Meta: Falling Star

This was my first serious foray back into original fiction after months and months of fan fiction. It's a very different process, because characterization and worldbuilding are about creation as opposed to adherence or clear alteration. In writing fanfiction (at least the way I do), the focus is more on building emotional connections between characters and having a well-paced adventure, so that's what I got to focus on.

Falling Star involved a lot of research on the late fourteenth century in Europe, and then throwing out or altering parts of it because magic. I wallow in description a lot: probably too much, for people who don't like historical detail, but it was a lot of fun to take the time to show that I had done the research. Lord of the Isles as a title is a bit of an exception, since in the real world, it's a Scottish title.

Titles for stories are usually a challenge for me, and I generally hate them after the fact, but I like this one, because it works on a couple levels. The body of the action takes place during a meteor shower, so under cover of what are often misnamed falling or shooting stars, with a lot of important bits deliberately staged at night (the introduction, the first real conversation with Arthur, finding out what Rigel had done). All of the characters except Eadweard are also named after stars: Vega for the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, Arthur as an Anglicization of Arcturus,  the brightest star in Bootes (and also to suggest that he's a good King by way of association with King Arthur), Rigel as the brightest star in Orion. I get a lot of mileage out of that one astronomy class I took in university. In hindsight, I'd have gone for something like Albireo (from the constellation Cygnus) for the King of Alba, because, while it might not suggest a common name for an English King like a modified version of Edward does, it sounds more like Alba and might further suggest that this is Alba rather than England, and things are different here.

Meta: Victoria

I really enjoy writing about places: the idea of setting as character is an aspect of CanLit that's really stuck with me. I like to think that generally I can keep a narrative going, but this piece was really designed as self-indulgent location-porn. It's not particularly plot-heavy. A lot of the way it's framed is because I can't quite conceive of actually doing travel writing and making it interesting to anyone, but I love architecture and the things that make each place unique.

Meta: Snowglare

This is undoubtedly one of the cruelest things I've ever written.

I wrote it in the summer of 2011, and, like so many things, it was for Adam's contest. The prompt was parody, so I wrote a parody of a person.

She's since become a friend, but at the time I was having a lot of difficulty connecting with her. She'd initially taken critique very badly, and then become reliant on getting critique (mostly from me or another friend of mine) before turning in, and hadn't had a particularly good English education (which is something I shouldn't hold against people, but tend to in writing-oriented settings). She'd also written a story with me as a character in it, with particular attention to my bosom. I was neither pleased nor comfortable with this. Since then, she's grown in leaps and bounds, and joined me in the semi-finals this year, as well as being published several times over the course of the year. She and I have also talked a lot more.

Her username is The Solarized Night, which gave root to a lot of the imagery: the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, are the result of solar flares, and are most visible at night.

Luminosity is a term for self-awareness.

She lives in the Southern hemisphere, while I and Adam live in the Northern hemisphere.

With that knowledge, everything else about the poem kind of falls into place: from vague imagery about long nights and the Northern Lights to excoriation of someone I did not consider as acting rationally or particularly intelligently and considered attention-seeking.

What's worse is that she liked the poem, but did not understand the meaning (I will probably link her this post).

Also I got a perfect score for this, the only one I've ever gotten. It is the reason I'm one of five people in the Hall of Perfection, and it can also be read here.

In sum: cruel and petty idea, well-executed.

Meta: Crazy Fairies

So, on Google Drive, in my Writing folder, I have a sub-folder labeled Shorts that has a sub-folder labeled Old.

That's where this is from. It was written in the winter of 2007 or 2008: I'm not sure which. I only uploaded everything to Google Docs in 2010, because I didn't want to lose all of the writing I'd done for the writing group I was part of in high school.

So this is how far I've come as a writer in the last five years, and contrasts with last week when I posted something just barely finished. It's also an experiment in how far I've come as a person able to objectively critique my own work and not just go hide under a rock.

Apparently this was based on a dream I had. Oh! And I think it was around New Year's in 2008, as I drew this:

Apparently these are the characters?

later in January 2008.

