A Brief Unpleasant Metaphor On Writing

At World Fantasy, I was talking about my intense work habits, and how poor Gini had to deal with me vanishing downstairs to a darkened basement for an hour and a half every day to write.  And someone quipped, “You SAY you’re writing.”
To which I replied, “It’d be easier for her if I was masturbating. At least then I wouldn’t be calling her downstairs when I was done to go, ‘Can you take a look at this?  Am I doing this right?'”

Sale! "Rooms Formed Of Neurons And Sex," to GUD Magazine!

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from selling the unsalable story.  Which is to say that when you write a 7,000-word erotica story dealing with the BDSM relationship between a girl and a brain in a jar, you’re pretty sure you’re not going to find a home for it.
(The brain is the Dom.)
…damn if I didn’t, though.  “Rooms Formed of Neurons and Sex” just sold to GUD Magazine, which also published my girl-in-a-junkyard story “In The Garden of Rust and Salt.”  This puts GUD on my happy-list ratio of 100% submissions-to-acceptances, along with Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  (You don’t want to know what my Asimov’s ratio is, and my batting average with many other major markets is zero, just for perspective.)
The title may change, as they’re wondering whether it’s fitting, but the opening line won’t:
“The greatest tragedy of Lydia’s life was when she broke her boyfriend during sex.  Admittedly, he was a brain in a jar, but she’d been trying to make do….”

…So How Are You?

I had Big Plans for essays here today, but a rather stellar kinky weekend has drained the thought from my mind.  And yet I am greedy, desiring the interactions of comments without actually producing anything worthwhile for you to comment on.
It’s interesting, because I have a bad habit of posting various memeries when I’m down: “Ask me a question,” or “Tell me something in your life,” or “Say something nice about me.”  This is a remnant of my blogging roots in LiveJournal, where such interactions were common – but now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve seen such a thing on a serious blog outside of LiveJournal.
And that is, I think, because at its height LiveJournal was so crammed with people and interactivity that it could spark such things.  You didn’t need to have a “serious” blog with lots of entries on Weighty Topics, because it was so easy to get friends you could just pick them off the ground.  And all your friends were there anyway.
You know where I see the “entertain me” memes these days?  Facebook.  I think such posts are a symptom of critical mass, because without a lot of people you say, “Hey, tell me something cool” and not enough people are around to reply, and you just feel stupid.  It’s a corner case that can only show up on the top-tier social networks.
Strange.  Even doing one of those memes feels a little childish by now, as if it’s something a serious blogger shouldn’t do.  I’ve got my own domain, now, do I really need to do this?  And yet there’s that desire where Khan Noonien Singh pats the bed and tells the ship’s historian: “Entertain me.”
So what the fuck.  Tell me something nice about me.  Tell me something nice that happened to you.  Send me a secret.  Fill up my world with something interesting on a day when I’m too drained to dance for you.

Evolutionary Weirdness

The story I’m writing now is a clear window on how far I’ve come since Clarion, because I can view it so vividly and yet I’m spending all this time trying to figure out how to write it.
The story’s simple, and it’s set in a New England seashore tourist town… In other words, where I spent every summer as a kid.  So I have a great deal of familiarity with the location.  I know the ending, which is unusual for me, so there’s no plotting issues.
So what I have here is a tale where I know everything that happens in it, and can close my eyes and literally see the map of where it’s set… And I’m still trying to find the best way to tell the story.
The story is about a girl who goes insane and takes the sea as her lover, and it’s tricky because it’s actually several substories wrapped in one arc – the first 750 words are where she meets her only “real” boyfriend, the next 500 are where she has the fallout with her mother, the next 400 are where she loses the baby and finally snaps, and so forth.  It’s a madness tale.
And in past days, I would have written this opening (as a first draft) and been entirely happy:

Not many talked to Ella, ungainly as she was, so it was left to her mother to lecture her on what the rest of the town already knew: tourists were like the tides. They swept in with the good weather, party-giddy once they’d slipped loose the bonds of their fatcat jobs in New York, forking over $20s for conch-shell necklaces and flimsy T-shirts (“IT’S NOT A BALD SPOT, IT’S A SOLAR PANEL FOR A SEX MACHINE”), guzzling Anchor Steam down at the seaside docks and clumsily steering their oversized, electronics-packed yachts all over the damn harbor.
They flooded into Port Waukanamee in a drunken frenzy, filling it with enough money to make it through New England’s harsh winters, when the shrimp fry-stands shuttered up and a handful of loyal Waukanamites kept the city just warm enough to start up again in spring. Tourists were useful. Tourists were necessary.
Yet you’d have to be as stupid as a tourist to fall in love with one. But Ella had never been much of a girl for lessons….

Thing is, while that’s a decent opening for other stories, it’s a terrible opening for this story. This is a tale about spiraling madness, and what we have in the opening is a distant voice that doesn’t rub up close and personal against the character. It’s the voice of someone who’s not in the town, but a far-distant observer voice… And this story needs to be in lockstep with Ella’s descent, walking right with her into the abyss.
So then I tried starting at the point of maximum impact:

Ella kneels in the salt muck, hermit crabs scuttling away from her screams, jagged oyster shells slashing her feet. Between the contractions, she hears Mama’s words: never fall in love with a tourist, never fall in love with a tourist, never fall in love with a tourist.
She’s been a fool. She hugs her belly tight, hoping to keep the baby pent inside by force of will alone, not sure what’s happening, knowing no one she could ask. The only person left in this world who might love her is now dribbling down her thighs.
She howls, her anguish echoing across the cold September bay.

