Yes, I'm still alive. And I have mysteriously received this brief list of historical novels published in 2116, concerning the anniversary of so very much. Of varied quality, what they have in common is 20/20 hindsight - either the protagonist, or the narrator, keeps throwing a backward-glowing light on events, finding significance and drawing conclusions that those of us living through them couldn't because we lack the context of what's coming. From that direction, it all looks inevitable. From this direction, nothing looks inevitable, or even probable, as we bungee-jump into the future.
Pokemon Bro - A middle school transboy must confront his own latent misogyny when girls face off against boys in the neighborhoodwide race to "catch 'em all"
Coup de Theater - The members of a theater troupe in Ankara get through the night of the coup in various ways, their stories and personalities intertwining with the play they're rehearsing to throw ironic light on near-future Turkish history.
Battle of the Thames - A black comedy centered on (and improving on) the watergoing shenanigans of campaigners for and against Britain's remaining in the European Union, soon to be a major holomotion picture with an ensemble cast of big names, all of them prettier than the people they'll be portraying.
Traffic Stop An unforgiving but ultimately hopeful story of police brutality, racial injustice, and indomitable courage. The protagonist is an idealistic African-American policeman.
Su Vota es Su Voce - Originally written in Spanglish, a romantic comedy about a political blogger and the campaign manager she hounds for information, set against the background of the American primaries. Contains several significant anachronisms.
This has been such a weird year; and we're only half done with it.
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale: Overabundance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale: Overabundance. Show all posts
Sunday, July 17, 2016
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Libraries of Timbuktu
Way too many news stories happen in any given year for me to garage sale them all, even if I made a serious effort to keep up with the news. (Which I don't, because depression + crying jags.) So excuse me that the inspiring link to the thriller about the rescue of the Manuscripts of Timbuktu dates back to April.
It boggles my mind, however, that there's no movie in the works yet. Youthful vow to guard a fabulous fragile treasure in the form of the manuscripts, implacable black-hearted foe in the form of the book-burning legions of Al-Qaeda posing an imminent threat; desperate coordinated action under the noses of the conquering Bad Guys; "exotic, distant" lands (from the point of view of the locii of thriller-making, southern California and New York) - seriously, this has it all! For YA authors, it is no great stretch to get a fictional hero in the correct age range, given that business about "family vows," working within the covert organizational framework provided by Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, who led the rescue attempt.
The equally urgent threat of mold and subobtimal curation environments in the Mali refuge where the bulk of the manuscripts wound up is less photogenic and requires more work. But a movie which used the safe arrival in Mali as the unambiguous happy ending required by the thriller format could be leveraged into a fundraising effort to provide for the safe curation and study of the manuscripts, and benefit the reputation and bottom-line of the production company. So the sooner somebody with deep pockets gets on this, the better.
A whole treasure-trove of disparate stories, however, lies behind this, in the possibilities presented by Sankore University of Timbuktu, where these manuscripts originated. Starting with a mosque in the tenth century, Sankore attracted students and scholars from all over the known world. Timbuktu was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis which rivaled the cities of Europe - yes, even Paris; even Rome - when it didn't outright overshadow them. As a setting, it can't be beat - none of the stories buried in this fertile soil have been told to modern Western audiences before. It should only take a little digging to turn up a lifetime's worth of intriguing possibility. Love stories, war stories, political intrigue, spiritual exploration; fantasy and gritty realism - they must all be waiting there for the willing researcher.
What if a modern Al-Qaeda member intent on destroying the knowledge of the past got lost in a time loop and went back, alone, to 16th-century Timbuktu? Would he wreak havoc? Would he undergo a major character arc and, in the absence of the social, personal, and political pressures that set him on this path, acquire more humility and a truer Islamic spirit? Or would his isolation in an alien time exacerbate his opinions into madness?
What if the last member of a family sworn to protect its cache of books is a young girl who has internalized both her responsibility to the manuscripts and her responsibility to adhere to "traditional" feminine roles? What positions does this put her in; and how does she choose when these responsibilities conflict?
Who was the "female philanthropist from Mandinka" who financed the infrastructure of the University; what else did she fund, where did her money come from, what motivated her philanthropy?
How did European scholars who came to study in Sankore during the times generally called "medieval" live? What did they do with the knowledge they gained? How did they deal with living as a Christian minority among Muslims, and learning from them? What were the burning questions and conflicts of the day?
Asian scholars, ditto?
It's kind of like that dazzling expanse of snow I remember waking up to when I was small and lived in places where snow happened. You're afraid to step in it, lest you mess it all up. But you can't build snowwomen, or forts, or have snowball fights, or even get to school, without taking those first steps; and once you start, isn't it glorious to run around in?
It boggles my mind, however, that there's no movie in the works yet. Youthful vow to guard a fabulous fragile treasure in the form of the manuscripts, implacable black-hearted foe in the form of the book-burning legions of Al-Qaeda posing an imminent threat; desperate coordinated action under the noses of the conquering Bad Guys; "exotic, distant" lands (from the point of view of the locii of thriller-making, southern California and New York) - seriously, this has it all! For YA authors, it is no great stretch to get a fictional hero in the correct age range, given that business about "family vows," working within the covert organizational framework provided by Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, who led the rescue attempt.
The equally urgent threat of mold and subobtimal curation environments in the Mali refuge where the bulk of the manuscripts wound up is less photogenic and requires more work. But a movie which used the safe arrival in Mali as the unambiguous happy ending required by the thriller format could be leveraged into a fundraising effort to provide for the safe curation and study of the manuscripts, and benefit the reputation and bottom-line of the production company. So the sooner somebody with deep pockets gets on this, the better.
A whole treasure-trove of disparate stories, however, lies behind this, in the possibilities presented by Sankore University of Timbuktu, where these manuscripts originated. Starting with a mosque in the tenth century, Sankore attracted students and scholars from all over the known world. Timbuktu was a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis which rivaled the cities of Europe - yes, even Paris; even Rome - when it didn't outright overshadow them. As a setting, it can't be beat - none of the stories buried in this fertile soil have been told to modern Western audiences before. It should only take a little digging to turn up a lifetime's worth of intriguing possibility. Love stories, war stories, political intrigue, spiritual exploration; fantasy and gritty realism - they must all be waiting there for the willing researcher.
What if a modern Al-Qaeda member intent on destroying the knowledge of the past got lost in a time loop and went back, alone, to 16th-century Timbuktu? Would he wreak havoc? Would he undergo a major character arc and, in the absence of the social, personal, and political pressures that set him on this path, acquire more humility and a truer Islamic spirit? Or would his isolation in an alien time exacerbate his opinions into madness?
What if the last member of a family sworn to protect its cache of books is a young girl who has internalized both her responsibility to the manuscripts and her responsibility to adhere to "traditional" feminine roles? What positions does this put her in; and how does she choose when these responsibilities conflict?
Who was the "female philanthropist from Mandinka" who financed the infrastructure of the University; what else did she fund, where did her money come from, what motivated her philanthropy?
How did European scholars who came to study in Sankore during the times generally called "medieval" live? What did they do with the knowledge they gained? How did they deal with living as a Christian minority among Muslims, and learning from them? What were the burning questions and conflicts of the day?
Asian scholars, ditto?
It's kind of like that dazzling expanse of snow I remember waking up to when I was small and lived in places where snow happened. You're afraid to step in it, lest you mess it all up. But you can't build snowwomen, or forts, or have snowball fights, or even get to school, without taking those first steps; and once you start, isn't it glorious to run around in?
Sunday, August 3, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: The Resurrection McGuffin
Your family has an artifact that can bring someone back from the dead. No time limit. Usable only once. Possibly there's a need for some suitable ritual or sacrifice to make it work, but nothing that raises huge moral dilemmas (at least, not in most of your family members). It comes with a "side effects" warning, but it's not clear what these might be. Perfect health and a certain amount of youthening, however, are guaranteed - so even someone who died of a chronic illness or old age would be worth bringing back.
Scenario 1: Anyone in the family can use it, but only with the full consent of all members of the family. Therefore, it is never used; there is always one hold-out. That's a satirical short story about family politics. Perhaps the protagonist is left alone, after a disaster that kills off the rest of the family, staring at the artifact with too many names to choose among.
Scenario 2: Only one person in the family can activate its power, which passes to a new member after the death of the old one. The person with the power right now is your parent. Are you more careless as an adolescent, because of course if you die in a car crash your mother would bring you back? Are you more careful because you are sure she likes a sibling more than you; or because your other parent is in a dangerous occupation and you want the option to be available in case the worst happens? Does your parent routinely warn you that if you die of stupidity she won't bring you back? Do you go into a heroic profession yourself, secure in the knowledge that, if you die pulling children out of a burning building, it'll be all right in the end?
And then you die, and are brought back. The artifact can never be used again. You are ten years younger than you were and the side effects include partial emotional memory loss - you have no sense of any connection to your family, except the one who brought you back.
That's a novel.
Scenario 3: You are in sole charge of the artifact and, in a surge of altruism, patriotism, or sheer fanboyish enthusiasm, you resurrect your favorite historical personage. Who will inevitably disappoint you in some ways. Wacky hijinx ensue. Farce, satire, or deep philosophical humor.
Scenario 4: You learn of the artifact when it comes into your possession on the death of the previous holder, who has left it to you in her will. It comes with a note in which she explains how it works, and why she never used it. Maybe there's a notebook, a kind of mortology, detailing deaths in the family back several generations, with notes in the handwriting of generations of ancestors, from detailed philosophical musings to a cryptic "No," beside each one. A few are labeled "Maybe." For the most part, it's being held against an untimely death, and there haven't been that many in your family since these notes began to be taken. Do you do the same? Or do you have a death in mind, all ready to undo?
Scenario 5: You are holding the artifact when your spouse is reported MIA from a theater of war; or your child goes missing. You hang onto it for years, not wanting to waste the use if this person is still alive - somewhere - or afraid that, if dead, he will be resurrected in the same place that he is lost now, and the unknown side effects will keep him from returning to you.
Scenario 6: ????? You've already thought of Scenario 6, haven't you?
Scenario 1: Anyone in the family can use it, but only with the full consent of all members of the family. Therefore, it is never used; there is always one hold-out. That's a satirical short story about family politics. Perhaps the protagonist is left alone, after a disaster that kills off the rest of the family, staring at the artifact with too many names to choose among.
