entire family groups are wiped out when the weather hits.
I could take my pick of weather conditions. People grown arrogant with confidence in their own technology or their standing with the divine are easy to kill because they don't pay close attention. Tsunami or storm, the paradise-seeking armada is devastated, most of them drowned, survivors and the remains of their broken boats strewn along the shore of Australia.
Australia would look different in the Pleistocene, but it would still not be the Paradise they were seeking. Where are their dead loved ones? Especially the ones that wouldn't have died if they hadn't come on this cockamamie expedition. If the Charismatic Leader survived, he would experience a vicious backlash - not only against him, but against everything associated with him. Although many of the shipwrecked would set to work trying to build new canoes so they can travel home and report, a strong core would not only kill Charismatic Leader, but would destroy boats as fast as they were built. Man is not meant, declares the leader of the new faction, to meddle with the sea at all. We have offended the powers that be and must ditch all that. The ocean is too powerful. Leave it alone.
Perhaps some collective shame sets in for things done under the aegis of the leader. Perhaps there is a period of chaos during which everyone does things they would rather forget. When a new generation is born, no one speaks about the past. Different skill sets are passed on. New visionaries arise, with new visions. The past is erased.
If I were Australian and could write this, no doubt it would be modified considerably by research. Although, in light of what I know about humans and history, every stage of it is possible, collectively it's, by archeological standards, a pie-in-the-sky, sensationalistic story. And knowing more about Australian myth and archeology would no doubt modify it a lot.
But I have't looked into it, because Australia is way too far out of my comfort zone for me to ever write this.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: Western Gothic
So Damon got a copy of The Castle of Wolfenbach for his birthday - guaranteed horrid by Isabella Thorpe, and she wasn't kidding around: apparently central Europe in the early 19th century was sufficiently lawless that the natural response of an honest person finding one woman with her throat slit and another missing was to conceal the corpse in a trunk and not alert any authorities. And reading it reminded me of a story I blocked out during some idle time at a temp job in the mid-90s.
At that time, I had been reading J. Sheridan LeFanu's Uncle Silas, which somebody or other described as the most frightening book in English literature or something like that. But I remember feeling that the heroine had access to resources she wasn't exploiting due to artificial limits in her world view. Most of Uncle Silas's power over her was due to isolation; most of her isolation was due, not to the absence of people, but to a mutual assumption that the people around her weren't really there. She also was helpless in ways that seemed to me unnecessary.
This is often my reaction when confronted with a vulnerable 19th century British heroine. We are so used to modern Gothics, in which our own sensibilities are reflected back in time via spunky heroines, that when we read the authentic originals the feminine upper middle-class ideal of the British 19th century - trapped in a straitjacket of social convention and without many essential life skills, like cooking and cleaning - we are apt to want to slap them more than to commiserate with their helplessness.
American heroines of the same vintage do not suffer from the same contrast. Though contemporary authors often complain of the deficiency in household education of the young American woman, their outlook on life is much more aggressive, and their social milieu is such that, when an author wants to isolate one, she can be removed right away from all human contact and thrown on her own resources in fact, rather than merely being taken to a "lonely" manor where the only faces she sees are those of servants and "rustics," on whom she depends for her daily necessities without ever attempting to befriend. (The heroine of Castle of Wolfenbach is at least grateful to a faithful servant, but she can't sleep in a cottager's bed and it never occurs to her that she should learn to cook.)
So I plotted out an extended Gothic parody in which an Uncle Silas-like figure lures the orphan daughter of an estranged son and heir back to England. The time is post Civil War, so she's feeling a financial obligation to get what she can out of her father's legacy for her mother and little brothers and sisters; and she stymies her villainous uncle at every turn by taking an interest in the wrong things. A debut in society is stressful and sinful (all that dancing and card-playing!), but she takes a lively interest in the sheep, horse breeding, and farming operations. The local tenants and managers, though disconcerted by her at first, are hardly likely to be indifferent to a potential heir who wants to learn from them rather then just extract money from them; though any of them who are mismanaging or corrupt will soon be put in an awkward position with her evil uncle. She has an understanding with a young man back home, so the romantic candidate her uncle puts forward doesn't stand a chance. When sinister servants try to intimidate her, she threatens to have them fired and does for herself. And the familiarity with basic mechanics and firearms she developed in the course of helping her mother run the ranch during the War is of signal assistance to her in circumventing the nefarious death and rape traps her uncle puts her into when he realizes he can't control her by the social means he intended. In the end she'll work out that he was lying to her about what the will says and find that the terms give her power over him (otherwise he'd hardly be so hot to manipulate and put her out of the way), and use it.
The heroine's name was Beulah, because it was the least romantic one I could think of.
The trouble with this story, of course, is that done properly it would be a lot of work, very long, and appeal to a narrow audience; a kind of extended fanfic for a genre rather than a specific work. Time and energy are finite.