That’s got everything I would have killed for before: a strong start, a good hook, some strong raw prose. But that’s not the story; the story is the arc of her madness, seeing her start from dumb teenager to old crazy lady, and by starting in the middle you get a stronger start but no middle. You’re seeing this intense moment happen at a time when you know the least about our lead, and as such you take a potentially climax moment and turn it into a “What’s going on?” moment… Which can work for certain stories, but not in a story where the story is the journey is the descent.
I eventually traded in for a not-quite-as-dramatic opening, one where she’s going to meet her boyfriend that she met at the Shrimp Shack, and as such you get to see her at the beginning so the full slide as she becomes loonier and loonier is (hopefully) more unsettling.
The interesting thing is that this story may never gell, because there’s all of these other elements about it that become tricky – it’s the story of about two decades’ worth of crazy, told in flashfic segments, and when you take on something like that then you have this twinned problem in that every flashfic segment has to be entertaining and compelling on its own (so effectively, this one story is about seven separate stories), and it has to pull you through with a linked nature so that there’s a narrative thread that pulls you through the individual segments, like the string on a necklace.
Regardless, it’s just a show of how much damn craft I’ve accomplished.  What I’ve written for beginnings are decent beginnings for the wrong story.  And now that I know enough, I keep turning my tales over and over again, analyzing them with an increasingly experienced mind, to recognize not just works for this sentence but what serves the story as a whole.

Who Do We Disband, And When?

My conservative friends have sniffed at Occupy Wall Street, saying that if they were acting like criminals, they’d hope someone would shut their occupation down just like #OWS is.  Which I guess would be true… if they were as equally upset about the illegal actions of cops covering up their badges to not be identified, shooting rubber bullets at protestors who were merely filming them, and beating people far outside the need of any realistic crowd control.
The lists of Occupy Wall Street troubles are comparatively minor, for a group this size staying as long as they have.  And I take the odd view that while we should expect perfection of any group, and certainly punish individuals who stray from that mentality, dissassembling the entire group because of a handful of bad apples is probably a bad idea.
(If you disagree, then certainly you’ll also agree that foreign countries have not only the right, but the moral privilege, to expel American military bases, which are well-known for bringing increased incidents of sexual assault to their area.)
Now, this is not an essay telling you that we should dismantle anyone.  I think the cops should stay employed.  I think the military bases should stay where we need them.  I think Occupy Wall Street should be allowed to stay where it is, so long as it remains overly peaceful….
…with the caveat that “peaceful” goes both ways.  If the cops harass Occupy Wall Street until Occupy Wall Street reacts, well, I’m not going to condone the activity, but I will understand it – in much the same way I once watched two cops beat up a friend of mine and didn’t blame them at all.  I’m seeing a fair amount of cop-dickishness coming from the protests, but I also do note that the protestors are the ones allowed to put up YouTube videos of their day.
The point I’m making is that the real reason my conservative friends believe that Occupy Wall Street should be shut down is because they see Occupy Wall Street as a threat who should probably be dispatched.  After all, the Tea Party are well-groomed individuals who’ve never harmed a fly, despite the fact that the Tea Party wasn’t required to spend a week standing in one place before they started to get serious national media attention.
I know my conservative buddies will be heartbroken to hear me say this, but if the Tea Party had needed to hang around for two months to make a point, there’d be some random assaults and violence happening.  You put that many humans in one place, someone’s bound to be a dick.  In much the same way that while I don’t condone police brutality in any way, I do understand that cops are human and going to snap, and if a liberal said, “Well, a cop was mean, so we should disband the NYPD,” I’d call him an idiot, too.
Because here’s the deal: I know full well that even if I compiled a database of Occupy-related crimes compared to Occupy-related police department illegal activities, and it turned out that the police were being more dickish, my conservative buddies wouldn’t say, “Well, we should get rid of those police.”  They’d talk about arresting the cops who committed the crimes, and changing the structure to make sure better structures were in place, but they’d never go, “Well, they just shouldn’t be there!”
It’s the way I feel about Occupy Wall Street.  Yeah, I’m sure a significant percentage of them are dicks who deserve to be hauled off.  I’m not convinced that the entire band needs to be broken up.  And I’m honest enough to say it’s because they’re a cause I believe in, and not hide behind some screed like, “Well, they’re not well behaved like my guys.”  (Because the truth is, my conservative associates are really operating off of the idea that one bad apple means Occupy are mostly bad apples who should be tossed out, but one bad cop-apple is just human error and in general the cops are great.)
My guys are kinda dickish.  Based on Sean’s entry, there were probably some things they could have done better to comply with fire codes.  But that doesn’t mean they should go away entirely.
(EDIT: And my favorite quote of the day comes via Twitter: “If only they enforced bank regulations like they do park rules, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”)