A to Z Reflections

The hosts on the main A to Z page posted some questions for today's reflection on the Challenge.

How about commenting - did you stumble upon lots of sites still using word verification? Did this prevent you from leaving a comment? What worked for your blog?

You know, I don't mind word verification. It doesn't stop me from commenting. Then again, I don't post unless I have something to say -- I'm not the "Me Too!" kind.

I turned mine off before April, but I can't say it's made much difference in the comment rate.  I just don't get a lot of comments.

What pearls of wisdom do you want to share with the Co-Hosts of this event?

"Keep it short" is not the kind of advice that is going to keep me reading A to Z posts. Personally, I want blogs that I can sink my teeth into. That may well be just me, though. And I may have big teeth.

OTOH, I may have gone overboard with my own posts. Then again, that may be part of my personal brand: pretentious writer flailing in the deep end.

And here's another thing: I know that on the main A to Z board there was a wish expressed for all participants to break 100 followers... being on Blogger, for me that means the Google Friends Connect list in my sidebar.

Does everyone realize that Google has "discontinued" Friends Connect? I was never 100% clear on how to use it, and then at one point it began giving me trouble so I actually cleaned my whole Connect list out -- I read everybody's blogs through Google Reader now. Which, I suspect, does not show up on the Friends Connect following count.

I'm not even sure if my reading through Reader will register as a hit on your page, for that matter. Which makes me wonder how many ghosts in the machine there really are. TBH, I have no idea how many real people are reading my blog and how many of the hits Blogger records are just spiders or bots or whatever's crawling the web these days.

In general...

April was a challenge for me. I've been blogging for a bit more than a year now and the habit is fairly well ingrained in me, but the level of obsession that April brought was new. I'm not entirely sure it was a good thing. I'm not going to commit to doing this again next year, yet -- I'll have to see how things lie come January 2013.

Meanwhile, if you're a new follower pick a Comfy Chair, pour yourself a beverage and let's have a write-in. :)

Answering A to Z questions

For W, I asked what you wanted to know. So here goes -- and hey! I'd love to get your feedback!

What kind of graphic design do you do, and do you ever try to combine it with your scifi ventures? 

I got into graphic design through the back door. I started out as a proofreader and did fairly well at it. I was working in a very busy place and at first it was "Could you just do those little edits to the file yourself?" and then it was "This is an easy job, could you knock it out?" and after a couple years I noticed they were giving me job jackets that said "For your best designer."

It wasn't anything glamorous. It was one of those companies that sends you envelopes full of coupons, in fact. Not Val-pack, but the same idea.

For ten years or so, I was the one-person design/pre-press department in various small print shops, so I've done everything from business cards to 300-page books to custom die-cut promotional stand-ups to photomanip... still, nothing glamorous but very practical.

Currently, I'm freelancing and working temp jobs when I can get one. Feel free to email me if you're looking for someone with mad P-shop and InDesign skillz.

I haven't combined this with my writing... yet. Aside from this blog, which I hope does not grate on anyone's eyeballs. 

No favorites, love them all

Hello! What's your favorite color?? If aliens forced you to see only one color forever, which color would you choose?

I don't really have a favorite color -- they've all good, honestly. But if I had to choose a monochrome, I'd go with plain old black-and-white. Why? Because greyscale is actually easier to look at than any other color of monochrome. It's a quirk of the rods and cones in your retina. You'll pick up details quicker and with better definition in greyscale than if everything were shades of blue, for example.

That's a huge oversimplification, of course. But yeah, I'd go greyscale if the aliens put a ray gun to my head.

Have you ever thought about blogging a theme within a theme? Perhaps creating simple science experiment lesson plans for teachers and students? If science is your fiction, I'm sure you could expand your blog in this or some other way. What are your thoughts about this? 

I wouldn't mind taking up the theme of "Hey! My stories are for sale!" but they aren't, yet. So far as expanding my blog goes, I'm not clear on what more I could do within this writing theme that isn't directly related to my own work -- whether sales boostering or fanservice. 

And as far as lessons plans go, no, never thought about them. If these blog posts have helped anybody, I'm glad... have they? Carly Watters recently posted about platform-building for writers, and it raised a similar question: what do you keep coming back to my blog for?

Z: Zygomatic arch

Has anyone complimented your zygomatic arches?

They're your cheekbones. And they're further back than you'd think -- when you put your fingers on the upper part of your cheek, most of that bone there is actually the lower part of the eye socket (the zygomatic bone.) The arch connects that bone to the temporal bone, which is a patch of your skull just above your ear.

Cheekbones are one of several qualities of the face that contribute to that thing called "beauty"... so a few thoughts about characters, beauty, and describing your characters' zygomatic arches.

Writers want their characters to be attractive to readers and at first thought, physical appearance is part of that. Whether you simply say your character is good-looking or go into great detail about eyes, lips, and cheekbones, your aim is to hold the reader's interest. Does beauty always hold the reader's interest, though?