The closest I ever came to writing this was The Light in the Tower at Mulder Manor, which I need to dig out and make available in its entirety for the delectation of the sort of people who like this sort of thing - a fanfic I did years ago for the AOL x-phile boards, the first paragraph of each chapter of the X-files triple-decker Gothic novel, which I justified to myself as an exercise in being funny on purpose and writing to an audience, but also allowed me to write lines like "He said her name as if sucking an orange" and glorious run-on polysyllabic sentences like "Certainly not from her previous employer, who was still wroth as a result of her thrusting his grown son into the fishpond -- despite the fact that she had at once extricated him from that predicament; and, indeed, it was the young man's own cephalopodian tendencies which had suggested the fishpond to Dana as the proper habitation of his person."
Now, of course, we have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and steampunk, and I have once again dallied behind the curve where I might have leapt ahead of it. Oh, well.
At that time, I had been reading J. Sheridan LeFanu's Uncle Silas, which somebody or other described as the most frightening book in English literature or something like that. But I remember feeling that the heroine had access to resources she wasn't exploiting due to artificial limits in her world view. Most of Uncle Silas's power over her was due to isolation; most of her isolation was due, not to the absence of people, but to a mutual assumption that the people around her weren't really there. She also was helpless in ways that seemed to me unnecessary.
This is often my reaction when confronted with a vulnerable 19th century British heroine. We are so used to modern Gothics, in which our own sensibilities are reflected back in time via spunky heroines, that when we read the authentic originals the feminine upper middle-class ideal of the British 19th century - trapped in a straitjacket of social convention and without many essential life skills, like cooking and cleaning - we are apt to want to slap them more than to commiserate with their helplessness.
American heroines of the same vintage do not suffer from the same contrast. Though contemporary authors often complain of the deficiency in household education of the young American woman, their outlook on life is much more aggressive, and their social milieu is such that, when an author wants to isolate one, she can be removed right away from all human contact and thrown on her own resources in fact, rather than merely being taken to a "lonely" manor where the only faces she sees are those of servants and "rustics," on whom she depends for her daily necessities without ever attempting to befriend. (The heroine of Castle of Wolfenbach is at least grateful to a faithful servant, but she can't sleep in a cottager's bed and it never occurs to her that she should learn to cook.)
So I plotted out an extended Gothic parody in which an Uncle Silas-like figure lures the orphan daughter of an estranged son and heir back to England. The time is post Civil War, so she's feeling a financial obligation to get what she can out of her father's legacy for her mother and little brothers and sisters; and she stymies her villainous uncle at every turn by taking an interest in the wrong things. A debut in society is stressful and sinful (all that dancing and card-playing!), but she takes a lively interest in the sheep, horse breeding, and farming operations. The local tenants and managers, though disconcerted by her at first, are hardly likely to be indifferent to a potential heir who wants to learn from them rather then just extract money from them; though any of them who are mismanaging or corrupt will soon be put in an awkward position with her evil uncle. She has an understanding with a young man back home, so the romantic candidate her uncle puts forward doesn't stand a chance. When sinister servants try to intimidate her, she threatens to have them fired and does for herself. And the familiarity with basic mechanics and firearms she developed in the course of helping her mother run the ranch during the War is of signal assistance to her in circumventing the nefarious death and rape traps her uncle puts her into when he realizes he can't control her by the social means he intended. In the end she'll work out that he was lying to her about what the will says and find that the terms give her power over him (otherwise he'd hardly be so hot to manipulate and put her out of the way), and use it.
The heroine's name was Beulah, because it was the least romantic one I could think of.
The trouble with this story, of course, is that done properly it would be a lot of work, very long, and appeal to a narrow audience; a kind of extended fanfic for a genre rather than a specific work. Time and energy are finite.
The closest I ever came to writing this was The Light in the Tower at Mulder Manor, which I need to dig out and make available in its entirety for the delectation of the sort of people who like this sort of thing - a fanfic I did years ago for the AOL x-phile boards, the first paragraph of each chapter of the X-files triple-decker Gothic novel, which I justified to myself as an exercise in being funny on purpose and writing to an audience, but also allowed me to write lines like "He said her name as if sucking an orange" and glorious run-on polysyllabic sentences like "Certainly not from her previous employer, who was still wroth as a result of her thrusting his grown son into the fishpond -- despite the fact that she had at once extricated him from that predicament; and, indeed, it was the young man's own cephalopodian tendencies which had suggested the fishpond to Dana as the proper habitation of his person."