Scenario 2: Only one person in the family can activate its power, which passes to a new member after the death of the old one. The person with the power right now is your parent. Are you more careless as an adolescent, because of course if you die in a car crash your mother would bring you back? Are you more careful because you are sure she likes a sibling more than you; or because your other parent is in a dangerous occupation and you want the option to be available in case the worst happens? Does your parent routinely warn you that if you die of stupidity she won't bring you back? Do you go into a heroic profession yourself, secure in the knowledge that, if you die pulling children out of a burning building, it'll be all right in the end?
And then you die, and are brought back. The artifact can never be used again. You are ten years younger than you were and the side effects include partial emotional memory loss - you have no sense of any connection to your family, except the one who brought you back.
That's a novel.
Scenario 3: You are in sole charge of the artifact and, in a surge of altruism, patriotism, or sheer fanboyish enthusiasm, you resurrect your favorite historical personage. Who will inevitably disappoint you in some ways. Wacky hijinx ensue. Farce, satire, or deep philosophical humor.
Scenario 4: You learn of the artifact when it comes into your possession on the death of the previous holder, who has left it to you in her will. It comes with a note in which she explains how it works, and why she never used it. Maybe there's a notebook, a kind of mortology, detailing deaths in the family back several generations, with notes in the handwriting of generations of ancestors, from detailed philosophical musings to a cryptic "No," beside each one. A few are labeled "Maybe." For the most part, it's being held against an untimely death, and there haven't been that many in your family since these notes began to be taken. Do you do the same? Or do you have a death in mind, all ready to undo?
Scenario 5: You are holding the artifact when your spouse is reported MIA from a theater of war; or your child goes missing. You hang onto it for years, not wanting to waste the use if this person is still alive - somewhere - or afraid that, if dead, he will be resurrected in the same place that he is lost now, and the unknown side effects will keep him from returning to you.
Scenario 6: ????? You've already thought of Scenario 6, haven't you?
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Home, Secret Home
So I was sitting here thinking about today's Garage Sale, and everything I came up with seemed like a variation on a theme, or possibly something I'd offered up before, and I was seriously considering just not doing it today. So I clicked over to another tab and read newsgroups, and found someone mystified by a sporadically damp place inside his garage. A particular spot on the concrete slab forms puddles periodically, but it's not directly correlated with rainfall and he can't find a source of drip. So it was suggested that maybe he was looking in the wrong direction, that the water might be coming in laterally, or even from below. Concrete looks solid, but if you break a piece you can see that it's porous. Murderers have found to their distress that concrete does not necessarily mask what it was poured to hide.
And I suddenly remembered the time I was dismantling the woodshed that was on our property once, including taking apart and moving the woodpile, and how I started finding bits of trash that made me nervous, that started the story generator in my head suggesting that I was shortly going to find human bones or a mummified cat or an enigmatic artifact, relic of some deep-buried crime or at least guilty secret.
What I found was decayed Christmas wreaths, but that's not the point.
When I was in middle school I realized that an awful lot of books started with moving into a new home, and that this was always a much more fruitful process in books than in real life. (Air Force brat. I felt like I'd moved a lot and was an expert.) New homes in books had mysteries, ghosts, hidden treasures! They had not, as all the homes I moved into had, been emptied down to their bones, recently painted and sheetrocked, and all their secrets hauled off in a dumpster. They were not, as most of the homes being moved into at any given time in the late 20th century were, brand-new builds on land that had previously been a ranch or hunting lease or orchard or farm.
But what if it's a secret that the management company selling the place wouldn't find in its clean-and-spiff-up, or its new build; or that even belonged to someone within that company or on a work crew, who chose this place to bury it, in hope of - what?
What kind of secret would depend on the target audience and genre. A brand new garage with an old body under it is a natural jumping-off point for a murder mystery, but in real life it would be a police case, and for a book we want something of personal resonance to the homeowner and her family. So that takes us straight to "ghost," and the problem of learning who the ghost is, and how to put it to rest, without having any control of the evidence or any pull with the police.
"The Clue in the Woodpile" is a good solid middle-grade mystery title, and I couldn't swear to you there isn't a Nancy Drew called that - a lockbox full of odd, not obviously significant objects and messages in cipher.
Maybe you're taking down a stone wall and find a "post office" used by children in pre-internet days to communicate when they couldn't get together reliably. What could have been left so long that could still affect you today?
This is all vague, but the impact of the hook requires specific, evocative items. So you look at your environment and its history. Who used this land? Who passed through it? What history lies unacknowledged beneath your feet? And what consequences does the secret have in this place, today?
Almost any piece of land in the world can be a murder dump site; but say you go with that. There's murders, and there's murders. Do you live in an area where lynching and private justice were respectable within living memory? Could a crime, uncovered now, of which you yourself are innocent, undermine your own claim on a property, or undermine family dynamics that seem solid and essential?
Are you in a former war zone?
Are you sure you're not? Indian wars, range wars, the war on drugs: they all leave their traces; they all have their mysteries, their secrets, their espionage, and their treachery.
And those are just the realistic options! Allow in ghosts, offended nature spirits, local legends and magical traditions (you do too have a magical tradition, even if you only call it "superstition" or "religion"), and think about all that could have been hidden, or what could have been taken and be trying to get back -
Yeah, there's no place like home. Maybe it's time to research your property and see what stories are lurking there.
Maybe next week I'll tell you about mine.
And I suddenly remembered the time I was dismantling the woodshed that was on our property once, including taking apart and moving the woodpile, and how I started finding bits of trash that made me nervous, that started the story generator in my head suggesting that I was shortly going to find human bones or a mummified cat or an enigmatic artifact, relic of some deep-buried crime or at least guilty secret.
What I found was decayed Christmas wreaths, but that's not the point.
When I was in middle school I realized that an awful lot of books started with moving into a new home, and that this was always a much more fruitful process in books than in real life. (Air Force brat. I felt like I'd moved a lot and was an expert.) New homes in books had mysteries, ghosts, hidden treasures! They had not, as all the homes I moved into had, been emptied down to their bones, recently painted and sheetrocked, and all their secrets hauled off in a dumpster. They were not, as most of the homes being moved into at any given time in the late 20th century were, brand-new builds on land that had previously been a ranch or hunting lease or orchard or farm.
But what if it's a secret that the management company selling the place wouldn't find in its clean-and-spiff-up, or its new build; or that even belonged to someone within that company or on a work crew, who chose this place to bury it, in hope of - what?
What kind of secret would depend on the target audience and genre. A brand new garage with an old body under it is a natural jumping-off point for a murder mystery, but in real life it would be a police case, and for a book we want something of personal resonance to the homeowner and her family. So that takes us straight to "ghost," and the problem of learning who the ghost is, and how to put it to rest, without having any control of the evidence or any pull with the police.
"The Clue in the Woodpile" is a good solid middle-grade mystery title, and I couldn't swear to you there isn't a Nancy Drew called that - a lockbox full of odd, not obviously significant objects and messages in cipher.
Maybe you're taking down a stone wall and find a "post office" used by children in pre-internet days to communicate when they couldn't get together reliably. What could have been left so long that could still affect you today?
This is all vague, but the impact of the hook requires specific, evocative items. So you look at your environment and its history. Who used this land? Who passed through it? What history lies unacknowledged beneath your feet? And what consequences does the secret have in this place, today?
Almost any piece of land in the world can be a murder dump site; but say you go with that. There's murders, and there's murders. Do you live in an area where lynching and private justice were respectable within living memory? Could a crime, uncovered now, of which you yourself are innocent, undermine your own claim on a property, or undermine family dynamics that seem solid and essential?
Are you in a former war zone?
Are you sure you're not? Indian wars, range wars, the war on drugs: they all leave their traces; they all have their mysteries, their secrets, their espionage, and their treachery.
And those are just the realistic options! Allow in ghosts, offended nature spirits, local legends and magical traditions (you do too have a magical tradition, even if you only call it "superstition" or "religion"), and think about all that could have been hidden, or what could have been taken and be trying to get back -
Yeah, there's no place like home. Maybe it's time to research your property and see what stories are lurking there.
Maybe next week I'll tell you about mine.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Beyond Biracial
So, yesterday was weird in various ways too tedious to relate, and tomorrow is Tax Day so be sure to get your estimated payment in, and the garage sale opens off schedule but that's the breaks, what're we gonna put out for sale today? Wait, there was a news story yesterday - ah, yes, here we go: Neanderthals and humans definitely interbred, and the offspring were not mules, because we're still carrying their DNA, it's absolutely positively true this time, we're sure this time.
One thing this means is, that Neanderthals were a race of humans, not a species; or, more biologically accurately, I suppose, homo sapiens and Neanderthals were both subspecies. Which is like a race except that it has an actual biological meaning, unlike "race," which is a categorization fiction which people take far too seriously and turn into a social reality to justify doing terrible things to each other.
And you're way ahead of me, picturing the ways this can be used to write allegories and satires and fables projecting modern racial prejudice into the past and tell stories about racial tension while not having to deal with any race that isn't white, and isn't that a relief? (Pulls self back from precipice of a rant.)
But let's stop a minute and really think about it. If humans and Neanderthals interbred sufficiently often that 20% of of the modern human genome is descended from Neanderthals, then that implies either a large area of overlap geographically and socially - perhaps (since there weren't any towns yet) mixed clans, or Neanderthal/cishuman networks - or a few Neanderthal/cishuman couples with large, successful families.
So, if we ask ourselves my favorite story generation question - what would really happen? - we do not necessarily come up with anything that looks like the familiar outcast/socially marginalized/fighting for justice miscegenation narrative.
Maybe the populations we would call Neanderthal and human would not recognize themselves as distinct in any significant way?
Maybe Neanderthal/human marriages were deliberate sociopolitical arrangements intended to create a caste of special people - shamans, perhaps; long-distance traders; mediators between populations, assumed to be able to bridge differences by carrying the representative features of each?
Maybe certain clans of humans specialized in long-distance trading and casually bred with all the populations within their trading territories?
Maybe the intermarriage occurred in areas where both Neanderthals and modern humans were so thin on the ground that they were beginning to suffer the effects of inbreeding, and the hybrid vigor of the bispecies children revitalized both groups, or made a third, distinct group that outcompeted both sets of their cousins?