Most people are not at one extreme or the other -- not beautiful, not ugly. They're ordinary. On the cute side, maybe, or on the unattractive side. Describing someone who can't be rubber-stamped as pretty or ugly can take more words, actually, to go over the ups and downs of their appearance. And while I think it's a good idea to not have all your characters be drop-dead gorgeous, you also don't want to bog down your story in long descriptions.

Excepting those genres where it's expected, of course.

So maybe you just sketch your characters and hit the highlights. The nice smile. The hair. The calloused hands. The weak chin or the hairy warts, if you're going for a less attractive package. Those are quick and you can mention them more than once so they stick in the reader's mind. Maybe you assume the rest of the character is ordinary, or maybe you assume the rest is ripped muscles and generous bosoms -- again, genre comes into play.

There's an interesting argument put forward by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics (it was my U entry) with regards to characters with distinctive, detailed appearances vs. a non-specific appearance. You really should read the book, but here's the gist of it: a non-specific appearance encourages the reader to place themselves in the character's shoes.

McCloud's talking specifically about comics, a more directly visual media than fiction... but it's a valid point, and I suspect it carries over. How closely I identify with a fiction character has very little to do with their appearance -- in fact, the only physical detail that would draw me in would be obesity. But that's a different post.

Writers want their characters to be attractive to the readers. Is physical appearance important?

What do you think?

Y: Yoga

I do yoga. I've been doing yoga three times a week for several years now.

I started doing yoga because I was sick and tired of my awful balance (I was the sort who could just be standing there and I'd lose my balance,) my lack of flexibility, and my general wimpy-ness. Why not go to a gym? I don't like them. I don't want a TV babbling at me, I don't want strangers around me while I'm exercising (or friends, for that matter,) and I'm not paying money for the "opportunity" to break a sweat.

Where Down Dog Is Man's Best Friend

Enter the free video podcast Yogamazing, hosted by Chaz Rough. I did have to buy a yoga mat, and I did also buy a yoga brick but I don't need it anymore. Total $$ invested: 20, maybe? I don't have to leave the house. I don't have to "answer" to a trainer or compete, however subconsciously, with the student next to me.

Gained: balance, flexibility, muscles... stamina, focus, confidence, and a truce with my fat body for the first time in my life. Lost: two pant sizes, though not any actual pounds. Whatever. I've made peace with the fat and that's worth far more than trying to fit into somebody's height/weight chart.

(Amusingly, once the truce was established the pounds did begin to slink away slowly. Again, whatever. I'm still fat and I will not violate the truce. There are studies about the role of cortisol (a hormone produced when you're under stress, maybe because you're haranguing yourself for being fat) in retaining fat.)

First time I tried Down Dog, I thought I was going to die. Now, it's almost a resting pose. Used to be that Hero's Pose felt a lot like my feet were going to snap off at the instep. Boat Pose? Are you kidding?  Not anymore...

Namaste, Chaz. From the bottom of my heart.

If you're catching up with A to Z posts, swing by my W post and ask a question.

X: Signature for the illiterate

Legally, a simple X can still be the signature of a person that cannot write their name. It needs to be witnessed, since such a thing is so easy to forge, but it's still legit. Some places substitute an inked fingerprint, which is quite reasonable too.

Illiteracy is the default state in my fantasy story -- not surprising, I'm sure. Peasants have more important and time-consuming survival skills to teach their children than reading and writing. Most of them would sign with an X if they needed to sign something.

Unexpectedly, this also came up in my science fiction when a truce needed to be signed. The universe I built -- the Jovian Frontier -- is so hooked up, wireless and otherwise computer-driven that I suddenly realized that it had been 150,000 words and nobody had even typed anything, never mind held a pen and written something on a piece of paper.

(a piece of what? the stuff you blow your nose on?)

So I was wrapping up the end of the second book and suddenly I looked over at Maggie and asked, Can you sign your name? 

She said she'd practice for it, since this treaty was important. But it made me think about hand-writing and how it's slowly but steadily fading from the world. Would it ever become so unusual that one would need to practice one's signature for a special event?

What would that special event be?

If computers become good enough to take dictation and read text to us, will reading fall by the wayside too?

Perish the thought...

W: What do YOU want to know?

Moody Writing opened the floor to questions for Q day with the option of not getting any questions and taking a day off... well, W is the last letter I need an entry for and I'm getting burned out, so I am going to do the same.

Pick my brains. Go ahead. I dare you.

I will answer questions, or engage suggested topics, on Tuesday, May 1 -- which would normally be a blog posting day for me, but after a whole April of posting I'm a bit short on topics.

Or I will take the day off, if nobody comments on this.

Thank you to everyone who's commented so far. If you've got a question, post it!

I can do more than one answer session if I need to.