Now, of course, we have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and steampunk, and I have once again dallied behind the curve where I might have leapt ahead of it. Oh, well.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: Married to a Contactee
Although the first UFO abduction was documented in 1966 by John G. Fuller in The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours "Aboard a Flying Saucer," concerning the Betty and Barney Hill case, as long ago as the early 80s the big names in UFOology were still contactees - people who claimed direct contact with "space brothers" bringing messages of peace, love, and how we better shape up or ship out. Folks like George Adamski and Billy Meier met tall, slender aliens who resembled Tolkien elves, received messages, wrote books, took UFO pictures, and acted a lot like gurus.
The trip to Medina Lake jogged my memory of a book I considered writing way back in those days, before anal probes and therapy and little gray aliens with big eyes. I had been reading a book about Billy Meier, and how his UFO photos, contact stories, and non-profit foundation changed his lifestyle. Sorry, but that's what I chiefly remember! He attracted followers who filled his home, and his wife was placed under a lot of stress - I particularly remember one scene where she had a strong hysterical episode and was taken care of by one of the followers, with whom she had no common language. Money came in via the UFOs; but I was struck by how isolated, silent, bewildered, and marginalized this woman was in the midst of all this fuss. Did she believe her husband? The overwhelming impression I was getting is that he was faking for profit, but that he hadn't confided in her; that in fact he seldom told her anything. And when we went to visit one of my husband's co-workers on Medina Lake, I found myself looking at the setting for this novel.
It was a brilliant psychological thriller, if I say so myself - at least the shining perfect version in my head was. You'd have a standard working class Texas family living, not on the expensive waterfront, but in one of the small communities fringing the lake. Like my husband's co-worker, the family would own a small former vacation cottage, in need of a great deal of work to make it comfortable year round. If I recall correctly, this cottage had no insulation; windows opened by being pushed straight up into the wall above them; and space was at such a premium that one child essentially slept in a closet, with her clothes hanging above her. Unlike the co-worker, however, my characters would not be getting by.
The husband would be suffering from some disability and the wife would be working too hard to bring in less money than they needed to cover medical bills (no insurance!) and fix the house. They would be under tremendous financial pressure and desperate for a way out. The husband would spend more and more time out of the house; and one day would start bringing home UFO pictures and strange stories. He'd publish these and, with some canny publicity, become one of the contactee gurus, complete with book, news interviews, followers showing up on the doorstep, fame, suspicion, and fortune.
The POV character would be the wife. The husband always tells her the same stories he tells everyone else. The money is good, he's always been a good husband, and she loves him - she has to believe him. Yet, the stories are so far outside her experience she can't wrap her mind around them, and she never quite manages to see a UFO or an alien for herself - she finds believing him impossible. Strangers fill her house, making work for her and interfering with her children; strangers build a new room for her daughter, load her husband with enough money to get out of debt, tell her he's brilliant. He evades confrontation and behaves as if the most bizarre events are normal as a walk in the park. He develops relationships with female followers that seem closer than his with her; yet if he's lying, he's probably lying to them even more. Over time she will find evidence that he's faking, but he has a plausible explanation for everything and acts bewildered and hurt when she questions him. Is he crazy? Is she? What is all of this doing to her children?
One of the characters would be an investigator with whom she gets closer as the rift with her husband widens, but she was not going to cheat on her husband. The investigator would show her evidence - models perhaps - that would convince her that her husband was lying to her; but in the climax, a flood he predicted and in which he behaves heroically, alternate explanations for the evidence would arise, and the husband would disappear, permanently, leaving her more financially secure, and less certain of what was real and what wasn't than ever. The ending would make readers across America throw their books across the room in disgust, but they'd never be able to shake it.
I didn't write this for a number of reasons. At the time I conceived it, I could tell it was way too ambitious. For one thing, I wasn't even married yet (my husband and I were together five years before we did that). Though I had once been involved with a man I realized afterward was an habitual liar, who made unprovable claims every bit as weird and grandiose as the husband in this book, I knew enough to know that marriage is different, especially once you have kids, and that I would be dealing with complex, intense emotions that were way outside my experience.
The motivation to believe unbelievable things said by certain people is powerful, whether that person is spouse, parent, lover, or mentor. That was the idea that interested me most - the faith we invest in other human beings, and how far that can be tested before we break. It would be 20 years before I could approach this matter as more than an intellectual exercise; and in the meantime, I discovered that this isn't my sort of book. It would have to be dense, psychological, dark, and intense. Worst, it would be an adult book. All the concerns in it are adult concerns. The necessary style and approach to character would be suitable for adults, not children or teen-agers. I don't even read these books anymore. I sure wouldn't know how to peddle it. I could easily spend two years of my life writing this and never circulate it because the idea of breaking into the adult novel market didn't appeal to me.
I suppose I could rework the story from the POV of one of the children, but I find I can't get into it. The thing is, the wife's story is the specific one that attracted me. The children would be under tremendous strain for similar reasons; but ultimately they aren't responsible for their father or the financial well-being of the family. Their mother is. And whereas the kids have no choice about being the children of their parents, their mother gets up every morning and chooses anew whether to remain her husband's spouse.