Ultimately, the stories we modern humans tell must, if they are to achieve any currency in the marketplace of the mind, relate to Us, to modern humans and the ways we interact with the world and ourselves. But this doesn't have to mean projecting our bitterest problems all the way into our prehistory. Because how productive is that? Doesn't that confirm these things as inevitable, condemn us to resigning ourselves to the Way Things Are because if they've been around since the beginning we can't possibly hope to solve them now?
It can mean projecting different ways of organizing our world so as to reimagine them without our bitterest problems? To do an end run around them? To imagine different human possibilities, and sets of problems?
To free ourselves up to recategorize ourselves, and get down to the real universals?
This is all airy-fairy theme stuff, I'm afraid. But anybody who knuckles down and does the research, consciously unlatching the well-worn paths of thought as they learn more and more and more about Ice Age Europe and the world where two human subspecies came together, and made babies, will, I think, find plenty of specifics to work with to make a new, rich world.
Because reality is like that, and will expand your fiction (rather than limiting it) if you let it.
One thing this means is, that Neanderthals were a race of humans, not a species; or, more biologically accurately, I suppose, homo sapiens and Neanderthals were both subspecies. Which is like a race except that it has an actual biological meaning, unlike "race," which is a categorization fiction which people take far too seriously and turn into a social reality to justify doing terrible things to each other.
And you're way ahead of me, picturing the ways this can be used to write allegories and satires and fables projecting modern racial prejudice into the past and tell stories about racial tension while not having to deal with any race that isn't white, and isn't that a relief? (Pulls self back from precipice of a rant.)
But let's stop a minute and really think about it. If humans and Neanderthals interbred sufficiently often that 20% of of the modern human genome is descended from Neanderthals, then that implies either a large area of overlap geographically and socially - perhaps (since there weren't any towns yet) mixed clans, or Neanderthal/cishuman networks - or a few Neanderthal/cishuman couples with large, successful families.
So, if we ask ourselves my favorite story generation question - what would really happen? - we do not necessarily come up with anything that looks like the familiar outcast/socially marginalized/fighting for justice miscegenation narrative.
Maybe the populations we would call Neanderthal and human would not recognize themselves as distinct in any significant way?
Maybe Neanderthal/human marriages were deliberate sociopolitical arrangements intended to create a caste of special people - shamans, perhaps; long-distance traders; mediators between populations, assumed to be able to bridge differences by carrying the representative features of each?
Maybe certain clans of humans specialized in long-distance trading and casually bred with all the populations within their trading territories?
Maybe the intermarriage occurred in areas where both Neanderthals and modern humans were so thin on the ground that they were beginning to suffer the effects of inbreeding, and the hybrid vigor of the bispecies children revitalized both groups, or made a third, distinct group that outcompeted both sets of their cousins?
Ultimately, the stories we modern humans tell must, if they are to achieve any currency in the marketplace of the mind, relate to Us, to modern humans and the ways we interact with the world and ourselves. But this doesn't have to mean projecting our bitterest problems all the way into our prehistory. Because how productive is that? Doesn't that confirm these things as inevitable, condemn us to resigning ourselves to the Way Things Are because if they've been around since the beginning we can't possibly hope to solve them now?
It can mean projecting different ways of organizing our world so as to reimagine them without our bitterest problems? To do an end run around them? To imagine different human possibilities, and sets of problems?
To free ourselves up to recategorize ourselves, and get down to the real universals?
This is all airy-fairy theme stuff, I'm afraid. But anybody who knuckles down and does the research, consciously unlatching the well-worn paths of thought as they learn more and more and more about Ice Age Europe and the world where two human subspecies came together, and made babies, will, I think, find plenty of specifics to work with to make a new, rich world.
Because reality is like that, and will expand your fiction (rather than limiting it) if you let it.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Real and Fictional Alaskas
Today's garage sale is easy, since this is the anniversary of the purchase of Alaska - $7.2 million dollars given for an enormous chunk of land the purchasing entity didn't know how to use or control, from a government entity that didn't use or control it.
Russians did use Alaska, of course, but the land area was largely irrelevant to them. Private citizens profited from the cold, rich waters around Alaska. But the people who lived there, and whose ancestors had lived there for longer than any American at that time guessed, are the only ones who could be said to own any of it.
It would take someone better acquainted with them than me to sort out the reality of the places we lump together and call Alaska, dividing it off from other circumpolar places of which, in a very real sense, it is a part. Just as, when we look at the American Southwest, it only takes a slight adjustment of the eye to see that South Texas and Northern Mexico have a unity not acknowledged by political geography, we can look down at the top of the globe and see that Alaska, much of Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, and much of Russia make a coherent whole, and can also be divided into a number of distinct but related cultural areas, independent of the influential fictions of States and Nations. The $7.2 million dollars was an exchange at the fictional level (money being exactly as fictional as nations, and providing a fair barometer of how well the fiction of an individual nation is faring at any given point in time), so it's not that surprising that it seemed a worthwhile deal in the abstract, map-driven plane of deal-making, as opposed to the practical day-to-day reality that named the place "Seward's Folly."
A century and a half later, it's easy (given appropriate research) to look back and spin alternate twentieth-century histories out of notions like "what if Russia still controlled Alaska in 1963?" or "What if Canada had bought it instead?"
Alternatively - and fruitfully, particularly, for Alaskan natives - far too few of the stories of the intersection between the real "Alaska" and the overlay of its imperialist fiction counterpart have been told, and even fewer have attracted as much notice as they deserve. A book like My Name is Not Easy, by Debby Dahl Edwardson, was a finalist for the National Book Award, yet I bet you've never heard of it. Which of course discourages people from writing such books, which is a damn shame. Especially for the non-white natives of Alaska who are discouraged from reading when they don't find themselves reflected in the books they can find, but that's another rant.
And finally, and what interests me particularly as someone who loves books that grow out of research and imaginative engagement with facts, it seems to me that the circumpolar regions provide a place for a creative exploration of the intersection between daily reality and overlying fictions. What if the people who really own a place, the folks who live there and understand its hardships and resources, are able to find a way to retain control of it? What if, in 1963, neither Russia, nor the US, nor any other overwhelming fiction of statehood has any recognized claim to that area, but the people who live there do?
Or what if there's a Circumpolar Nation, made up of all those cultures bonding together at the abstract government level?
This is one for people who live in Alaska to sort out.
Russians did use Alaska, of course, but the land area was largely irrelevant to them. Private citizens profited from the cold, rich waters around Alaska. But the people who lived there, and whose ancestors had lived there for longer than any American at that time guessed, are the only ones who could be said to own any of it.
It would take someone better acquainted with them than me to sort out the reality of the places we lump together and call Alaska, dividing it off from other circumpolar places of which, in a very real sense, it is a part. Just as, when we look at the American Southwest, it only takes a slight adjustment of the eye to see that South Texas and Northern Mexico have a unity not acknowledged by political geography, we can look down at the top of the globe and see that Alaska, much of Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, and much of Russia make a coherent whole, and can also be divided into a number of distinct but related cultural areas, independent of the influential fictions of States and Nations. The $7.2 million dollars was an exchange at the fictional level (money being exactly as fictional as nations, and providing a fair barometer of how well the fiction of an individual nation is faring at any given point in time), so it's not that surprising that it seemed a worthwhile deal in the abstract, map-driven plane of deal-making, as opposed to the practical day-to-day reality that named the place "Seward's Folly."
A century and a half later, it's easy (given appropriate research) to look back and spin alternate twentieth-century histories out of notions like "what if Russia still controlled Alaska in 1963?" or "What if Canada had bought it instead?"
Alternatively - and fruitfully, particularly, for Alaskan natives - far too few of the stories of the intersection between the real "Alaska" and the overlay of its imperialist fiction counterpart have been told, and even fewer have attracted as much notice as they deserve. A book like My Name is Not Easy, by Debby Dahl Edwardson, was a finalist for the National Book Award, yet I bet you've never heard of it. Which of course discourages people from writing such books, which is a damn shame. Especially for the non-white natives of Alaska who are discouraged from reading when they don't find themselves reflected in the books they can find, but that's another rant.
And finally, and what interests me particularly as someone who loves books that grow out of research and imaginative engagement with facts, it seems to me that the circumpolar regions provide a place for a creative exploration of the intersection between daily reality and overlying fictions. What if the people who really own a place, the folks who live there and understand its hardships and resources, are able to find a way to retain control of it? What if, in 1963, neither Russia, nor the US, nor any other overwhelming fiction of statehood has any recognized claim to that area, but the people who live there do?
Or what if there's a Circumpolar Nation, made up of all those cultures bonding together at the abstract government level?
This is one for people who live in Alaska to sort out.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Urban Fantasy, Squared
So anyway I'm reading this anthology called Weird Detectives, and there's this story in it by Elizabeth Bear that I find uncomfortable for reasons that are neither here nor there at the moment, but when the upper-class white wizard/detective in the story tracks down a lower-class Hispanic supplier to get a specific component needed to deal with the threat, she sizes him up and asks him where he and his were when the threat was confining itself to her neighborhood. A question he acknowledges as valid but which is not followed up in the story. Perhaps it is elsewhere in other works about the same character.
But I was shocked to find that I hadn't noticed before how overwhelmingly true it is that low-fantasy and urban fantasy stories mostly involve white magical people dealing with threats to white mainstream people from white people. Ethnic magic may or may not be used and referenced, and urban fantasy particularly may have lots of people of color in supporting roles, but think about it - when was the last time you saw a black or Hispanic or Asian master vampire or protagonist vampire hunter? (Okay, I can think of one. Plus Blacula.)
Or a white master vampire preying preferentially on lower-class people of color?
Or tribal Little People instead of imported European fey in an American setting?
Yet it is absolutely true that if you live by preying on humanity, you will target (like any predator) the most vulnerable members of a population; and in America, the most vulnerable members are the poor, and the most vulnerable poor are people of color living in large concentrations. Crime, even horrible crime, in those neighborhoods does not attract the mainstream public attention that serves to protect the public. A vampire who preys on people who won't be missed, like the serial killer who does the same, will be operating in low-income neighborhoods and feeding off people of color. Heck, if he's old and rich enough (as so many of them are) he may even regard them as legitimate prey and in no way a stain on his character, whereas he would think less of himself if he went after middle-class high school students or people with ancestors from the Mayflower.