V: Voice

I recently finished Part III of my fantasy monstrosity, Disciple, which included a full revision of Part II... all of which comes to about 100k words over a few months so I was well steeped in my fantasy-writing voice.

Then I tried to write a character interview with Neal, one of my science fiction characters. The change in voice was kinda like downshifting too far and I felt that whump the engine does, then heard it rev painfully high... well, if you drive a stick shift you know what I'm talking about.

Voice is difficult to pin down. You know it when you see it (like porn.) In thinking about it, I remembered that I have two scenes of somebody watching somebody seducing somebody else. So I thought I'd compare voices.

No context, yeah, but what's going on doesn't matter right now. I'm looking at word choices and sentence structures.

Fantasy: 

I was given the smallest of the guest rooms as my own and the men shared the others. My boots had hardly been off in two days, and when I sat on the mattress and unlaced them it took some two-handed wiggling to get them loose and then some peeling for the wool socks. The floor was chilly under bare feet, but no worse than my dormitory room at the Order. The baron's daughter had said she’d return with a hot water bladder for my bed.

My toes drying, I got up to shut my door. Glancing down the hall — I was at the end — I saw her, lamp in hand, leaning against the wall opposite Sir Anders. They spoke too quietly to hear, but she laughed at something he said and played at sassing back with one fist on her generous hip. That made him laugh in return.

Sir Anders shifted to put his hand to the wall beside her and lean on it. She turned her nose away, haughty, but spoiled the effect with a smile. He caught her chin with two fingers and turned her back for a kiss.

I felt a blush rise on my face. I pushed the door shut but couldn’t help lingering with one eye at the shrinking crack.

The baron's daughter stepped around him and he turned, leaned against the wall where she’d been. She took a few steps, looked back, and then kept walking. After a moment, Sir Anders followed.

I never did get that hot water bladder. 

Science fiction: 

Maggie, leaning past Neal to watch, saw Shen’s dark eyes sharpen on Glenna. His casual hug turned into a tighter grip. The corner of a grin slipped around her face as they hovered, noses almost touching, eyes locked. Maggie’s pulse shuddered in her chest, turning cold. Shen’s hand on Glenna’s back, long fingers splayed, caught on the edge of her corset as his grip tightened.

And Shen kissed her sister.

Glenna raked her fingers into [his] dark green hair and his hand was sliding down toward her butt. A bit of a twist and she was slithering onto his lap, wedged against the lip of the bar.

A squeeze bottle broke Maggie’s line of sight and she blinked. Neal flipped the nozzle open and hesitated, noticing her. He was blurring fast as her eyes filled up. And behind him, where the vague glimpses of green and…

“Psst!” Jezebel snapped and pointed toward the open door at the end of the bar. “Get a room!”

Maggie blinked and tears clung to her lashes. Got a glimpse of Glenna the moment Shen pinned her up against the door sill, her arms inside his unzipped jumpsuit. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut. Her sister’s giggles faded down the hallway past the door.

“Hey, hey.” Neal’s arm wrapped around her, put her face to his shoulder. “Don’t cry.”

Verbs
In the interests of keeping this short, just looking at the verbs illustrates pretty well how much softer and slower my fantasy voice is.

Fantasy:
was given      shared      had been      sat      unlaced      took      wiggling      peeling      was      had said      drying      got      glancing      was      saw      leaning      spoke      laughed      said      played      made      felt      rise      pushed      couldn't      lingering      shrinking      stepped      turned      leaned      'd been      took      looked      kept      followed      get

Science fiction:
leaning      watch      saw      sharpen      turned      slipped      hovered      shuddered      turning      caught      tightened      kissed      raked      was sliding      slithering      broke      blinked      flipped      hesitated      blurring      filled      snapped      pointed      blinked      clung      got      pinned      squeezed      faded      wrapped      put     cry

Why wasn't kiss a verb in the fantasy seduction? was the first thing I saw when I made those lists. What do you see?

Want to read more? My writing samples: Fantasy, Science fiction.

U: Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud, is an amazing book about storytelling in "comic books" -- "sequential art," more accurately.

I found it useful because I'm the sort of writer who's following a mental movie as I write. There's a lot here that boils down to being a better director, in the sense of guiding the reader's eye. Which you do, as a writer, even more than a comic book artist or a movie director. Your words are the only window into your world.

Four chapters in particular were very useful to me.

Chapter 3 discusses different types of transitions between image frames. Chapter 4 discusses sequences of events and covers timing in the process. Both of these are just as important to prose as to sequential art.

McCloud speaks in terms of image frames, since that is the basic unit of information for sequential art. In prose, one could think in units of a paragraph or even a sentence.* The relationship between one sentence/paragraph and the next falls into one of six types and those relationships have a direct impact on one's voice, timing and pacing.

Chapter 6 discusses the interplay between image and text -- and prose is limited to just text, but consider: the interplay between descriptive paragraphs and dialogue/action.

