Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

No new words yet - I just got home from a Buffy marathon. All I can say is Depresso-ep! And that line should have been 33.33% of the Legion of Doom were flayed alive the last time they were in Sunnydale. Maybe that was an intentional mistake.

So, the geeking - there’s a new release of Chimera, the Cocoa Mozilla browser for MacOs X. I downloaded it this weekend, and it’s been crashing up a storm. I’m hoping it’s broken itself in now. The last version rarely crashed for me, so if this one keeps it up I’m going to have to downgrade.

For NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided on a new daily word count of 2,000 to counterbalance the upcoming holiday and my bad habit of getting behind. I may slack off tonight and just round myself up to 20,000.

Word count: 18451

I’m taking a break at this word count because it means I’ve finally caught up. It’s not midnight on the West Coast yet by any means, but at the moment only 5% of NaNoWriters are officially caught up. I owe it all to the muse. When deprived of Internet access for an hour or two, she can really crank out the words. She’s written about 3,000 today, to make up for her inexcusable laziness and surfing yesterday. Actually, now that I count them, I think she wrote almost 3,000 words yesteday, too. Why did I feel so much more productive about it today?

Maybe I’ve stopped fighting and learned to love the technobabble. The title of this entry, Put one word after another, is one of the two pieces of advice from mystery author Julie Smith that came in my NaNo email today. The other one was, DON’T GET IT RIGHT, GET IT WRITTEN! Translated, they mean the only way to write is to write, and the only way to finish is to stop obsessing about quality—very NaNo advice. Yes, it’s the brute force approach to writing, and it’s working well for me despite my pro-muse prejudices. (I’ve been watching too much of The Forsyte Saga - pro-muse makes me think pro-Boer.) While doing some novel research earlier this weekend I stumbled across a quote about the muse; this is what got me muse-musing again:

But it is a fact that, in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious–thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche.
We find this in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious. The ability to reach a rich vein of such material and to translate it effectively into philosophy , literature, music, or scientific discovery is one of the hallmarks of what is commonly called genius.
[…] The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his “storong sense of man’s double being,” when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. –Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

Note that Jung said that, not me. I’m not claiming to be a genius - it’s all too likely my muse has hit on a vein of fool’s gold. I’m just trying to make a meaningful distinction between which of today’s 3,000 words the muse wrote (the inspiration) and which ones I wrote (the perspiration). One thing that makes it hard to diffentiate is the out-of-nowhere quality of all creative thought. Even if you’re piecing together your latest romance novel out of selections from the Cliche Thesaurus, the arrangement is probably still original. So perhaps the question is how original?

I’ll take an example from yesterday rather than today, because it illustrates my point. I was writing a nondescript party scene, in which my main character was chatting with a minor character who just popped out of nowhere the last time I wrote a nondescript social scene. Both characters are refugees from somewhere else, and they were catching up with one another when suddenly, Minor Character pulled something out of his ear! I had no idea he was going to do that. Main Character was extremely interested in the technology behind the little microphone from Minor Character’s ear because he used to make similar devices Back Home. (I blew up Home in the first scene. That was fun.) It turned out that the Ear Device was created by an entirely new female character. And look, there she was on the other side of the room, ready to provide a needed love interest for Main Character. I had no clue, until the ear incident, how I was ever going to get Main Character involved in this new society.

So of the approximately 800 words in the party scene, I would say most were written by me, but at the point where Minor Character pulls Ear Device out of his ear and brings together even more threads of my plot than mentioned above, that part was the muse. I went on to finish the scene with a nondescript introduction of Main Character to Female Character.

To put it too briefly, the muse has been responsible for the plot of my novel, because she’s good at pulling threads together. I didn’t outline beforehand; in fact, I didn’t even come up with the subject of the novel until the week before. Up until then I had been considering several other ideas from my sci-fi universe’s timeline (two of them children’s stories), and even a disaster novel I’ve wanted to write for a long time. This was the only idea that came together, and it came together from several directions, including, oddly enough, a conversation with a coworker about an old mainstream novel she’d read.

I don’t mean to imply that the muse can’t write prose - she can. She’s written some lovely sentences in her day. Muse-prose is the sort of stuff that echoes the themes of the novel, and at only 18,000 words there isn’t much to echo yet.