In which case, the independent supernatural task forces would logically be made up primarily of the people who are most invested in those neighborhoods.
Why shouldn't a street gang recognize that a supernatural threat is operating on their turf, and go after it?
Why shouldn't the people operating or using the Salvation Army soup kitchen, or the local Goodwill, or the Planned Parenthood clinic, or the flophouse be the ones noticing that disabled vets are turning up dead with non-needle holes in their veins, that one particular up-and-coming gang only comes out at night, or that recent immigrant single mothers all tell the same weird story of this guy who paralyzed them with his eyes?
Why isn't the curandera operating the botanica as the covert nerve center of the supernatural underground?
Why not?
I'd read any one of those books. I'd watch any one of those series, or at least give it a shot. I'd buy that ticket. Wouldn't you?
But I was shocked to find that I hadn't noticed before how overwhelmingly true it is that low-fantasy and urban fantasy stories mostly involve white magical people dealing with threats to white mainstream people from white people. Ethnic magic may or may not be used and referenced, and urban fantasy particularly may have lots of people of color in supporting roles, but think about it - when was the last time you saw a black or Hispanic or Asian master vampire or protagonist vampire hunter? (Okay, I can think of one. Plus Blacula.)
Or a white master vampire preying preferentially on lower-class people of color?
Or tribal Little People instead of imported European fey in an American setting?
Yet it is absolutely true that if you live by preying on humanity, you will target (like any predator) the most vulnerable members of a population; and in America, the most vulnerable members are the poor, and the most vulnerable poor are people of color living in large concentrations. Crime, even horrible crime, in those neighborhoods does not attract the mainstream public attention that serves to protect the public. A vampire who preys on people who won't be missed, like the serial killer who does the same, will be operating in low-income neighborhoods and feeding off people of color. Heck, if he's old and rich enough (as so many of them are) he may even regard them as legitimate prey and in no way a stain on his character, whereas he would think less of himself if he went after middle-class high school students or people with ancestors from the Mayflower.
In which case, the independent supernatural task forces would logically be made up primarily of the people who are most invested in those neighborhoods.
Why shouldn't a street gang recognize that a supernatural threat is operating on their turf, and go after it?
Why shouldn't the people operating or using the Salvation Army soup kitchen, or the local Goodwill, or the Planned Parenthood clinic, or the flophouse be the ones noticing that disabled vets are turning up dead with non-needle holes in their veins, that one particular up-and-coming gang only comes out at night, or that recent immigrant single mothers all tell the same weird story of this guy who paralyzed them with his eyes?
Why isn't the curandera operating the botanica as the covert nerve center of the supernatural underground?
Why not?
I'd read any one of those books. I'd watch any one of those series, or at least give it a shot. I'd buy that ticket. Wouldn't you?
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Secrets of the Subculture
Psst...want to write in your favorite genre?
Step 1: Spend a few months reading the genre and nothing else.
Step 2: When not reading, go about your normal life.
Step 3: See the genre overlay on your life! Particularly on the parts of your life that create subcultures.
We all belong to multiple subcultures, beginning with our families. Your work circle and your leisure circle are probably not the same and don't function under the same social rules. You probably have friends from both circles who find each other mutually incomprehensible, which will help you find the line of demarcation. The craft shows you attend (as a crafter, as your crafter mom's assistant, as a buyer) on the weekends combine into their own little world with politics, scandals, romance, and tragedy; as does the law office where you make your living. Whenever I go to the farmer's market I get a brief little glimpse of a vast network of hardworking and surprisingly diverse people, who appear to be in direct competition (selling exactly the same things) and yet are also mutually supportive - trading among themselves, fetching each other coffee, making change for each other.
If you read enough romance novels, with the idea in the back of your mind that you will and can write one, you'll begin to see how romance could bloom at the farmer's market between the daughter struggling to keep her family farm viable and the naive organic-horticulture newbie.
If you read enough science fiction, you'll start thinking of ways that nanorobotics will change the working conditions in your real estate office, or imagining the particular challenges of peddling real estate on the moon.
If you read enough mysteries, you'll imagine what it would mean for everybody on the RenFaire circuit (where you go every year to help out your Rennie aunt) if a serial killer starts leaving garbed bodies on the jousting field, and invent ingenious ways to kill and be killed with turkey legs, corset laces, and blunt souvenir swords.
Trust me. You too will soon have more ideas than you know what to do with. The problem will be to pick one. You'll have the best results with subcultures in which you participate as an insider, not as audience; but if an idea knocks hard enough, it's worth going out of your way to become an insider.
I promise.
Step 1: Spend a few months reading the genre and nothing else.
Step 2: When not reading, go about your normal life.
Step 3: See the genre overlay on your life! Particularly on the parts of your life that create subcultures.
We all belong to multiple subcultures, beginning with our families. Your work circle and your leisure circle are probably not the same and don't function under the same social rules. You probably have friends from both circles who find each other mutually incomprehensible, which will help you find the line of demarcation. The craft shows you attend (as a crafter, as your crafter mom's assistant, as a buyer) on the weekends combine into their own little world with politics, scandals, romance, and tragedy; as does the law office where you make your living. Whenever I go to the farmer's market I get a brief little glimpse of a vast network of hardworking and surprisingly diverse people, who appear to be in direct competition (selling exactly the same things) and yet are also mutually supportive - trading among themselves, fetching each other coffee, making change for each other.
If you read enough romance novels, with the idea in the back of your mind that you will and can write one, you'll begin to see how romance could bloom at the farmer's market between the daughter struggling to keep her family farm viable and the naive organic-horticulture newbie.
If you read enough science fiction, you'll start thinking of ways that nanorobotics will change the working conditions in your real estate office, or imagining the particular challenges of peddling real estate on the moon.
If you read enough mysteries, you'll imagine what it would mean for everybody on the RenFaire circuit (where you go every year to help out your Rennie aunt) if a serial killer starts leaving garbed bodies on the jousting field, and invent ingenious ways to kill and be killed with turkey legs, corset laces, and blunt souvenir swords.
Trust me. You too will soon have more ideas than you know what to do with. The problem will be to pick one. You'll have the best results with subcultures in which you participate as an insider, not as audience; but if an idea knocks hard enough, it's worth going out of your way to become an insider.
I promise.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Halloween, and the Day After
At some point we stopped leaving our lights on for Halloween; part of our long withdrawal from the collective culture, you could call it. But I still pay attention. This year the people banning Halloween are Russian, but the arguments are just as unrealistic, ignorant, and divorced from the real Halloween experience of real people as ever.
Halloween is a popular holiday for authors, for obvious reasons. It gives us a natural, liminal setting for supernatural motifs and for fantasies of transformation. What if the masks reveal more than they conceal? What if they transform instead of merely disguising? The legitimacy of disguise and deception in a public setting is an ideal setup for the mystery author, or the comedian, to create confusion, particularly concerning identity. Agatha Christie loved a masquerade. Choice of costume illuminates character - remember how, in Freak the Mighty, the heroic-spirited Kevin dressed as Darth Vader? (If you haven't read Freak the Mighty, for pity's sake, go do so! The movie misses some of the point, though it has the major virtue of Gillian Anderson as Loretta, Heroic Biker Chick.) It's about so much more than candy!
Here's a piece that I think is ripe for fictional exploration: Halloween as the Queer Holiday.
The place of Halloween in the social history of gender identity is persistent. Particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, where social disapproval of genderbending dress was supported by laws punishing the wearing of males clothes by women and vice versa, Halloween was the Great Exception. In cities in which wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a shirt that buttoned up the wrong side could get you arrested 364 days of the year, you could prance down the street in full drag on this one day. Establishments catering to a particular clientele under the constant threat of raids could hold huge Halloween bashes with impunity. Teen-agers who didn't dare be themselves in public could put on their real selves and call it a costume, and even gain admiration for doing so - if they were smart enough. If the bullies were imperceptive enough. If they made enough people laugh.
If the spoilsports weren't trying to ban Halloween on ridiculous grounds in that particular locality that year. Or maybe, even if they were. Maybe, in defying the forces of willful blindness, oppression, suppression, and depression, Halloween is the night of triumph.
Somebody is always trying to ban Halloween, and that somebody is always missing the point. Or is, perhaps, terrified of admitting the point. Is hiding behind nonsense about non-existent occult or psychological threats because they can't deal with the truth of the holiday in practice. Because the anxiety created by the fluidity of identity is too much for them.
Comedy, tragedy, thriller, fantasy, domestic novel, novel of self-discovery - it works for all of them.
And then everybody has to get up the next day and carry on daily life. But does that mean putting the mask back on? Or does it mean negotiating a larger space for oneself?
Because that's the rest of the story.
Halloween is a popular holiday for authors, for obvious reasons. It gives us a natural, liminal setting for supernatural motifs and for fantasies of transformation. What if the masks reveal more than they conceal? What if they transform instead of merely disguising? The legitimacy of disguise and deception in a public setting is an ideal setup for the mystery author, or the comedian, to create confusion, particularly concerning identity. Agatha Christie loved a masquerade. Choice of costume illuminates character - remember how, in Freak the Mighty, the heroic-spirited Kevin dressed as Darth Vader? (If you haven't read Freak the Mighty, for pity's sake, go do so! The movie misses some of the point, though it has the major virtue of Gillian Anderson as Loretta, Heroic Biker Chick.) It's about so much more than candy!
Here's a piece that I think is ripe for fictional exploration: Halloween as the Queer Holiday.
The place of Halloween in the social history of gender identity is persistent. Particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, where social disapproval of genderbending dress was supported by laws punishing the wearing of males clothes by women and vice versa, Halloween was the Great Exception. In cities in which wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a shirt that buttoned up the wrong side could get you arrested 364 days of the year, you could prance down the street in full drag on this one day. Establishments catering to a particular clientele under the constant threat of raids could hold huge Halloween bashes with impunity. Teen-agers who didn't dare be themselves in public could put on their real selves and call it a costume, and even gain admiration for doing so - if they were smart enough. If the bullies were imperceptive enough. If they made enough people laugh.