Chapter 7 is more abstract. It tackles McCloud's theory of "art" and the development of artists. He takes a very broad definition of art -- which, in later years, he took a few steps away from -- and that's his opinion. I found his presentation on the six layers of art persuasive, though.

The rest of it is fun, too, looking at the power of icons and visual media. I was especially struck by his pointing out that characters with a generic appearance invite the reader to place themselves in that character's shoes, and I wondered how that applied to prose characters as well. I thought of reviewing Understanding Comics, in fact, while writing my entry for Z... which tipped over into a discussion of beauty. Stay tuned for that.

* I've heard it argued that the paragraph is the basic unit of information in prose, not the sentence. And they may have a point, since a sentence can tell you something but a paragraph also provides context. And we know how much of meaning in English rides on context... most of it, it seems like. 

T: Target - self-publishing?

Getting published. That's been my target for a long time. These days, of course, that target is moving and splitting into a couple dozen targets: "legacy" publishers, small press publishers, self-publishing... what to aim at?

There's been a lot of blogging about the ups and downs of self-publishing. A lot of it is persuasive, too. It's made me ask myself what parts of "being published" make it my target.

• Craving the validation. Which is foolish, yes, because for every one person who likes my writing, there will be at least one other who doesn't care for it.
• Earn money. I'll admit to wanting that.
• Wanting to entertain people. It kinda surprises me to say this.
• Craving the validation. Yeah, twice. 

It seems to me that if a traditional (legacy?) publisher agreed to publish one of my novels, there are some risks involved:

• Little or no promotion for the book results in it vanishing into the horde of other published titles.
• Screw-ups in the production process result in a book that misrepresents me and/or angers the readers. 
• Production/promotion/reception of my book gets sabotaged by forces beyond my control, making it DOA.

Then again, these are the same risks I face with a small press or as a self-publisher... but if I do it myself, I retain control of more of my rights. My sales will be small, but I'll get a larger cut of them. I could hire an editor and a proofreader, rather than rely on luck. I've got enough graphic design, prepress/production and HTML coding experience to do my own layout. The only catch is marketing, as I see it. Technically, I could hire a little marketing firm too.

I could go over to Kickstarter.com and commit to handing out all kinds of goodies if people were willing to help. Put together an estimate of editing and production costs, make a trailer video... it's a thought. I've done stupider things.

How has all the talk about self-publishing influenced you?

S: Soundtracks

I use the playlist function on iTunes to create background music for writing. I put songs into playlists according to what sort of energy they invoke, how "high-profile" they are (some songs just attract more of my attention when they play) and how appropriate they are to a given story.

I have quiet, contemplative playlists for quiet scenes. Tense, anguished playlists for drama. Story-specific lists full of songs the characters have pointed out to me. I mix and match these playlists too. Most of Disciple, Part III was written, for example, with my ambient/melancholy/smooth-electronica/Disciple-specific blend playing in the background. (combined length of those lists is about 2 days and 3 hours.)

Except for the combat portions of the story (of which there are many) which require something very different. Crafting a playlist specifically for writing combat has proven tricky, for me. I've been working on it since I was writing Orbital Shifts (which had a fair amount of ship-to-ship science fiction combat) over the summer last year.

Here's what I've got so far -- I call this playlist "Heavy" to distinguish it from the "Fast Electronica" and the "Grungy/Dark" playlists. The full list is currently 70 tracks but not all of them are available on Playlist.com (I collect a lot of small bands' and DJs' music, because a lot of it is free.) I found about half of them and made a public list for you all.

Needless to say, Caution: loud, angry stuff here. I generally cut this playlist with "Fast Electronica," "Melancholy," and the story-specific playlist to keep my blood pressure under control.

R: Resuscitating lapsed ideas

Everybody has some manuscripts languishing in a comatose state, don't they? I'm talking about full drafts, or at least mostly-done, that suddenly manifested some deep flaw that drained out the spark of life. So you wrapped it up for long-term storage in your mental non-intensive care unit and figured you'd get back to it at some point.

Sometimes these stories resuscitate themselves. Sometimes it takes work. Sometimes you work them over with the shock paddles and mainline hormones through the IV and it still won't twitch.

I've got two in mind: a short story and a novel. Both SF, both Jovian Frontier stories. There are a lot of reasons why stories can lapse into comas, so I'll only talk about why these particular two did.

Wrong MC
I came to the realization that the main character arc in the novel was too muddy. What do I mean by that? My novels tend to include a main action arc -- a sequence of (exciting?) events -- and at least one character arc -- a sequence of (interesting?) changes the MC goes through. The two of them have a relationship, but how closely twined they are varies from story to story.

In this novel, the MC I had settled on did not have a clear objective. She was pulled into a situation and decided to take advantage of it, but why was not sufficiently clear and she made some choices that weren't... all that sensible, which always puts me off a character. This echoed into the main action arc and resulted in some serious "why are we doing this?" moments.

