Naril

NaNoWriMo Discussion

Over 17,000 words!

I've spent about 16,500 of those establishing who these characters and their world are (while trying to hew pretty close to the idea of "make every scene work on two different levels"), but if you're telling a story about superhumans, you have to eventually show what they can do.

So, our protagonist's sister just tried to kill her.

The Sunday Group

You know, I actually did originally write Morgan for a NaNo a few years ago. I could never quite figure out what story to put her in, so I just occasionally polished who I thought she was and where she came from, and kept her on the shelf as a "maybe I'll figure this out someday." I have a couple of characters like that.

I had planned on writing modern fantasy for this year, but I wound up more interested in outlining something rather different. Maybe Morgan will show up in a full story of her own sometime, but it won't be NaNo - this time, anyway.

The Sunday Group

Well, NaNo and a few other things ate my life, but New Post is written (drunk with sleeplessness) and will be edited sober (in the morning).

You all are lovely. <3

NaNoWriMo Discussion

Just over 9600 words before I went to bed last night.

Like always, dialogue comes much easier than anything else. I do an enormous amount of technical writing, and it's sometimes a job to keep myself from leaping off the Good Narrative track and into the land of Shitty Infodumps. Not only are Shitty Infodumps, well, shitty, but they're very word-efficient and dry, which is not terribly helpful when your goal is word count.

NaNoWriMo Discussion

7150 words, officially still on track, even a little ahead.

I'm headlong into how the first public reveal of metahumans goes, and laying down the foundations of the familial dysfunction and emotional complexity that this story is going to need. I'm very deliberately making sure that these two aren't orphaned, because that's the lazy way to build some of the narrative structures I'm going to be needing. Characterization at this point is necessarily broad, but the complexity and shading will come along with the narrative.

I wish I'd done more outlining; the way this story is coming together I'm having to do a scene skeleton before each block of writing. Normally I work from broad arc descriptors, but I've also never done this kind of temporal skipping before. Ann Leckie makes this look so easy, hah!

The Book Club

OH BOY LET'S TALK ABOUT BOOKS

I recently made my way through a pair of space opera-flavored trilogies, one was okay and the other was incredible.

First, The Bobiverse, which is:

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
For We Are Many
All These Worlds

All by Dennis E. Taylor.

The premise for The Bobiverse is great: A normal person, killed in a car accident in 2016, wakes up in the mid-distant future to discover his brain has been scanned into a computer, and that his new job is to be a self-replicating von Neumann probe, searching the galaxy for new life, new civiliations, and new challenges. The only problem is that he's also woken into a horrifyingly believable political nightmare, and humanity atom-bombs itself into certain doom by chapter 12. The series has several interesting conceits - copies of the titular Bob all develop their own personalities and individual quirks, which is generally reflected well in the prose (and marvelously performed by Ray Porter, the audiobook narrator). The Bobs are all basically stable and basically decent people, at least by their own metrics, and what conflict exists between them is generally handled well.

The story falls down in its failure to examine many of the subjects it brings in any particular detail (in particular, the idea of personal immortality) and a general lack of narrative focus. There is some fairly unpleasant handling of a romantic relationship between a Bob and a (at the time) flesh-and-blood human, and I cared neither for the arc of those characters or the ultimate resolution. The final book in the trilogy wanders far too much, and the series' principal and concrete antagonist is given much less time in the story than they deserve, which is something that makes their ultimate threat somewhat abstract.

Really, this is a story that wants to exist in a crossroads between The Martian and Old Man's War, and I would say it doesn't quite get there. There are Big Ideas, but they are left unexplored. There's a Big Bad, but the interactions with them are perfunctory, and the lasting impact poorly examined. There are moments of emotional resonance, but few landed where they were supposed to, and one in particular made me angry rather than satisfied. Still, for all that, the story does move quickly, the prose is conversational, often funny, and deeply accessible. If you like stories where the author "did the math," Taylor does manage that and occasionally in spectacular fashion. It wasn't bad, but it could have been so much better.

----

Next, The Imperial Radch, which includes:

Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Sword
Ancillary Mercy

All by Ann Leckie.