If the spoilsports weren't trying to ban Halloween on ridiculous grounds in that particular locality that year. Or maybe, even if they were. Maybe, in defying the forces of willful blindness, oppression, suppression, and depression, Halloween is the night of triumph.
Somebody is always trying to ban Halloween, and that somebody is always missing the point. Or is, perhaps, terrified of admitting the point. Is hiding behind nonsense about non-existent occult or psychological threats because they can't deal with the truth of the holiday in practice. Because the anxiety created by the fluidity of identity is too much for them.
Comedy, tragedy, thriller, fantasy, domestic novel, novel of self-discovery - it works for all of them.
And then everybody has to get up the next day and carry on daily life. But does that mean putting the mask back on? Or does it mean negotiating a larger space for oneself?
Because that's the rest of the story.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Redirect
So I'm going to be lazy this morning, but you'll thank me for it.
The blog Disability in Kidlit addresses subjects of vital literary interest, and in particular the recent post Discussion #3: What Would You Like to See More of? is chock-full of brilliance. Like for example, from S.E. Smith:
That bolded bit is brilliant!
Of course, you'd have to know quite a bit about schizophrenics and schizophrenia, and by that I don't just mean library research. Knowledge can be acquired. I've known a few schizophrenics, but not intimately. Enough to know that they can be annoying to be around, if they don't accept or understand their own condition, but that if they're on top of their illness, the accommodations others have to make around them are no more onerous than adjusting to someone with mobility problems: i.e., not onerous enough to make a fuss over. A writer with schizophrenia (Virginia Woolf was, remember, so don't try to tell me that having this condition is enough to disqualify one as a writer!), who works with mental and emotional conditions, or with a close family member with the condition would be in the best position to do so. But it's not impossible for a sufficiently dedicated researcher with no direct experience, yet. After all, a person with a disability is simply someone who doesn't mesh perfectly with the world around her - and who hasn't felt that way at least occasionally?
And it could be awesome.
And enlightening.
And completely mutilated in the blockbuster Hollywood movie adaptation; but of what awesome and enlightening work is this not true?
Anyway, you the reader or I the blogger may not be up to carrying out some of the specific ideas presented, but this should be enough to get you thinking. Because these are reasonable desires and the road to fulfillment is wide open. And creativity springs from limitation.
(And bookmark or follow that blog while you're about it.)
The blog Disability in Kidlit addresses subjects of vital literary interest, and in particular the recent post Discussion #3: What Would You Like to See More of? is chock-full of brilliance. Like for example, from S.E. Smith:
I don’t want to see the disability version of the whitewashed form of diversity sometimes seen with authors trying to write characters of colour where a one-off mention is made to a character being Black or Latina/o and it never comes up again, depriving characters of cultural context–I want to see a character’s disability mentioned and playing a role in the narrative, but not as its own character. (A wheelchair user who’s a hacker, for example, and gets frustrated with the stairs at the local hackerspace. A schizophrenic character who thinks her meds need adjustment when she really is seeing ghosts. A D/deaf or HoH teen witch who’s pissed about uncaptioned YouTube videos. Get imaginative!)
That bolded bit is brilliant!
Of course, you'd have to know quite a bit about schizophrenics and schizophrenia, and by that I don't just mean library research. Knowledge can be acquired. I've known a few schizophrenics, but not intimately. Enough to know that they can be annoying to be around, if they don't accept or understand their own condition, but that if they're on top of their illness, the accommodations others have to make around them are no more onerous than adjusting to someone with mobility problems: i.e., not onerous enough to make a fuss over. A writer with schizophrenia (Virginia Woolf was, remember, so don't try to tell me that having this condition is enough to disqualify one as a writer!), who works with mental and emotional conditions, or with a close family member with the condition would be in the best position to do so. But it's not impossible for a sufficiently dedicated researcher with no direct experience, yet. After all, a person with a disability is simply someone who doesn't mesh perfectly with the world around her - and who hasn't felt that way at least occasionally?
And it could be awesome.
And enlightening.
And completely mutilated in the blockbuster Hollywood movie adaptation; but of what awesome and enlightening work is this not true?
Anyway, you the reader or I the blogger may not be up to carrying out some of the specific ideas presented, but this should be enough to get you thinking. Because these are reasonable desires and the road to fulfillment is wide open. And creativity springs from limitation.
(And bookmark or follow that blog while you're about it.)
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Accidental Kid
I am 50. The person I took to the Zoo yesterday is nine. Therefore, I am zonked today. (But hand-feeding lories is awesome and I have no regrets.)
As we pulled into the parking slot at her father's apartment complex I said: "Let's go see if your dad's apartment is still there." Which is the kind of thing I say when I'm tired and will give you an inkling into why I never had children. This is a conscious choice on my part and one of my smarter ones, if I do say so. I'm a tolerable aunt when the occasion calls for it but I live too much inside my head for a full-time gig and anyway, given the appalling overpopulation of the world today, I think the only people who should be breeding are the ones to whom their children are The Most Important Thing in the World.
But, what if I, or someone like me, were the only person a kid had left? What if the apartment had not, in fact, been there when we arrived?
In this particular child's case, we would have gone to her mother's; plus she has extended family in another city, so it would have to be a pretty dire implosion of the poor kid's life to result in her having nobody but Damon and me to rely on - and us with no legal right to her, too. "Nightmare" doesn't cover it, and the horror would be a good deal worse for her than for me, dealing with a major trauma with someone no more prepared to cope even with normal childhood incidents than I am to help her through it.
But good books grow from nightmarish situations, so - there's one.
The child thrown into the care of the should-be-incompetent caregiver is a standard trope. The literary world is populated by orphans, and there's at least as many who bond with and make a profound difference to their caregivers (Heidi, Anne Shirley, that kid in Silas Marner; my personal favorite is the collective entity of the 24 woodies Snufkin has to look after in Moominsummer Madness) as there are maltreated ones who have to strike out on their own. But it's standard for a reason, and the thing to do is to build strong and sympathetic characters, put them through the wringer suggested by your own taste and circumstances, and see what you get. It'll fit into any genre - domestic fantasy, high fantasy, realism, dystopian, science fiction, whatever - which in this case would be dictated by the circumstances I dreamed up to account for my being the person left in charge of K. Ideally, as with Heidi and Anne Shirley, the reader who identifies most readily with a character of one age will also be led to understand the behavior and interior workings of the character of the other age; which is no light task, especially if you want to avoid both the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of didacticism.
At the moment, I am a great deal too tired.
As we pulled into the parking slot at her father's apartment complex I said: "Let's go see if your dad's apartment is still there." Which is the kind of thing I say when I'm tired and will give you an inkling into why I never had children. This is a conscious choice on my part and one of my smarter ones, if I do say so. I'm a tolerable aunt when the occasion calls for it but I live too much inside my head for a full-time gig and anyway, given the appalling overpopulation of the world today, I think the only people who should be breeding are the ones to whom their children are The Most Important Thing in the World.
But, what if I, or someone like me, were the only person a kid had left? What if the apartment had not, in fact, been there when we arrived?
In this particular child's case, we would have gone to her mother's; plus she has extended family in another city, so it would have to be a pretty dire implosion of the poor kid's life to result in her having nobody but Damon and me to rely on - and us with no legal right to her, too. "Nightmare" doesn't cover it, and the horror would be a good deal worse for her than for me, dealing with a major trauma with someone no more prepared to cope even with normal childhood incidents than I am to help her through it.
But good books grow from nightmarish situations, so - there's one.
The child thrown into the care of the should-be-incompetent caregiver is a standard trope. The literary world is populated by orphans, and there's at least as many who bond with and make a profound difference to their caregivers (Heidi, Anne Shirley, that kid in Silas Marner; my personal favorite is the collective entity of the 24 woodies Snufkin has to look after in Moominsummer Madness) as there are maltreated ones who have to strike out on their own. But it's standard for a reason, and the thing to do is to build strong and sympathetic characters, put them through the wringer suggested by your own taste and circumstances, and see what you get. It'll fit into any genre - domestic fantasy, high fantasy, realism, dystopian, science fiction, whatever - which in this case would be dictated by the circumstances I dreamed up to account for my being the person left in charge of K. Ideally, as with Heidi and Anne Shirley, the reader who identifies most readily with a character of one age will also be led to understand the behavior and interior workings of the character of the other age; which is no light task, especially if you want to avoid both the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of didacticism.
At the moment, I am a great deal too tired.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Arrested - for Science!
Here's one for you: A high school student was arrested for doing an extracurricular science experiment that blew the top off a bottle.
As it happens, the student is black, female, and living in the south.
This is a tailor-made story for the school library market. You have a sympathetic, curious, good-girl protagonist; you have a school setting; and you have Relevant Issues out the wazoo. Security and paranoia, "zero tolerance" policies on school grounds, the overstepping of authority, the meaning of discipline, the nature and interpretation of rules, race, class, gender issues - it's overwhelming! A student not just chastised but arrested for conducting a science experiment at school! A young woman discouraged from doing science! A black person criminalized for behavior that is well within normal range!
Add to that the fact that I was alerted to this story via a petition notification on Change.org geared toward freeing the young lady, reinstating her at school, and wiping her record clean. If the situation goes viral, that opens up worlds more of story material, as the world descends (literally or figuratively) on this school.
You'd have to detach from the news story early and figure out how to get a tight enough focus to write a coherent novel without either shortchanging or oversimplifying the issues. You'd have to figure out how and why a school gets to the point that this sort of thing is even possible; not only who the student is, but who the school administrator in charge is; where the student fits in the school social and academic hierarchy; and what else is going on at the same time that makes this incident into a flash point. A comfortable familiarity with high school interior politics would be a great aid in writing this.
In order to produce something more than an issue-driven problem novel, though, you'd have to drill down through the public issues and bring out the personal ones involved. Play with roles. How do the conflicts change when you change the story's heavy - the school administrator responsible for her arrest - from a white man to a black man, or a black man to a white woman, or a white woman to a black one? The protagonist's identity as a "good girl" is emphasized in all the articles I've seen - what does that say about the public reaction?
And what does "good girl" mean, exactly? Perhaps she's not as good as all that, but is primarily good at not being caught. Maybe she's sick of being good and does the bottle-popping stunt to impress someone. Maybe she's been set up...