Some NaNites have claimed that they’ve spent the first 20,000 words on character development and still don’t have a plot. I’m afraid I may also have this problem. I have mostly dialogue and flashbacks so far, and the character development is almost done. I think of it as my main plot all being there, but it’s more of a thematic direction than a logical sequence - there’s definitely not enough action. Aside from Ear Device, which just appeared yesterday, I have no subplots. I need to get at least one subplot in before I reach the end of the main plot, because subplots have to tie in to the main plot at the end.

I know what Julie Smith would say - stop thinking and get back to writing.

Word count: 14,000 (inflated, see details below)

Now this NaNoWriter is truly disgusting. The pulps are dead, people! Please stop trying to revive them. According to another thread, Zette has written between six and nine novels this year, so a word count of 90,000+ isn’t unbelievable. No one has pointed out the obvious yet - Zette must be an Artificial Intelligence! Real people have the decency to keep it down to 25,000+, though a few are over 30,000.

I found Zette by accident, but you can also sort the author list by word count.. Quite a few people are done already. About 900 people are on-schedule out of 14,000, and 10% of the NaNoWriters are ahead of me. Considering that I’m a few days behind, that’s not many marathon runners in the lead. If I write 10,000 words today, and another 10,000 tomorrow, I could be a contenda. Of course, they’re all still writing, and who knows how many people either haven’t submitted their word count, or aren’t keeping it up-to-date? I’m not keeping mine up to date - I tend to stay away from the NaNoSite because of its time-sink tendencies (which this entry amply displays). It took me a while to realize that you could set your word count before the official counting begins on November 15th.

I have no idea how anyone is getting their word counts. My usual word counts are counts of actual words, where anything in the dictionary counts as a word. I have a little emacs-lisp script that does the counting. I have a LaTeX manuscript class that will count words the way editors do, which is by line-length in a fixed font, where a word is six characters (including spaces). I haven’t actually run it through LaTeX yet…hold on. Nice! According to LaTeX, I have 14,000 words, and 56 pages of double-spaced, 12pt Courier. And who’s to say I don’t?

Word count: 11760

Yes, I’m behind again. Five thousand words every three days can get to be a bit much. I should probably bump myself up to that 2,000-a-day plan, just to compensate for my irresistible urge to goof off. For my latest NaNoWriMo procrastination I’ve set my Mac up to play Filk Radio. So far it’s been more folky than filky in my style, but I like folk music so I’m still listening.

I tried several browsers before I struck one that worked. Chimera, my Mac browser of choice, isn’t fancy enough yet to let the user choose an application for a new streaming file type. Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is supposed to do it, but despite following the directions to the letter, twice, all it did was crash. Yet another reason never to use IE, as if I needed more…

So I dug out Mozilla, which, like Chimera, is not officially supported by Filk Radio. I don’t usually run it because it’s not as fast as Chimera, though it’s more full-featured. The setup was much quicker than the unsuccessful IE version - I just followed the Netscape instructions, more or less. It thought I was on a T1 line, but I corrected that little misapprehension quickly. Presto! Filk! Then, once it had passed the streaming MP3 baton to iTunes (the designated helper application), I closed Mozilla and reopened Chimera. I’m stubborn that way.

I don’t quite understand how a cover of “From a Distance” with a couple of pronouns changed qualifies as filk. The ratio of meta-filk - filk about filking - to filk proper - songs about sci-fi - is even higher than the ratio of ville-wank to ville-fic, were that possible. Ah, here comes a real filk, of “Hotel California” - any fannish gear/you will find it here…

Word count: 1729

I’m still behind on my novel, but I have an excuse. Yesterday as I was happily novelizing I also downloaded some updates for my Mac - because it asked so nicely and did it all by itself. Apparently the updates broke Emacs (Fatal error (4). Illegal instruction., if you’re curious). All I could find about the problem was this similar situation from somebody using the Hurd. He said recompiling solved the problem, so I rebuilt Emacs and that solved the problem.

My mac is past three years old now, and it doesn’t build Emacs for Mac OS X as fast as a shiny new TiBook would, so it took me a while to recompile, which is my excuse for my word count still being so low. I did notice this nice Mac Emacs FAQ while I was waiting, though.

Word count: 5 (49,995 to go)

But they’re the most important five words! Yes, I’ve come up with an opening line that summarizes the entire novel. In fact, it’s so telling that I can’t put it at the beginning where (everyone knows) the opening line that summarizes the entire novel goes. I’ll have to hide it after a dramatic, interest-grabbing prologue instead.