Fatal flaws. I threw it in the drawer (electronically speaking) and let it collect dust.

Then I went to the Viable Paradise workshop and listened to Elizabeth Bear's lecture on plot structure (among other wonderful lectures.) A couple weeks later, I was eating breakfast (I kid you not) and Bear (well, her voice) re-framed the novel's plot in terms of the other major character, whose objectives are far simpler, clearer, and are complicated by the female MC in (amusing?) ways.

My gut's verdict: this will work. I haven't done it yet, but I wrote down the notes.

Non sequitor
The main thing keeping the short story on life support is a pretty good sequence where a small team is working its way through a ghost ship. Its problem is that the character arc has very little to do with the action arc. This makes the character's changes seem to come out of left field and had (more than one) beta asking "What?"

No signs of life in this one. I might cannibalize out that one sequence if it can be used elsewhere. That's a perfectly good use of comatose stories, IMO. Organ harvest.

Why did that story of yours lapse into a coma?

Q: St. Qadeem

The few betas who have been beta reading Disciple, Parts I - III (sample of Part I in the page tabs above) can confirm that I am not pulling this out of my butt just to cover the dreaded Q entry for A to Z. My side of this Character Conversation is in italics. (There are more of these under the "character development" tag.)

Saints, in my fantasy monstrosity, are people who have attained godlike powers. They can be killed, but not by ordinary means -- and the death of a saint is disastrous for the people who have aligned themselves with him/her. 

My fantasy kingdom has three saints, who've formed something of a pact and work together to protect -- and be protected by -- the kingdom. Two of the saints were locally grown, as it were, and have blood ties to the kingdom. I wanted the third to be an outsider. Someone who, even though he's been part of the pact for a long time now, will never quite fit in. Thus, my kingdom is largely pasty-white-and-blond by ethnicity and Saint Qadeem... is not. 

Naveen Andrews - I believe this is from his stint on Lost?

Reference photo (yum): 

The very first thing I wrote about the three saints was: War saint, Craft saint, Nerd saint. I never had any doubt which one was the outsider. 

A saint of knowledge would be the outsider even in his homeland.

You've been quite mum about why you came to this little back-woods kingdom.  

There's been no hiding that I traveled much of the world before finding my place here.

Your place, or just a place? 

When one is an outsider, it's a fine shade of difference.

Were you running from something? (he only shrugs, with a smile) In assigning you an ethnicity that can be shorthanded as "Arabic" I wanted to invoke the intellectual and scientific prowess that pre-dates the fundamentalist, isolationist persona that dominates the Muslim world nowadays. 

In addition, warmer climes and richer lands allow people more leeway for learning rather than farming. Hardly any one kingdom's fault if its soil is cold and thin, requiring much labor to feed one's family. Why-ever I came to this mountain kingdom, I stayed for being welcomed by its people as well as its saints. 

But you haven't, shall we say, contributed to the gene pool here.

There are consequences to long life. When one knows the full spectrum of what a family will require of you, one's perspective changes.

That's something I've seen addressed now and then with other immortal beings, such as vampires. It's always interested me. (See my entry for I: Immortals)

Near all saints have descendants. The question is, how many generations can one reasonably maintain involvement with? Or does one begin a new family whenever one wishes -- take a new wife, watch her grow old, hold babes in your arms and follow them from cradle to grave?

One could certainly have a favorite great-great-grandchild. 

As Saint Woden does, in the kingdom's royal family. Surely a swath of the people could trace kinship to one or the other of their saints, after so many generations. They can hardly befriend them all, though. They are the saints of the land.

Which is a full-time job.

And deadly, as well.

I'll end the conversation here, though I'm itching to talk about what qualifies one to be the "saint of nerds" in a high-fantasy setting; all the saints are magic-users, first and foremost, not scientists. 

What role have cultural outsiders played in your fantasy stories?

P: Pages (of my writing)

I have a few writing samples scattered around, but maybe it's time for something bigger. You've listened to my blathering about my science fiction and my fantasy, so I should post some. Put my pen where my mouth is, as it were.

They're in the Page tabs above. Links below, too.

SF: Course Corrections query

Maggie McBride lost five years laying low, nursing her anger. She was just a kid when Jupiter’s police force cracked down on the McBrides’ independence movement. Maggie escaped, but the void took most of her family. Her one surviving cousin got arrested and packed off for realignment “treatments” to fix those obviously faulty thinking patterns.

Now Maggie’s hacking together a team — the few who survived the rebellion, a couple sympathizers, a chuck who just needs the money — with the skills to break into the remote asteroid Correctional Facility where her cousin’s being “treated.” To get the cash for all this, Maggie signs a contract with a vicious old pirate, selling her future into slavery if she fails.

It’s millions of kilometers to the little rock, across open space with nowhere to hide. But she’s going to get her cousin back.

COURSE CORRECTIONS is a 79,000-word hard science fiction adventure.