As it happens, the student is black, female, and living in the south.
This is a tailor-made story for the school library market. You have a sympathetic, curious, good-girl protagonist; you have a school setting; and you have Relevant Issues out the wazoo. Security and paranoia, "zero tolerance" policies on school grounds, the overstepping of authority, the meaning of discipline, the nature and interpretation of rules, race, class, gender issues - it's overwhelming! A student not just chastised but arrested for conducting a science experiment at school! A young woman discouraged from doing science! A black person criminalized for behavior that is well within normal range!
Add to that the fact that I was alerted to this story via a petition notification on Change.org geared toward freeing the young lady, reinstating her at school, and wiping her record clean. If the situation goes viral, that opens up worlds more of story material, as the world descends (literally or figuratively) on this school.
You'd have to detach from the news story early and figure out how to get a tight enough focus to write a coherent novel without either shortchanging or oversimplifying the issues. You'd have to figure out how and why a school gets to the point that this sort of thing is even possible; not only who the student is, but who the school administrator in charge is; where the student fits in the school social and academic hierarchy; and what else is going on at the same time that makes this incident into a flash point. A comfortable familiarity with high school interior politics would be a great aid in writing this.
In order to produce something more than an issue-driven problem novel, though, you'd have to drill down through the public issues and bring out the personal ones involved. Play with roles. How do the conflicts change when you change the story's heavy - the school administrator responsible for her arrest - from a white man to a black man, or a black man to a white woman, or a white woman to a black one? The protagonist's identity as a "good girl" is emphasized in all the articles I've seen - what does that say about the public reaction?
And what does "good girl" mean, exactly? Perhaps she's not as good as all that, but is primarily good at not being caught. Maybe she's sick of being good and does the bottle-popping stunt to impress someone. Maybe she's been set up...
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: When Worlds Co-Exist
So, having read about the two habitable planets closer to each other than Earth is to Mars you immediately start world-building.
But where do you start? When will your story be set?
It has to be post-crossworld-contact or what's the point? But is it at the beginning, when they start becoming aware of each other - which could be as early as the first Renaissance-quality telescopes? Is it at first physical contact? Is it when us humans stumbled across them? Is it during a period of peace, or a period of war?
Actually - if the two intelligent species I am assuming for each of these planets are enough like earthlings for us to write stories about them, periods of peace are probably non-existent. Everybody is always fighting somebody; and how each individual tribe/nation/state feels about interplanetary contact is probably vastly influenced by where in the war/truce/peace/annoyance cycle it is.
You could, of course, decide that only one planet has intelligent life, so there's no interspecies conflict, just a larger-scale colonization period, but that's underutilizing the setup and making it far too easy to fall into simplistic accidental allegories of the Discovery of the New World, without acknowledging the agency of the people who were already in the New World. I want different-but-equal. I want some real basic exploration of the idea of personhood, detached from biology; I want some really different stories!
What is each species like, for starters? What basic difference in the evolutionary histories of their planets shaped them?
What if one intelligence evolved in the oceans, complete with opposable thumbs or whatever other dodge full manipulation requires of their basic anatomy, and one evolved on land, not necessarily from primates? The vaccuum of space would be equally intimidating for both, but the technical problems presented by space travel, and probably the motives for space travel, would be different. A zero-G environment would not be half the adjustment for a cephalapodian intelligence that it would for an ursid one; but holey cheese wouldn't life support be complicated? The ocean-based species would probably regard long-distance sensing and communication as the easiest and most natural way to deal with extraplanetary activity; might lack the terrestrial urge to go there.
The ocean-based species could colonize the oceans of the terrestrial planet and the terrestrial species could colonize the continents of the oceanic planet - before either one became aware that the other was intelligent at all!
Oh, man, my head's exploding already and I don't even have a character yet.
Speaking of characters - this'd make a great RPG setting.
Help...drowning...sea of possibilities...
But where do you start? When will your story be set?
It has to be post-crossworld-contact or what's the point? But is it at the beginning, when they start becoming aware of each other - which could be as early as the first Renaissance-quality telescopes? Is it at first physical contact? Is it when us humans stumbled across them? Is it during a period of peace, or a period of war?
Actually - if the two intelligent species I am assuming for each of these planets are enough like earthlings for us to write stories about them, periods of peace are probably non-existent. Everybody is always fighting somebody; and how each individual tribe/nation/state feels about interplanetary contact is probably vastly influenced by where in the war/truce/peace/annoyance cycle it is.
You could, of course, decide that only one planet has intelligent life, so there's no interspecies conflict, just a larger-scale colonization period, but that's underutilizing the setup and making it far too easy to fall into simplistic accidental allegories of the Discovery of the New World, without acknowledging the agency of the people who were already in the New World. I want different-but-equal. I want some real basic exploration of the idea of personhood, detached from biology; I want some really different stories!
What is each species like, for starters? What basic difference in the evolutionary histories of their planets shaped them?
What if one intelligence evolved in the oceans, complete with opposable thumbs or whatever other dodge full manipulation requires of their basic anatomy, and one evolved on land, not necessarily from primates? The vaccuum of space would be equally intimidating for both, but the technical problems presented by space travel, and probably the motives for space travel, would be different. A zero-G environment would not be half the adjustment for a cephalapodian intelligence that it would for an ursid one; but holey cheese wouldn't life support be complicated? The ocean-based species would probably regard long-distance sensing and communication as the easiest and most natural way to deal with extraplanetary activity; might lack the terrestrial urge to go there.
The ocean-based species could colonize the oceans of the terrestrial planet and the terrestrial species could colonize the continents of the oceanic planet - before either one became aware that the other was intelligent at all!
Oh, man, my head's exploding already and I don't even have a character yet.
Speaking of characters - this'd make a great RPG setting.
Help...drowning...sea of possibilities...
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Idea Garage Dale: A Sunday Brunch Buffet
Before we begin, please, I would like to appeal to anybody out there who knows how to update Facebook with this blog to contact me and tell me how it's done. Because I know people do this sort of thing, but neither I nor the person who helped me set up pages for Sullivan and me can figure it out.
All right, on to the regularly scheduled Garage Sale and since I have a new Fortean Times again, I'll go back to that bottomless well, Human Weirdness. I open it at random and find myself faced with the Strange Days feature. A man who has licked every cathedral in the British Isles on a bet. A naked "Texas Wildman" who lives in a cave in "the hills" (a phrase which conjures up completely inaccurate pictures of the landscape in question) around El Paso, living by donating blood and recycling cans, who harasses hikers and puts out dead snakes as food for wildlife. Hmm...A Japanese man whose library cards were washed away by the March 2011 tsunami hopes someone on the west coast of the US will find and return them...Holey Cheese, an empty 28-foot yacht with no identification markings, a tidy cabin, and Dutch sea charts, recovered about six miles from a nuclear power plant in Suffolk. And the world's oldest parrot, Tarbu, dead at age 55.
Not surprisingly, given the structure of the Strange Days features, each of these news snippets lacks an important feature necessary to the production of a full-fledged story; but each of them has potential. Taking them in order:
With the cathedral-licking story (the feature for the page, with a full column of text and two pictures) we have an attention-getting, but largely pointless, story. A bet is not, in and of itself, sufficient motivation for odd behavior for a story. Something else needs to be going on for this to be a good novel; probably the licker's character arc. And a character arc is implied by his reluctance to claim the original forfeit for the bet, which was that the friend who made the challenge streak outside York Minster. This now seems disrespectful, and he's likely to change the terms to a monetary contribution to York Minster. Yes, something could be done with it; and something has, and possibly will be, as he has a blog on the subject and considers writing a book. Therefore, the rest of us need to keep our hands off of this until it's undergone a chemical change in the compost heaps of our brains and produced something that won't infringe on his intellectual property rights in the matter of his own life.
Moving on to the "Texas Wildman," what we have here is, on the face of it, only another homeless person with mental issues, and most of the mystery and intrigue of the situation would probably vanish if we knew more about it. The fact that the snippet is credited to the Sydney MX News rather than any closer news source would seem to indicate that the people who live near him find him more annoying and/or pitiable than interesting. This is not unusual, as the poor of distant places, for whose welfare one cannot by any stretch of the imagination be made responsible, are often exotic and mysterious, while those who live close by are a mere itch in the conscience we would rather not notice. Given that poverty and inadequate public mental health provisions are not readily soluble problems, what we have here is a character without a plot. The plot, however, could be generated by an unflinching imaginative exploration of the character. Is the assumption of mental issues true, to begin with, or does he in fact have rational, functional reasons for his behavior? If he does, what are they, and where do they take him? Who are the other characters in his life - family, friends and ex-friends, the hikers (does he truly harass them, or do they feel harassed by his mere existence?), the owner or representative of the owner of the land on which he lives? Perhaps it's family land. Perhaps he owns it. What about the snakes? Does he wear clothes to cash in his recycling and give blood? How do the staff at the plasma center feel about him? You start answering questions like that and investigating the difficulties of the life he's leading, you'll find yourself a story, I promise you.
The Japanese man with the library cards is a character without a story; an optimist, or someone with no concept of scale. You couldn't stop with the library cards for this person. You'd have to show him in action, moving through mundane life at a completely different level than those people around him - ridiculous, maybe annoying, maybe endearing - and make some kind of point about the disconnect between expectation and reality. I wonder what would happen if his life trajectory intersected that of the man in the cave? Or the cathedral licker's?
And then the Marine Mystery, oh boy! What we have here is a teaser leading nowhere, the mystery rather than the solution, a nearly blank slate. A writing prompt, in fact. First, you'd have to decide from which direction to tackle the situation - will you be telling the story of the people who created the mystery, or of people who come upon it after the fact and uncover that story? Either way, you need to work out what happened. Is the nearby nuclear plant relevant, or a red herring? Are we talking a supernatural mystery, a thriller, or a personal tragedy? What are the implications of the lack of identification on the vessel? What maritime laws are broken here; what maritime customs make sense of this or that feature that merely puzzles a landlubber?
The 55-year-old parrot, who said "Hello, my darling" to his owner every morning, is a character without a story. Unless, of course, you put him alone on that empty yacht...