I know, the suspense is killing you. Here it is: “Tell me about your father.” Lovely in its triteness, it will slip by the reader like a greased pig. Other NaNoWriters may have stayed up all night to take advantage of their first piece of November; I went to bed. The muse needs her beauty rest if she’s going to pump out 50,000 words without even an outline.

Besides outlining, my wasted pre-NaNo weeks should have been devoted to research. I did manage to stop by the library for a pile of research material before it was, technically, November. It’s rare that I complete something hours before the deadline like that.

Speaking of planning, the obvious approach to NaNoWriMo is to divide 50,000 by 30 and come up with a daily word count of 1,667. That approach, while mathematically sound, is far too pedestrian for my work of speed-art. I prefer to divide 50,000 by 800 to get 63 scenes. That’s not quite round enough, though, so let’s divide 50,000 by 833 to get 60 scenes. That’s 2 scenes a day, a literary concept my muse can wrap her (stolen) mind around. One scene for breakfast and one for dinner, as it were.

Since it’s the afternoon already, I’m one scene behind. The weekend is clearly the time to catch up on such things, so I hope that by Sunday I’ll be back in the running. There’s no hope of my being the first to the finish line - there are 10,000 participants this year, I heard, and I’m no trilogy-writer like the fantasy people. This is just a little sci-fi novel that’s off to a slow start.

I had dropped the issue of badfic off my backblog list, but Lori linked an amazing article on the subject by Nick Lowe, The Well-Tempered Plot Device. It cannot be described, only excerpted:

…bad writing is governed by subtle rules and conventions of its own, every bit as difficult to learn and taxing to apply as those that shape good writing.
And while I’m about it I’ll propose a new definition of magic, account for the existence of Lionel Fanthorpe, and show you a way to derive pleasure from Stephen Donaldson books. (Needless to say, it doesn’t involve reading them. But neither does it involve burying them under six foot of badger manure and napalming the lot, which you might think the obvious answer.)

Yes, I did think that was the obvious answer. I’m not alone! (By the way, I’m blogging as I read the article, for that elusive first impression.) Ah, clench-racing… All I need is a few Catherine Asaro novels and some gullible friends and I can take up gentled-racing.

…I like to term this kind of thing Collect-the-Coupons plotting. It would be much too complicated to have three goodies overcome the whole usurping army, or at any rate it would be far beyond the plotting powers of a Lin Carter. So what you do instead is write into the scenario one or more Plot Coupons which happen to be “supernaturally” linked to the outcome of the larger action; and then all your character have to do is save up the tokens till it’s time to cash them in.

Obviously, this is an artifice which lends itself particularly well to fantasy writing, and is capable of widely varying subtlety of application. I think The Lord of the Rings, or Lord of the Plot Coupons, is the chief villain here, unless you want to trace it back to Wagner and his traditional sources.

Yes, the man is a genius. He goes on to explain how the author himself can appear in fiction:

One thinks irresistibly of Gandalf’s famous words to Frodo when explaining the logic of The Lord of the Plot Devices: “I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.” Frodo, unfortunately, fails to respond with the obvious question, to which the answer is “by the author”. […]
But actually, it’s not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters, chiefly on account of its omnipresence and lack of physical body. It’ll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon’s Plan, or The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I’d only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. “The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot.” “Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot.” When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero’s head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses “a great disturbance in the Plot.”

Was that deep or what? Unfortunately, it doesn’t help me much. Although I approve of pulps and plot devices, I have a tendency (in original fiction) to implant my plot devices in the characters’ brains or genomes. If you don’t look too closely, it passes for characterization.

I’m feeling uninspired - or rather, drained after a rant on-list about condescension - so I’ll get to that backblog of material now.

First of all, I forgot to mention that it snowed yesterday. In Boston, on October 23rd. The leaves aren’t even properly turned yet and there was snow falling out of the sky in broad daylight. Yet people keep telling me it’s going to be a mild winter.

Second, on the very hot topic of whether the sniper in Washington, D.C. should be referred to as a sniper: yes. I know the real snipers are up in arms because the alleged sniper didn’t use proper military-issue sniping equipment or murder his victims from a sufficiently challenging distance, but you can’t pin this use of the term on the sniper media circus. The dictionary definition of sniping is to shoot at exposed individuals from a usually concealed point of vantage. He shot at people, they didn’t see him - ergo, sniper.