Read the first scene here. (~700 words)

Fantasy: Disciple, Part I query

The saints favor her, else-wise a peasant girl like Kate Carpenter would never be apprenticed to the kingdom’s master healer. But her patron saint also marks her ready for the duty of tending to a mission that must cross the ice-bound mountains. Their little kingdom faces invasion by a vast empire and desperately needs allies; across the snow-filled pass, through the deathly thin air, is a country that’s held off the empire and may be willing to lend an army.

Kate knows about frostbite and the everyday injuries of wilderness travel. She can heal those.

She’s not ready for the attentions of a ne’er-do-well knight and the kingdom’s only prince, though.

And she isn’t ready for the monsters that harry them night and day, picking off their archers first, wearing the party to exhaustion, pushing Kate beyond the limits her healing abilities.

She must keep them alive, or her blood will be on the snow too.

DISCIPLE, PART I: FOR WANT OF A PIGLET is a 42,000-word gritty fantasy, the first part of an epic in progress. (3 parts of a projected 6 written, 160k and counting...)

Read the first scene here. (~900 words) (NOTE: This link now leads to my book blog for Disciple)

Going to hide in a corner because I left comments open on the pages...

O: On Killing

"We sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf." -- Winston Churchill

 
When it comes to committing violence, most of us are "virgins studying sex." And just as virgins can write about sex, we can write about violence without ever having done it -- and we're far less likely to be called on any mistakes we make in the portrayal than a virgin is for writing unrealistic sex scenes.

It's my opinion that we owe it to those who serve in uniform to portray violence, and the toll it takes, as honestly as possible.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman wrote On Killing in the mid-90s, and when I read it (pre-9/11) war was a far-away thing. I read it because I thought it would help me in creating my fantasy-world knights. It did that, but the book is so thorough, readable, and brutally honest that it was a bit like throwing myself in the deep end of the pool to learn how to swim.

Grossman covers all aspects of institutionalized violence: the deep-rooted instincts that prevent men from killing (yes, we're wired to be violent but deliberate killing is not part of the deal), how factors like physical distance and psychological distance contribute, the role of training/re-programming, the even more important role of group social dynamics, and the psychological trauma that 98% have to work with  -- successfully or not. It turns out that about 2% of the population is capable of killing without the usual difficulties, interestingly enough.

What I took away from On Killing was that I was asking my knights to engage in the most mentally difficult form of violence -- short-range, face-to-face slashing and stabbing -- and that what would let them sleep at night was their ability to define those they killed as sub-human, monsters, or otherwise unworthy of living, and the support and approval of both the people in authority over them and those they loved.

Once you look at it that way, a lot of things about soldiers, propaganda and veterans change their meaning.

Grossman also wrote a follow-up: On Combat, which goes into great detail about the physical effects of combat-related adrenaline rushes, panic, and the importance of training. He also goes on at length on his opinion of violent video games, which was less useful from a writer's POV but the rest of the information is well worth it. I blogged about On Combat here.

N: Neal McBride

My reference photo for Neal McBride: Paul Bettany

I chat with my characters to learn about them and their part in the story -- and to work out some aspects of world-building. (My side of the conversation is in italics)

Neal McBride is one of the POV characters in my sci-fi novel Course Corrections. 

He was part of a gang -- whether terrorists or freedom fighters depends on who you ask -- that was captured, some of them killed, a few escaped. Neal stood trial and was sentenced to prison and Parathena "therapy" to re-shape his personality into something more "acceptable."

I wrote about some of these ideas in this post here and this post on SiMF.

The concept behind the Parathena therapy was using drugs to manipulate the emotional content of your memories. 

Stripped out the anger that drove me. Once the "McBride Terror" got rolling, we fed off each other. Glenna's anger, mine, Maggie's, everyone who joined our team. Remembering all that would've kept me going for years.

And if they were able to biochemically pinpoint the emotions triggered by those memories and replace them with...

Sadness. Emptiness.

But they didn't erase the memories entirely. 

Year's worth of lost memories would be strange. Something I could wonder about, try to find out what happened, then get angry all over that it was taken away. 

And you would've known who erased the memories, because you remember the sentencing, the imprisonment. 

Maybe erase those too. Though how to explain many years gone from my head, then?

You were in a coma for years? 

Living out on Jupiter's moons, and there are still mysterious comas that last years? Who'd have paid for my upkeep all that time?

True, Maggie was gone. 

And Glenna's dead.

Are you angry about that, still? 

(He shakes his head.) They took my anger.


Stay tuned for the P entry, when I'll post the first scene from Course Corrections (and my fantasy monstrosity, Disciple) so you can see a little of what happened to Neal.

M: Money

In fantasy
You can create your monetary system from scratch, which has its ups and downs. Do you go the easy gold-silver-copper route, or put in the work to build something as complicated as the old British system? Go with exotic coins made of electrum or mithril?