We all have our limitations. I believe I know mine.
The trip to Medina Lake jogged my memory of a book I considered writing way back in those days, before anal probes and therapy and little gray aliens with big eyes. I had been reading a book about Billy Meier, and how his UFO photos, contact stories, and non-profit foundation changed his lifestyle. Sorry, but that's what I chiefly remember! He attracted followers who filled his home, and his wife was placed under a lot of stress - I particularly remember one scene where she had a strong hysterical episode and was taken care of by one of the followers, with whom she had no common language. Money came in via the UFOs; but I was struck by how isolated, silent, bewildered, and marginalized this woman was in the midst of all this fuss. Did she believe her husband? The overwhelming impression I was getting is that he was faking for profit, but that he hadn't confided in her; that in fact he seldom told her anything. And when we went to visit one of my husband's co-workers on Medina Lake, I found myself looking at the setting for this novel.
It was a brilliant psychological thriller, if I say so myself - at least the shining perfect version in my head was. You'd have a standard working class Texas family living, not on the expensive waterfront, but in one of the small communities fringing the lake. Like my husband's co-worker, the family would own a small former vacation cottage, in need of a great deal of work to make it comfortable year round. If I recall correctly, this cottage had no insulation; windows opened by being pushed straight up into the wall above them; and space was at such a premium that one child essentially slept in a closet, with her clothes hanging above her. Unlike the co-worker, however, my characters would not be getting by.
The husband would be suffering from some disability and the wife would be working too hard to bring in less money than they needed to cover medical bills (no insurance!) and fix the house. They would be under tremendous financial pressure and desperate for a way out. The husband would spend more and more time out of the house; and one day would start bringing home UFO pictures and strange stories. He'd publish these and, with some canny publicity, become one of the contactee gurus, complete with book, news interviews, followers showing up on the doorstep, fame, suspicion, and fortune.
The POV character would be the wife. The husband always tells her the same stories he tells everyone else. The money is good, he's always been a good husband, and she loves him - she has to believe him. Yet, the stories are so far outside her experience she can't wrap her mind around them, and she never quite manages to see a UFO or an alien for herself - she finds believing him impossible. Strangers fill her house, making work for her and interfering with her children; strangers build a new room for her daughter, load her husband with enough money to get out of debt, tell her he's brilliant. He evades confrontation and behaves as if the most bizarre events are normal as a walk in the park. He develops relationships with female followers that seem closer than his with her; yet if he's lying, he's probably lying to them even more. Over time she will find evidence that he's faking, but he has a plausible explanation for everything and acts bewildered and hurt when she questions him. Is he crazy? Is she? What is all of this doing to her children?
One of the characters would be an investigator with whom she gets closer as the rift with her husband widens, but she was not going to cheat on her husband. The investigator would show her evidence - models perhaps - that would convince her that her husband was lying to her; but in the climax, a flood he predicted and in which he behaves heroically, alternate explanations for the evidence would arise, and the husband would disappear, permanently, leaving her more financially secure, and less certain of what was real and what wasn't than ever. The ending would make readers across America throw their books across the room in disgust, but they'd never be able to shake it.
I didn't write this for a number of reasons. At the time I conceived it, I could tell it was way too ambitious. For one thing, I wasn't even married yet (my husband and I were together five years before we did that). Though I had once been involved with a man I realized afterward was an habitual liar, who made unprovable claims every bit as weird and grandiose as the husband in this book, I knew enough to know that marriage is different, especially once you have kids, and that I would be dealing with complex, intense emotions that were way outside my experience.
The motivation to believe unbelievable things said by certain people is powerful, whether that person is spouse, parent, lover, or mentor. That was the idea that interested me most - the faith we invest in other human beings, and how far that can be tested before we break. It would be 20 years before I could approach this matter as more than an intellectual exercise; and in the meantime, I discovered that this isn't my sort of book. It would have to be dense, psychological, dark, and intense. Worst, it would be an adult book. All the concerns in it are adult concerns. The necessary style and approach to character would be suitable for adults, not children or teen-agers. I don't even read these books anymore. I sure wouldn't know how to peddle it. I could easily spend two years of my life writing this and never circulate it because the idea of breaking into the adult novel market didn't appeal to me.
I suppose I could rework the story from the POV of one of the children, but I find I can't get into it. The thing is, the wife's story is the specific one that attracted me. The children would be under tremendous strain for similar reasons; but ultimately they aren't responsible for their father or the financial well-being of the family. Their mother is. And whereas the kids have no choice about being the children of their parents, their mother gets up every morning and chooses anew whether to remain her husband's spouse.
We all have our limitations. I believe I know mine.
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