All right, on to the regularly scheduled Garage Sale and since I have a new Fortean Times again, I'll go back to that bottomless well, Human Weirdness. I open it at random and find myself faced with the Strange Days feature. A man who has licked every cathedral in the British Isles on a bet. A naked "Texas Wildman" who lives in a cave in "the hills" (a phrase which conjures up completely inaccurate pictures of the landscape in question) around El Paso, living by donating blood and recycling cans, who harasses hikers and puts out dead snakes as food for wildlife. Hmm...A Japanese man whose library cards were washed away by the March 2011 tsunami hopes someone on the west coast of the US will find and return them...Holey Cheese, an empty 28-foot yacht with no identification markings, a tidy cabin, and Dutch sea charts, recovered about six miles from a nuclear power plant in Suffolk. And the world's oldest parrot, Tarbu, dead at age 55.
Not surprisingly, given the structure of the Strange Days features, each of these news snippets lacks an important feature necessary to the production of a full-fledged story; but each of them has potential. Taking them in order:
With the cathedral-licking story (the feature for the page, with a full column of text and two pictures) we have an attention-getting, but largely pointless, story. A bet is not, in and of itself, sufficient motivation for odd behavior for a story. Something else needs to be going on for this to be a good novel; probably the licker's character arc. And a character arc is implied by his reluctance to claim the original forfeit for the bet, which was that the friend who made the challenge streak outside York Minster. This now seems disrespectful, and he's likely to change the terms to a monetary contribution to York Minster. Yes, something could be done with it; and something has, and possibly will be, as he has a blog on the subject and considers writing a book. Therefore, the rest of us need to keep our hands off of this until it's undergone a chemical change in the compost heaps of our brains and produced something that won't infringe on his intellectual property rights in the matter of his own life.
Moving on to the "Texas Wildman," what we have here is, on the face of it, only another homeless person with mental issues, and most of the mystery and intrigue of the situation would probably vanish if we knew more about it. The fact that the snippet is credited to the Sydney MX News rather than any closer news source would seem to indicate that the people who live near him find him more annoying and/or pitiable than interesting. This is not unusual, as the poor of distant places, for whose welfare one cannot by any stretch of the imagination be made responsible, are often exotic and mysterious, while those who live close by are a mere itch in the conscience we would rather not notice. Given that poverty and inadequate public mental health provisions are not readily soluble problems, what we have here is a character without a plot. The plot, however, could be generated by an unflinching imaginative exploration of the character. Is the assumption of mental issues true, to begin with, or does he in fact have rational, functional reasons for his behavior? If he does, what are they, and where do they take him? Who are the other characters in his life - family, friends and ex-friends, the hikers (does he truly harass them, or do they feel harassed by his mere existence?), the owner or representative of the owner of the land on which he lives? Perhaps it's family land. Perhaps he owns it. What about the snakes? Does he wear clothes to cash in his recycling and give blood? How do the staff at the plasma center feel about him? You start answering questions like that and investigating the difficulties of the life he's leading, you'll find yourself a story, I promise you.
The Japanese man with the library cards is a character without a story; an optimist, or someone with no concept of scale. You couldn't stop with the library cards for this person. You'd have to show him in action, moving through mundane life at a completely different level than those people around him - ridiculous, maybe annoying, maybe endearing - and make some kind of point about the disconnect between expectation and reality. I wonder what would happen if his life trajectory intersected that of the man in the cave? Or the cathedral licker's?
And then the Marine Mystery, oh boy! What we have here is a teaser leading nowhere, the mystery rather than the solution, a nearly blank slate. A writing prompt, in fact. First, you'd have to decide from which direction to tackle the situation - will you be telling the story of the people who created the mystery, or of people who come upon it after the fact and uncover that story? Either way, you need to work out what happened. Is the nearby nuclear plant relevant, or a red herring? Are we talking a supernatural mystery, a thriller, or a personal tragedy? What are the implications of the lack of identification on the vessel? What maritime laws are broken here; what maritime customs make sense of this or that feature that merely puzzles a landlubber?
The 55-year-old parrot, who said "Hello, my darling" to his owner every morning, is a character without a story. Unless, of course, you put him alone on that empty yacht...
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Roadside Bigfoot
I turn again to the Fortean Times; to the same page of the same Fortean Times as last week, in fact, as the quarter-column about the mechanical ape is preceded by Bigfoot coverage: about three-quarters of a column on Bigfoot sightings in, and a dubious YouTube video from, Ohio (not thought of as Bigfoot country by the mainstream media), and half a column on a practical joker in Montana dressed in a ghillie suit and trying to spark a Bigfoot flap being accidentally hit by a teen driver, then run over by the teen driving the car behind her. Which is tragic, particularly for the teens, who now get to live with the fact that they've killed a man; even if it was, arguably, not their fault. Being hit by a car has to be accepted as a natural risk inherent in the activity of dressing in camouflage and deliberately looming up from the side of the highway trying to scare people at night.
Nor are cars the only hazard involved in impersonating Bigfoot, particularly in a state like Montana where gun racks are standard pickup equipment; but that's probably why August was chosen as hoaxing month. People are a lot less primed to shoot large animals in August than in November.
This is all evocative enough, but the trouble is, there's no real implied plot here. None of the characters have any obvious connection beyond that fatal conjunction at the side of the highway and nothing was at stake in the masquerade except for a practical joke. In a sparsely-populated state like Montana, the odds are reasonable that all of the principals knew each other, at least by sight, but Westerners are accustomed to driving long distances for what would seem to be slight cause in more densely-populated areas, and he presumably chose a relatively well-traveled area to maximize the potential that his prank would pay off, so it isn't a given.
So if you're going to use these elements, you have a lot of work ahead of you still. Here's some sample questions to answer before you even sit down to write:
Does the accident have to be fatal, or can you get away with pulling that punch and telling a farce?
Is the accident the end of the story, or the beginning? If it's the end, then the story is a tragedy (unless the hoaxer was using a Bigfoot disguise to cover up a nefarious crime, which is contrived and melodramatic, but contrived melodrama still has its place in literature); if at the beginning, the story will be about the two teens learning to cope with what happened and can, therefore, have a happy ending.
Is there some useful mid-point for the event, the third-act turn, for example, in which the discovery of a Bigfoot hoaxer turns the entire plot to that point on it's head? This would require that the protagonists (presumably the teens) were dealing with some mysterious events, all of which have been assumed to be Bigfoot-related; but now that they know about the man in the ghillie suit, not only have they got accidental manslaughter on their consciences, a big chunk of whatever they were involved in is suddenly not explained by the Bigfoot hypothesis and they're on a downhill run to the climax.
What are the connections between the two teens, the hoaxer, and Bigfoot, either as a concept or as a real phenomenon?
What more interesting motives than tomfoolery or boredom might have prompted a Bigfoot hoax? Perhaps the hoaxer is not a mere silly joker, but someone trying to create a flap in order to hoist the local economy out of the dumps through increased tourism. Perhaps there's a real Bigfoot population and he's trying to protect it by drawing the attention of cryptid hunters to areas where it's not.
Does it have to be Bigfoot?
Does it have to be Montana? Sometimes an incident floating in isolation in the news can be snapped into place in one's own culture and location, and you know that, if that had happened here, it would have happened on such-and-such a road, the hoaxer would have been a member of a particular subculture, his motivation would have been thus-and-so, and the teens would have been on their way to the county line to buy kegs; and the rest of the story would roll out effortlessly from there.
This is why people think it's hard to get ideas. Getting ideas is as easy and pleasant as reading the Fortean Times. Developing ideas, now - that's work!
Nor are cars the only hazard involved in impersonating Bigfoot, particularly in a state like Montana where gun racks are standard pickup equipment; but that's probably why August was chosen as hoaxing month. People are a lot less primed to shoot large animals in August than in November.
This is all evocative enough, but the trouble is, there's no real implied plot here. None of the characters have any obvious connection beyond that fatal conjunction at the side of the highway and nothing was at stake in the masquerade except for a practical joke. In a sparsely-populated state like Montana, the odds are reasonable that all of the principals knew each other, at least by sight, but Westerners are accustomed to driving long distances for what would seem to be slight cause in more densely-populated areas, and he presumably chose a relatively well-traveled area to maximize the potential that his prank would pay off, so it isn't a given.
So if you're going to use these elements, you have a lot of work ahead of you still. Here's some sample questions to answer before you even sit down to write:
Does the accident have to be fatal, or can you get away with pulling that punch and telling a farce?
Is the accident the end of the story, or the beginning? If it's the end, then the story is a tragedy (unless the hoaxer was using a Bigfoot disguise to cover up a nefarious crime, which is contrived and melodramatic, but contrived melodrama still has its place in literature); if at the beginning, the story will be about the two teens learning to cope with what happened and can, therefore, have a happy ending.
Is there some useful mid-point for the event, the third-act turn, for example, in which the discovery of a Bigfoot hoaxer turns the entire plot to that point on it's head? This would require that the protagonists (presumably the teens) were dealing with some mysterious events, all of which have been assumed to be Bigfoot-related; but now that they know about the man in the ghillie suit, not only have they got accidental manslaughter on their consciences, a big chunk of whatever they were involved in is suddenly not explained by the Bigfoot hypothesis and they're on a downhill run to the climax.
What are the connections between the two teens, the hoaxer, and Bigfoot, either as a concept or as a real phenomenon?
What more interesting motives than tomfoolery or boredom might have prompted a Bigfoot hoax? Perhaps the hoaxer is not a mere silly joker, but someone trying to create a flap in order to hoist the local economy out of the dumps through increased tourism. Perhaps there's a real Bigfoot population and he's trying to protect it by drawing the attention of cryptid hunters to areas where it's not.
Does it have to be Bigfoot?
Does it have to be Montana? Sometimes an incident floating in isolation in the news can be snapped into place in one's own culture and location, and you know that, if that had happened here, it would have happened on such-and-such a road, the hoaxer would have been a member of a particular subculture, his motivation would have been thus-and-so, and the teens would have been on their way to the county line to buy kegs; and the rest of the story would roll out effortlessly from there.
This is why people think it's hard to get ideas. Getting ideas is as easy and pleasant as reading the Fortean Times. Developing ideas, now - that's work!