Either way, consider:

• What does the coin represent? For a long time, the American dollar represented a certain amount of gold. In theory, you could go to the bank and get your gold whenever you wanted. Maybe a silver coin is equal to a bushel of wheat, in your fantasy kingdom. Or maybe money is a scrap of paper that's worth something because everybody believes it's worth something.
• Who claims the authority to make currency? In some times and places, it was issued by banks to represent deposited wealth - not governments. Do people melt down their jewelry to make new coins? Do they melt coins to make jewelry? Is there quality control? 
• On the heels of that, do people trust the money to be worth something? This is part of why precious metals are a no-brainer for coins. They'll always be worth something, right? (or will they?)

In science fiction
Up to a point, you have the option of simply using the existing monetary system. You could use "credits" or some equally generic term. Or maybe money has gone completely electronic and it's handled by your personal AI so it's rarely mentioned.

• Are there still multiple currencies - dollars, euros, yen - or has that all been scrapped in favor of one unit? 
• Did some other currency unseat the dollar and become the dominant currency?
• Does hard currency still exist? (I suspect it will last longer than expected. People like to hold things.)

If you're going far into the future or inventing alien cultures, the fantasy questions come back into play.

Is money a headache you'd rather not worry about, in a story, or did you wrestle with some of these questions?

L: The 48 Laws of Power

Because "48" isn't a letter and F was already taken...

This is another book from my Reference Shelf of Honor. It's a massive collection of brief, historical stories illustrating the 48 "laws" as formulated by the author -- some stories illustrating the law properly observed, some illustrating the price of failure. (If nothing else, consider it a treasure trove of plot ideas.)

The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene, goes into far more depth than Machiavelli's The Prince (though you should read that) and Sun Tzu's Art of War (read that too.) In some ways, I suspect 48 might be more laws than is necessary -- some of them overlap each other noticeably. And some do seem difficult to reconcile to each other, if not downright contradictory.

That's not as much a problem as one might think, as the idea that nobody can observe all these laws perfectly and therefore be the perfect leader (dictator, con man, etc.)... is rather reassuring, actually.

On the whole, though, the weight of so many examples is persuasive. While I recommend this book for anybody who wants their characters to be successful leaders, I do NOT recommend plowing through the whole book all at once. Doing that contributed noticeably to my jaded, pessimistic and manipulative side.

On the other hand, it did make me a lot more comfortable with letting my kings, empresses, and rebel leaders pull the gloves off and get stuff done. When Maggie McBride, my rebel leader, had to address the fact that one of her staunchest supporters had screwed up, gone behind her back to try to fix it and made things worse... I checked this book before writing the confrontation. It confirmed that she had to take him down a peg and challenge him to make it right, while making it clear she trusted he would.

Leaders are difficult to write, when you're a shy person. This book has helped me a lot.

K: Knitting

I'm a knitter.

Which is not all that unusual for a writer, actually -- at Viable Paradise, we knitters circled up and stitched while we chatted.

It's long been known that simple, repetitive tasks can ease one into a meditative state. Meditation has a long history, of course, and is held up by both mystically inclined people and a growing number of researchers as a way to reduce stress and maintain health. One's brain waves shift, while meditating, from task-oriented beta waves to the relaxed, attentive theta and alpha waves.

IME (and I'm sure I'm not alone) this is where creativity flows easily. It's a free-associative stream of thought where my characters can speak freely and we can try out ideas and their consequences. Thoughts bump up against each other, merge, and split up in new ways.

When it comes down to it, all the writing "crutches" that I have (music, alcohol, my starting-to-write habits) are geared toward dropping me into that theta and alpha state where I can see the story and hear the characters. And like crutches, or training wheels, with long practice I've gotten better about dropping into that state with less help. This is why writers have a reputation of being absent-minded and distracted, I suppose.

We all know what it feels like when you can't get to that theta-wave state.

Once you're good enough at knitting (or crochet -- I do that too) that your autopilot can do most of the stitching, it's a good inducer of that meditative state. I keep small projects by my computer and work on them when I need to resolve some sticky point.

I have a surplus of potholders, hand towels and lap blankets around the house, but hey...

What are your creative inducers?

J: Jupiter

What else would I be doing for J? :)

My science fiction universe, which I call the Jovian Frontier, took root around this giant planet for several reasons. One was the deep influence that the movie 2010 had on my young brain. (I blogged about that.) Another is the size and inherent challenges of the system. Jupiter seems to have an endless supply of moons, it's separated from the inner planets by the asteroid belt, and it's too far from the sun to even pretend to do any farming. It requires true independence from Earth's resources if you're going to set up a homestead here.

Jupiter itself was the fun part. It taught me some important things about getting around using real-world physics -- because I wanted this universe to be as hard-SF as possible. Let me try to explain one of those things by talking about some of Jupiter's moons.