So, since it's been so long, we'll do the first run the way I do first runs on most things: caustically.

I am not sure why I am all dismissive of homelessness except that the perspective character is a sociopath. Also dead bodies under plants are kind of a Japanese thing and I was going for Irish.

In the second section, the second sentence is telling rather than showing and could be tightened. I'm not sure if inconsistent capitalization of Garda was meant to be a character thing or is just a consistency fail.

No idea why it's so painfully pseudo-British except I think part of the prompt was that I had to include the word 'chesterfield.'

Lots and lots of telling.

Abrupt shifts! Also telling. Also run-on sentences.

The line about bestiality, and that whole scene, are really awkward. I still find it hard to write those awkward transitions from revelation to calm discussion to acceptance, but fainting is no longer something I tend to use to avoid those transitions.

I don't think they even read the Glob and Snail in Dublin. I have no idea why I included it.

I think I was trying to do a thing about speech bubbles and fairies seeing all spoken language as speech bubbles, but I don't think that came across very well, and has no time to sink in before it's over. Synesthesia is something that interests me, partly because a friend of mine has it with music. Magical synesthesia seemed like the doubleplusgood version of it.

In conclusion: interesting idea, poorly executed.

Meta: Fairy Tale

It should be noted that this was written in the past week, in an inchoate rush for the finals of Adam's contest.

He told me to write a fairy tale, and that it couldn't be a retelling.

After like an hour reading about Aarne-Thompson classifications and other components of fairy tales and nagging people for prompts and a failed first draft that involved Spivak pronouns and arguments and some really overcomplicated stuff with AI and gender, this happened.

The central idea was that the Devil always gets his due, and Orphne would lose in some way that didn't actually involve being triumphed over (thus, cheating at cards).

Then somehow the seven deadly sins?

I wanted to have all of them, with the kind of double thing that the Devil, whose initial sin was pride, would be caught up in lust, and the nymph, who is generally associated with lust and deals mostly in that, would have a mistake of pride.

It came out really well, I think. I don't even know. Next week: something I pull from the depths of the archives, and lengthy and embarrassed meta.

Edit: I won the contest! Wooooooo!

Meta: Purpose

This was written for the semi-final round of Adam's contest. This was the prompt:

Object Perspective
Your assignment for this round is to write a story or poem from the perspective of a kitchen sponge, broom, towel or fork. Yup, that's what I said. Have fun. 

I hated this prompt. I hated it so much. I don't particularly like writing anthropomorphism, and I've grown to dislike reading it, too. I read Silverwing and loved it and thought it was amazing, and I watched parts of the Redwall series as a kid. I read Animorphs and The Ship Who Sang and more werewolf stories than you can shake a stick at, so I was familiar with the more direct way of applying human characteristics to non-human things, too. But at some point I stopped liking it when human characteristics are applied to inhuman things. I like when the alien is alien and written as such. I like well-done xenobiology and earnest tries at xenopsychology and machine intelligences that are machine and uninterested in becoming human.

A lot of times, anthropomorphic objects are presented that way in children's literature. In children's literature, it can be a way to raise awareness of consideration for objects or the environment, or a way to present values in a way that is stripped of a lot of other societal constructs (the Little Engine That Could didn't have to deal with systemic oppression or privilege, just trying his hardest).

But part of all writing is writing to your audience, and Adam is the audience for this contest, and he is not a child. Writing it as a children's story wouldn't have worked, either for him as the audience or for me as a writer.

Honestly I think I spent nearly as much time complaining about this as writing it.

That is not to imply that it was rushed, but that I complained a lot and have several people I should apologize to.

What I hate most about the prompt is that I really like the story and have no real problems with it or areas I think definitely need improvement.

In a piece of irony, I put a silver plate in the dishwasher very late one night after working on this.

Meta: Flight

This was written for Adam's contest, with the prompt of spending a day in your favourite cartoon. The cartoon is The Vision of Escaflowne.