The Imperial Radch series is one where all of the trappings of space opera are present, but are turned, gently, on their ear. There is a vast empire, and it's not very nice, but our protagonist used to be one of its soldiers. But they aren't leading a rebellion, or at least, they don't set out to. Breq, the last surviving fragment of an intelligence once inhabiting the warship Justice of Toren, begins her story with a singular and familiar purpose: vengeance. For herself, for everything she was, for everything she might have been, for everything she was forced to be.

There are secrets Breq knows that are only revealed to the reader slowly; her ambitions and machinations are opaque until exactly the moment that they aren't, and the world she inhabits is shockingly rich. There are no clean, clear answers in this story, no objective good defeating objective evil. You are sympathetic to Breq, of course, but she is messy, complicated, existing in a universe that feels tarnished and alive and real in a way that feels effortless and complete. Breq's evolution from where she begins the story is subtle and profound. The scope of the story steadily expands, a vast and intricate mechanism that once wound up, scythes through the setting in a way that at first seems surprising, and on reflection, is the only way the story could have gone.

I loved this series, virtually without qualification. It is rich and dense, but without a Stephenson-style self-aggrandizement that requires you to sit through info-dumps. The story is driving and complex with emotional resonance, self-reflection, and examination of some very Big Ideas. The world has the constant feeling that Leckie knows much more about it than she's putting down on the page, and those splashes of detail lend vitality and constant excitement to the setting, which exists as both part of and in service of the narrative.

The series also has hive-mind sex, a schizophrenic Emperor whose mind is made of hundreds of clones of themselves, extensive asides about tea (and why it's important to have a good set of dishes), and a scene with Breq literally standing on the hull of her sentient starship while firing a handgun at warships coming to kill her, because she knows something they don't. It's a story that spans a few years and millenia, with ghost stories that involve entire starships, linguistics jokes, and a protagonist who will terrify you while you're rooting for her success. It feels fantastical and modern, prescient and contemporary. This is different from Bujold, and I would argue better (although I adore her writing), more ambitious than Scalzi, and more thoughtful than Heinlein or Niven or Pournelle ever could have been. I'll say it again: I loved this series.

NaNoWriMo Discussion

This will be my fourth NaNo (non-consecutive), and I'm fairly confident I can add my third finish this year.

I normally outline heavily, and while I didn't put nearly the time I wanted into that project this year, I think I'll be all right. I'm adapting a short-form thing I wrote a couple of years ago into a larger story, because I always thought there was a little more meat there than I had time to really play with.

In this case, the story is a superhero-metahuman setting. The main character is a woman who was "normal" while her sister was the one with extraordinary abilities. The thing is, the sister, while fundamentally moral and a nominal hero type, has profound misgivings about the idea of not being human (or, at the very least, something other than human), something that leads her to be self-destructive when she doesn't have a Big Bad to fight. In an effort to prevent or delay that, the point of view character chooses to make herself into that sort of persistent Professional Adversary. The story starts on the day that wasn't enough.

Right now the plan is for the first bit to be an in medias res start, then I'll probably do the "how we got here" contextualizing story that sets up the midpoint of the story before getting on to the consequences and blah blah. I'm reasonably sure there won't be a "nominal bad guy teaming up with the nominal good guys" arc; the main character is going to be strongly antagonized by her sister's former...um...co-workers, while also dealing with what happens after the sister's real dive into her downward spiral.

The Sunday Group

Jesus, I'm so sorry. I'm recovered from jet lag and have my first 4000 words written for NaNo; I'll be getting a post up tomorrow evening.

The Sunday Group

I thought that would give you a fun narrative opening. :3

After all, one of the cardinal rules of storytelling is to make things hard for your characters. Stack the deck against them and figure out how they solve the problem!

The Sunday Group

I’ll be writing tonight, and maybe posting tomorrow. Maybe posting from the plane home! What a world.

I figure that Morgan has a carry-on that included a couple days worth of necessities, her laptop and a change of clothes, and that she had time to get her pistol case from the bag claim agents. However, her bag that included a more professional change of clothes, some jewelry (nothing silver), an extra book to read, and her very real (but also very rescinded, though the average person wouldn’t know that) FBI badge is still whirring forlorn around the carousel.