The four biggest moons
Jupiter's four biggest moons are all found close to its equatorial plane -- they orbit more or less in line with the planet's equator. These are the moons you've probably heard of: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. They're a natural target for colonization (and fighting over) because they're large and relatively easy to get to because their orbits are nice, neat circles around the middle of the planet.

The prograde moons
Outside of the four biggest moons, there are six prograde (orbiting in the same direction Jupiter turns) moons. Four of them orbit at an angle of about thirty degrees relative to Jupiter's equatorial plane. The other two are off doing their own thing.

The retrograde moons
Outside of the six prograde moons, there's a wild array of retrograde (orbiting opposite to Jupiter's turning) moons. Most of them are less than 10 kilometers in diameter, and they're generally grouped by their angle of inclination relative to Jupiter's equatorial plane. These angles are numbers like 150, 165, and 140.

The "Seven Sisters" (as I call them)
The seven largest moons outside of the inner four are: Himalia, Lysithea, Elara, Carme, Ananke, Pasiphae, and Sinope. Leda gets an honorable mention. That's everything that's more than 10 kilometers across, outside of the inner four. The first three plus Leda are the prograde moons at a thirty degree angle that I mentioned. The others are large members of their similar-angle groups.

Why am I going on about angles?
Because traveling further than you have to, in space, is expensive. And dangerous.

All of the planets in our solar system orbit the sun within a fairly tight plane -- which is to say that when the planets "line up" there's one a little "higher," one a little "lower" but they're all fairly close to each other. Therefore all the places you want to travel to and from do not require angling yourself too dramatically away from everything else.

Which means, by extension, that when spaceships are coming and going from the entire Jupiter system, they're going to approach it along a fairly tight band of vectors that line up pretty well with its own equator.

Which means that the equatorial plane -- and the moons convenient to it -- are where the traffic is going to be. Where there's money to be made. It's also where the four biggest moons are, the ones that can give a ship the most help with slingshot acceleration or braking. (Free acceleration? Hell yes.)

The other moons can be expensive to get to, depending on where they are in their orbit -- you'll have to burn all the way out there and brake on your own. The seven sisters can help a little with that, but the rest of the dinky rocks are even worse.

This told me a few things about the Jupiter system: where the center of town is, where the boondocks are -- though even the boondocks get their turn close to the equatorial plane, it should be noted -- and the importance of location, location, location.

How does ease of travel (or difficulty) impact your story?

I: Immortals

Vampires are the most common variety of immortal being one comes across in fiction, but there have been others. Extremely long life can verge on immortality, as with classic-style elves. In science fiction, immortality can come by way of downloading minds into vat-grown replacement bodies.

Immortality brings some unusual factors into play, some of which have been addressed well and extensively in novels. The importance of long-term relationships -- and how they can sour -- in Anne Rice's vampire novels, for example. Grudges that go on for centuries. The loss of humanity (and questioning what humanity is) and the scarring effect of doing monstrous things to survive. Good stuff, all of it, as the popularity of vampires attests.

But there are some recurring facets of immortals that I question, too.  

They're rich

Up until 1933, if a bank failed in the United States the account holders usually got nothing. Their money was gone. For centuries, if your house burned to the ground you had nothing. If a lynch mob came after you with torches and pitchforks, you'd be lucky to escape with what's in your pockets. When an economy tanked, inflation would go through the roof and your horde of treasure isn't worth much anymore. 

So you spread out your assets, goes the logic. You invest in commodities like gold and jewels and hope you can hide them well enough that they'll still be there when you need them. (Really? Your staff is that trustworthy?) Invest in a widely varied portfolio and hope something pans out somewhere. One of these companies will be the next Microsoft, right? And it won't crash like Enron, of course. 

I'd love to read a story about a 700-year-old vampire who's poor. In fact I'm claiming that idea, I may need to write that myself. Can you imagine working shit jobs for hundreds of years?

They're out of the gene pool
Balancing long life with a low reproductive rate is reasonable for world-building purposes. However, it does leave out some interesting possibilities. I had a chance to think about them in the course of my current fantasy monstrosity.

If one's immortality is acquired, not inherent, then one could still have a "normal" family with one major difference: you're going to outlive them all. Not just your spouse but your children too. And your grandchildren.

How long do you remain involved in their lives? What's your role? Can you afford to be emotionally invested?

This was touched on a little in Highlander, except that the immortals couldn't have children. If anyone knows of other stories that addressed this, please mention them in comments.

They have "refined tastes"
Or are they just jaded due to having seen it all, done it all, and there's only so many ways you can do a thing anyway. It doesn't matter if the thing in question is sex, murder, cuisine or high fashion. Novelty is a dead end, on the grand scale of things.

At what point in immortality are you just so damn bored that you can't stand it anymore?

Just some thoughts. What aspect of vampires sticks in your craw? (aside from the sparkly part, LOL)

This is a topic that will come up in a character conversation later in the A-to-Z run. I'll link to it here afterwards.