Adam called me out on the transition to the world of the cartoon, and that's something I'm probably going to fix in edits, though the story probably won't live anywhere but here. That's because, as fanfiction, I can't publish it without checking with the IP reps for Escaflowne. It's also because, as self-insert drivel based around one of the most facepalm-inducing tropes in fanfic, I am not going to clutter up my account on Archive of Our Own with it.

Unsure what a facepalm is?

Image from  http://picardfacepalm.com/

It is when Picard cannot bear to look at you and slaps a hand over in exasperation because he's read six different fanfics this week where people who suspiciously resemble the author appear from nowhere and become his love interest. Three of them weren't even spellchecked.

As one may have gathered, I wasn't super-enthusiastic about the prompt. But I love Escaflowne, and it was great to revisit the world, and I watched a bunch of episodes of the series to refresh myself and also because it is still entertaining.

So if I were to edit it, I think I'd change the transition to the cartoon world into picking up a white feather, because that's imagery that occurs in the series and it gives me-as-character an active role in stepping into the cartoon.

Some of the starting part is based on a story I read years ago called How To Be Fantastic, which is a multiple-choice path to survival if you happen to find yourself trapped in someone else's fantasy.

The bit about dancing was because Escaflowne is noted for having an amazing soundtrack, and there's an episode which relies fairly heavily on singing a folk song; similarly, the tarot reading was included as a nod to canon, as was the bag that contains everything (though that was also based somewhat on real life: my messenger bag is capacious and packed full of interesting things).

The persistent subtle-and-not-so-subtle threats of violence (the falling a lot, the attempted kidnapping, the mole-man groping me-as-character) are based on canon, but more broadly: there's a war on in the series, and it has a lot of the pushy courtship nonsense common to a lot of anime.

In the writing itself, I could probably emphasize more that everything hurts a lot and me-as-character is a badass and ignoring the pain on purpose and not just magically unhurt. I'm quite happy with the way I filled the single day I had in the cartoon: I got a lot of stuff in without it being super-crowded or rushed.

Final verdict: needs more editing, not going to get it.

Meta: April

This was written for a contest, under deadline. There is not nearly the usual level of context, subtext, and pop culture reference because of this. Basically I wanted to write silly fluff with the subversion that not all drunken escapades end in sex or jail.

Of course, in my head they go on to fall in love and produce ridiculously successful projects together, the latter being more important than the former.

Oh! Just noticing: male romantic lead was given a Hispanic-sounding last name because I wanted to write non-white characters because it had occurred to me that I used a lot of WASP-sounding names even when I had no particular idea of race when writing characters.

Meta: kiss the golden cross for luck

It's poetry time again, which pretty much translates to spot-the-reference time. This was written for a writing contest in the summer of 2010, and was my first sestina ever. I think it was the first time I thought of form poetry as akin to Scrabble: you have a set of parameters and a set of tools, and you put together the tools you have according to the parameters, individuality dictating that everyone puts them together differently.

I cheated a bit - 'this' is quite simple, and I used 'more' once instead of 'oar' and 'see' once instead of 'sea.' The part I'm quite proud of, though, is my use of 'amber': it means three different things at different places in the poem. I felt quite smug in that, even though only one of the judges caught the reference to Roger Zelazny's fantasy realm, and wasn't entirely sure that it was a reference I'd meant to make.

The metaphor about escape to a more enlightened/licentious place is semi-coherent at best, except for the first stanza, where we have some requisite rejection of Catholicism in favour of Druidic tradition. In the fifth stanza that gets rejected, too, because what's a traditional poetry form without explicit rejection of most forms of tradition?

Meta: Violence and Violins

I got an itch to write, but didn't want to work on any extant projects: I was too restless to refer to an outline, and couldn't think of anything in particular I wanted to write about. So, as usual, I badgered the first friend I talked to for a prompt.

He told me violence, or violins, or violence with violins.

We know each other from the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr, and then through talking on Skype. In Homestuck, the character Rose plays the violin, and the character Dave is associated with swords and is the 'Knight' class in the game they play, meaning that to me he is associated with violence. He also has time-travel powers and deejays, to explain some of the other references.