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Miracles, Mistakes, and Lies
I'm tired of leafing through my old notes; fortunately, I got a Fortean Times this week. FT 289 (the people on the newsgroup are already discussing FT 290, but they're mostly British and can get it regular mail, while my issues have to hitch a ride on a tramp steamer or something) contains, on page 10, in a "Back from the Dead" round-up article, the story of an Argentinian woman who was told her premature baby was stillborn. Twelve hours later, they decided they wanted to say good-by properly, so the hospital staff pulled the frost-covered body out of the morgue drawer. Her mother touched her hand, and the baby opened her eyes.
Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.
But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.
The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...
The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...
Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!
Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.
But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.
The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...
The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...
Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: So Close, So Far
I took another stab at "Brush Week on Pear Street," the 11,000-word short story, today, and still don't see my way clear. It's a structural problem. But I've realized that it's another stab at an idea I've had for a long time, which I've seen other people do, and am not sure why I can't find my feet in it.
The premise is simple: You take a discrete multi-residence unit - an apartment building, a block, a village - and you tell the story of each resident. The stories intersect and affect and reflect each other. Some of the characters are active figures in each other's stories, others aren't. Even the nosiest character doesn't have all the information. Only the writer - and eventually the reader - has enough information for a god's eye view of the whole picture.
This premise itches my brain enough that I've already talked about it, but there's just so many ways you could do it, if you knuckled down to do it, that I don't mind putting it out there twice.
I think the fact that it itches me so bad means I'm going to get it done sooner or later. Maybe with this story? It's the closest I've gotten so far - it has a final page, anyway.
I'm not the only one with this urge. Sim blogs, like the ones posting to each other over at the Build-a-City Challenge on LiveJournal, are basically the same thing. For free. Not me - I want to have my artistic expression and be able to pay the builders, too!
The premise is simple: You take a discrete multi-residence unit - an apartment building, a block, a village - and you tell the story of each resident. The stories intersect and affect and reflect each other. Some of the characters are active figures in each other's stories, others aren't. Even the nosiest character doesn't have all the information. Only the writer - and eventually the reader - has enough information for a god's eye view of the whole picture.
This premise itches my brain enough that I've already talked about it, but there's just so many ways you could do it, if you knuckled down to do it, that I don't mind putting it out there twice.
I think the fact that it itches me so bad means I'm going to get it done sooner or later. Maybe with this story? It's the closest I've gotten so far - it has a final page, anyway.
I'm not the only one with this urge. Sim blogs, like the ones posting to each other over at the Build-a-City Challenge on LiveJournal, are basically the same thing. For free. Not me - I want to have my artistic expression and be able to pay the builders, too!
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: The Craigslist Camel & Other Stories
I spent Friday and most of Saturday (curse you, middle-aged lack of stamina!) at the Camel Clinic, and returned with an embarrassment of riches. Not only are the character of Sheikh and his relationship to other characters coming together in my head, I've got a big bundle of ideas to take straight to the garage sale. It's like one of those boxes with "everything in this box $1" written on it in black Magic Marker.
First of all, the clinic was held at Lightning Ranch, operated by Bill Rivers, an animal trainer who regularly works in the entertainment industry. Due to a recent injury, Bill was not supposed to be participating fully this weekend, leaving most of the work for Doug Baum, who runs the Texas Camel Corps, and Jim Hale, of the American Camel Company, both of whom work with camels every day. Doug is what you might call a camel historian as well as a trainer and trail guide, and Jim also makes and designs equipment. Each of them not only has a fund of practical information, but can act as a deep well of stories. Any enterprising non-fiction writer (which alas I am not) would have come to this clinic prepared to set up interviews and left it equipped with material with which to pitch any number of articles to a wide variety of markets.
Camel trail rides, desert expeditions, tourist ranches that double as animal training facilities, and the animal handling layer of a movie set are also dandy settings for novels. Want a closed setting for a murder mystery? Take your cast on a wilderness trek, disable your characters' communication equipment with some weather, and let your murderer strike in the middle of a storm! Want a modern middle school character with a convincing set of survival skills? Raise her on a ranch like this. Want a glamorous opposites-attract romance premise? How about the ambitious actress and the cowboy who's supposed to train her to ride camels, horses, and water buffalo convincingly?
Second, each and every participant had an individual reason to be there and a situation that could be exploited in fiction. A pair of missionaries preparing to work in North Africa; an animal trainer who wanted giraffes but settled for camels; a local rancher and his granddaughter; a nine-year-old girl with a baby camel she wanted to train to carry her camping gear and pull a cart; a team of animal pros who wanted to do more with their Nativity Scene camel. (If you're on Facebook - I'm not - see if you can find the page for the adventures of Wilson the Water Buffalo.)
The most pitchready story, however, is that of Jerry and Cactus. Jerry had gotten interested in camels, handled other people's in various contexts, and when he was sure this was what he wanted to do, bought one on Craigslist.
Are you thinking "live-action Disney movie?" Of course you are. Only in the Disney movie, Jerry's story would be spliced with that of Olivia of the baby camel and maybe the grandfather/granddaughter team. And there'd be a villain somewhere, who probably wanted to put Cactus down or exploit him or something.
Cactus turned out to be a huge, vocal gelding whose previous owner warned that he kicked, and who could put in an impressive display of head-weaving and teeth baring when asked to do anything. Jerry, not certain how to proceed, had gone three weeks without working him or interacting except through a fence. (Also; really nasty cud breath. I don't think cud breath is nice at any time, but none of the other camels made me back up by breathing on me.)
As it developed, Cactus works fine once he gets it into his head that Jerry wants to work him, only he's a grumbler and feels like he has to whine and complain about everything. Based on his behavior, before the end of Friday I'd decided that he used to be a fairground camel, who gave camel rides and posed for pictures, probably working many years with an old man, now dead. This man's heirs (I make them out to be his brother's or sister's grandchildren, who barely knew him as the family maverick - see how easy it is to generate a family history out of a little camel body language?) didn't know what to do with him and weren't interested in finding out, so they let him eat his head off in a stall while they found a sucker, and took the first offer. They wouldn't have abused him, but they didn't love him or understand that he was bored and lonely rather than mean, and unless his original master died right in front of him he wouldn't have understood what happened to his old work partner; so of course they didn't get along.
Cactus was a character; but so was Zeke the baby, who had to put everything in his mouth. So was Butter the Nativity camel, who liked being the center of attention and would stretch herself out to act as a backrest. So was Mongo the Bactrian, who yelped like a chihuahua when taught to kneel (koosh). Butter and Zeke are both eminently suitable protagonists for picture books. Cactus is more complex and probably needs a whole novel to develop.
And that's even before you get to the people's stories!
I hope to have pictures later. One of these days I'll get a digital camera (but then the battery will always be run down).
First of all, the clinic was held at Lightning Ranch, operated by Bill Rivers, an animal trainer who regularly works in the entertainment industry. Due to a recent injury, Bill was not supposed to be participating fully this weekend, leaving most of the work for Doug Baum, who runs the Texas Camel Corps, and Jim Hale, of the American Camel Company, both of whom work with camels every day. Doug is what you might call a camel historian as well as a trainer and trail guide, and Jim also makes and designs equipment. Each of them not only has a fund of practical information, but can act as a deep well of stories. Any enterprising non-fiction writer (which alas I am not) would have come to this clinic prepared to set up interviews and left it equipped with material with which to pitch any number of articles to a wide variety of markets.
Camel trail rides, desert expeditions, tourist ranches that double as animal training facilities, and the animal handling layer of a movie set are also dandy settings for novels. Want a closed setting for a murder mystery? Take your cast on a wilderness trek, disable your characters' communication equipment with some weather, and let your murderer strike in the middle of a storm! Want a modern middle school character with a convincing set of survival skills? Raise her on a ranch like this. Want a glamorous opposites-attract romance premise? How about the ambitious actress and the cowboy who's supposed to train her to ride camels, horses, and water buffalo convincingly?
Second, each and every participant had an individual reason to be there and a situation that could be exploited in fiction. A pair of missionaries preparing to work in North Africa; an animal trainer who wanted giraffes but settled for camels; a local rancher and his granddaughter; a nine-year-old girl with a baby camel she wanted to train to carry her camping gear and pull a cart; a team of animal pros who wanted to do more with their Nativity Scene camel. (If you're on Facebook - I'm not - see if you can find the page for the adventures of Wilson the Water Buffalo.)
The most pitchready story, however, is that of Jerry and Cactus. Jerry had gotten interested in camels, handled other people's in various contexts, and when he was sure this was what he wanted to do, bought one on Craigslist.
Are you thinking "live-action Disney movie?" Of course you are. Only in the Disney movie, Jerry's story would be spliced with that of Olivia of the baby camel and maybe the grandfather/granddaughter team. And there'd be a villain somewhere, who probably wanted to put Cactus down or exploit him or something.
Cactus turned out to be a huge, vocal gelding whose previous owner warned that he kicked, and who could put in an impressive display of head-weaving and teeth baring when asked to do anything. Jerry, not certain how to proceed, had gone three weeks without working him or interacting except through a fence. (Also; really nasty cud breath. I don't think cud breath is nice at any time, but none of the other camels made me back up by breathing on me.)
As it developed, Cactus works fine once he gets it into his head that Jerry wants to work him, only he's a grumbler and feels like he has to whine and complain about everything. Based on his behavior, before the end of Friday I'd decided that he used to be a fairground camel, who gave camel rides and posed for pictures, probably working many years with an old man, now dead. This man's heirs (I make them out to be his brother's or sister's grandchildren, who barely knew him as the family maverick - see how easy it is to generate a family history out of a little camel body language?) didn't know what to do with him and weren't interested in finding out, so they let him eat his head off in a stall while they found a sucker, and took the first offer. They wouldn't have abused him, but they didn't love him or understand that he was bored and lonely rather than mean, and unless his original master died right in front of him he wouldn't have understood what happened to his old work partner; so of course they didn't get along.
Cactus was a character; but so was Zeke the baby, who had to put everything in his mouth. So was Butter the Nativity camel, who liked being the center of attention and would stretch herself out to act as a backrest. So was Mongo the Bactrian, who yelped like a chihuahua when taught to kneel (koosh). Butter and Zeke are both eminently suitable protagonists for picture books. Cactus is more complex and probably needs a whole novel to develop.
And that's even before you get to the people's stories!
I hope to have pictures later. One of these days I'll get a digital camera (but then the battery will always be run down).
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