Rose is a passive class in the game they play, which is why I left her up on the tower. She is also associated with light, and with communing with things that live beyond the stars, which is how that symbolism sneaked in there.

The story itself takes place between events shown in the comic, and is meant to be one of the possibilities that could fill that gap.

The whole tone is somewhat ethereal, which was what I felt compelled to write at the time, but might not be the tone I'd use if I were to make it longer. The tone fits well with Rose, except that her writing is a lot more verbose. The exception is the metaphor about drunk surfers, which is more in Dave's voice. He's fairly verbose, too, though.

I think I caught the tone I wanted, even though it wouldn't be quite the same tone as the comic. It got the writing bug out for the evening, and my friend enjoyed it.

I probably could have done more in depth characterization, but that's one of the joys of fanfiction: Homestuck fans would already immediately recognize them.

Meta: Punk

This was for Adam's contest, and the prompt was 'steampunk mecha.'

What I took to heart was an overarching tone of 'rollicking.' I wanted this to be fun, because the prompt was over-the-top, and I didn't want to take it way to seriously and have to do research. I didn't want to go for an over-the-top parody, either, and I think I kind of skirted the line with it. This piece is about a year old.

The main characters are based entirely on myself and Tristan Tinder, but with easy renaming conventions like one of many ways to mis-parse my name and a shortened version of Tristan's opposite in Tristan and Isolde. I am never terribly opaque in how I rename friends into characters.

There's a lot of info-dumping in the first part, because I wasn't sure how to expose the world in fewer than several thousand words. But I got to refer to people being zombies as "an unusual and cannibalistic form of pica," and that really amused me. As did having Montreal overrun by zombies. I kept thinking about all the bitching that would happen because New Orleans gets sexy vampires, and Montreal is stuck with zombies. Horrible stupid Americans hogging all the nice things, etc.

Also I had been briefly torn between zombies and Bonhomme as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, but zombies obviously won. Zombies also won because I wanted to make the threat obvious without a ton of explanation, and thought Bonhomme might be too regional. That's why the devastation was mentioned in Montreal instead of Quebec City, as well. Montreal is a bigger city, so more people know where it is and it can also be inferred that more people were there to be eaten by zombies. That also let me imply that everything along the St Lawrence had fallen to zombies.

The story is set in a sort of steampunk Victoria because, well, that's where I was living and that was the prompt, but also because islands have it easy in terms of escaping zombie epidemics and Esquimalt is already a naval base. I also associate this area of the world irrevocably with steampunk, because the first instance of steampunk dress that I encountered in real life was the Steampunk Expo held at the Empress, after which I went on a brief tour of the Olympic Peninsula with Tristan, while reading the first actual steampunk novel I'd ever picked up, which was set in Seattle. I'd encountered steampunk before, of course, in the form of the comic Girl Genius and numerous aesthetic references, but hadn't had much personal contact with it.

Now, of course, I am convinced that everyone setting steampunk things in London or other major cities in Europe is Doing It Wrong. Ada Lovelace, for example, lived in Surrey. Explosions and rogue mechanical devices entertain me a great deal more when I picture them ravaging the peaceful English countryside than when I picture them as London's menace-of-the-week (next week: aliens). But the North American West lends itself to steampunk really well in that around the time it is usually set, the West was just starting to be settled. Steampunk technology would make more sense as part of inherent infrastructure in the West.

Obviously, these are just my ramblings, and I've read really well-done steampunk set elsewhere. My favourites, though, are the ones where the runaway technology are a part of daily life, which is usually an invented place.

"When you can't, add some guns," is one of my favourite lines that I have ever written, and encompasses many of my feelings about writing in general. Something not working? Make it worse. Hero half-dead? Whoops, spontaneous regeneration and also an afterlife. Four separate mythical canons involved? Add another. Many of my favourite things to write end with me cackling off into an obscenely complicated sunset.

The engineering things mentioned are in no way based on science. They are based on mental images of dark workrooms and too many gears and arc-welding torches.

The pacing at the end was really off: everything happens too fast, as opposed to the beginning where it's just information and talking. I wanted some acceleration in plot, but didn't manage to execute it the way it was in my head. It could all use a good overhaul, possibly with a bulldozer. But it was ridiculously fun to write.

Meta: Karl Marx

This was written for a contest hosted by a friend of mine, one that focused on songs as prompts for stories and poetry. Here are the annotations I included with my original submission:

Annotations:
Songs referenced:
Rag and Bone by The White Stripes
45 by Shinedown (word count)
Believe by The Bravery
Other:
"Religion is the opiate of the masses." ~ Karl Marx
Religions as represented by their flags (rainbow)

I include those here because that is the context the judge was given, and context is everything.

Rag and Bone was the original prompt, but I was inspired by the concept of the contest to include as many songs as I felt fit. All three songs have similar kinds of grasping desperation, and that's what I wanted to embody.

It was the confluence of listening to Rag and Bone for the contest and Believe from my regular writing playlist that solidified the idea of begging and being on the fringes of society and coming across almost like a caricature of a junkie, but for ideology rather than anything physical.

There's some deliberate ambiguity as to whether atheism is the ground state from which one gets high or whether it's a sharp drop from normal.

Meta: First Person

Perspective and the relationship between the narrator and the story itself fascinate me. Obviously unreliable narrators are one of my favourite things to play with.

That was one of my major motivators in this piece. I wanted a narrator who couldn't trust their memory enough to portray things as dialog, and I wanted an ephemeral tone to the whole piece. That's why fog and steam and coffee imagery persist: I wanted the fic to feel like the first inhale of a London Fog.

I had no particular gender in mind for the priest, and so am unsure if this is edgily transgressional or not. The priest was not an important character to either narrative, and so was not assigned a name or gender. Actually, no one got names, because it was not important to what I was trying to do.

Names are usually one of the last things I come up with, and very rarely have any meaning attached other than plausibility. Unless they are from a culture wherein they select their own names, names will have been selected based on what the parents thought was significant, and may or may not have anything to do with the character themselves. I read a lot of amateur fiction wherein the heroine is named something like RavenMoon Bloodless or whatever because they have long black hair and pale skin and oh they had somehow not noticed they are from an ancient line of vampires. My hyperbole is only slight. This personal context is why I shy away from naming characters at all in most short fiction.

I should also admit that this story is a bit over a year old, and I was experimenting with how well I could stay constrained to present tense. Now, of course, there is the Homestuck fandom, so switching between first, second, and third person and past and present tense is as natural as breathing.

I also wanted to work on wrapping things up, and denouement, as it was something that had been frustrating me in working on my novel at the time. I find short stories helpful as scale models of some problems, though the scope is often much more limited.

Meta: Can I kiss you?

I jotted this down while reading 50 Shades of Grey, because I went to a presentation my freshman year of university that really stuck with me. It was entitled 'Can I kiss you?' and was about consent being 'yes' and not just the absence of 'no,' and how we should always ask.

I sometimes see requests for consent from romance writers like Christina Dodd, which always make me happy. For the many who don't have them, the people who have not explicitly given their consent are still enjoying themselves, and it is still all happily ever after at the end.

But this relates back to cultural narratives and my obsession with normalizing things that are healthy, like consent. The things we consider normal shape our brains.

Another contributing factor to this short story was reading this story (Merlin fanfiction, too sexy for work), and finding the idea of arguing literature as foreplay completely and unutterably adorable.

But, of course, having brought up literary criticism, and having already been toying with the idea of doing this before I started it, the comments about Derrida are not just nonsense filler. It's only in learning about kishotenketsu and reading more about literary criticism and semiotics that I've started to understand that Derrida's presentation of stories revolving around binary opposition has coloured almost everything I've ever thought about storytelling. I've yet to read anything he's written.

So the dialogue here are snippets from an argument I'd love to arm myself well enough to have in a few years.