I forgot to mention the forums at NaNoWriMo. They reminded me how much I hate forums. A nice little flat-level forum, say, of the size of the J/C Index message board isn’t bad despite the trolls, but when you get into thousands of posts like at TrekBBS, who has time to follow it all? There are no trolls at NaNoWriMo, but still, a thousand people saying hi, a hundred random topics about novel genre - I can’t face it. I’d rather meet the people in person, though, unfortunately, I’ll be away this weekend so I won’t get to go to the Boston kick-off party.

Liz gave a 1 to 10 scale for ranking fic a while back. There’s a more accurate way to rank fic, though - put it all in order, from Revisionist History to Burning Thistles Amongst Thorns. The story’s score is the percentage of stories that are ranked beneath it. That’s how the SAT’s are scored (or at least, how they were scored before the grade inflation). Of course, a scanner doesn’t have to suffer through the bad fic.

There are simpler ways to do it. One could, for instance, take down the name and summary of every story posted to ASC in the course of a year, or every story in the J/C archive, then ask fans a binary question about the list - say, “Do you remember story X which was about Y?” Then rank the stories by the percentage of readers who remembered them, or remembered them fondly. Anyway, it could be done. People would scream bloody murder if you did it, but it could be done.

The new backblog list is:

• The Jossing of Anya
• Extreme measures in veterinary medicine
• That the things I hate about Buffy are just like the things I hated about XF

As long as I’m here, I’ll add my rant on condescension:

So stop it already.

National Novel Writing Month is coming soon, and I do have a novel in mind. At first I’d decided to write a children’s book, not because I was especially inspired, but because it seemed like the most efficient use of 50,000 words. While it’s the ideal for a month-long spate of novelizing lunacy, fifty thousand words is too much for a novella and too little for a novel, market-wise. In my complete ignorance of children’s lit, I thought it might be an appropriate length for that.

As far as I can tell, a children’s book is a book about children. Yes, it’s shorter than Gone with the Wind and less racy than Anne Rice erotica, but there are adult books that are neither infinite nor smutty. Maybe there are certain factors of tone involved; I think my tone would do. My interest in writing for children is not the smut-free pass, the reduced word count, or even the off-chance of striking it rich with the next Harry Potter phenomenon.

Children’s books are the best-loved books. I may have read better books since the Chronicles of Narnia and Taran Wanderer, but they just haven’t hit me the same way. I think it’s more the childhood than the literature - my attachment to LotR dates to elementary school. Man of La Mancha, the musical, wouldn’t form such a large part of my worldview if I hadn’t grown up on it. So yes, I want to scar youth permanently the way Aldonza’s song did me.

But I won’t be doing it for NaNoWriMo, because another idea came to mind. A certain character has popped up in a couple of my uncompleted novels (the Wrong Novel and the Wrong Prequel, to be precise), and I decided that since he fascinated me so much more than my nice female protagonists, he deserved history - a name and a habitation.

I’ve known for a long time that his name was that of an ex-boyfriend of mine, though I’ve buried it in faux-futuristic versions in the other novels. If I stopped to think about it, I might find some unresolved bitterness in the fact that he’s destined to start a war, end a golden age, and perhaps get a little genocide in on the side. Simple filicide will do for the first 50,000 words of his life, though.

I looked up some text generators along the lines of Lorem Ipsum today. Using something called the Dada Engine, one generates postmodernist journal articles, one writes adolescent poetry, and the third does band names. Another site provides legalese on demand.

A belated article on the Alan Sokal affair led me to the pomo generator above, and on to thoughts of what it means for a text to be sense rather than nonsense. SETI, for example, isn’t really a search for intelligence but a search for that which can be distinguished from random noise.

I thought for a moment of adapting the Dada Engine to fanfic, but in fact even the most mockable fanfic is too linear for the random approach. Just suppose, for a moment, than a computer could generate fanfic. (I once accused Suz Voy of being an artificial fanfic intelligence program.) What would make our live fanfic better than the canned thing? How would we know the difference between bad human-written fanfic and good computer-composed fanfic? I don’t know.

I get the feeling that a good computer program could write soap opera scripts. How far is it from there to fanfic? I’m tempted to write a fanfic-generating program myself, but I waste enough time trying out new styles, and we all waste enough time reading bad fanfic. There’s no need for computers to get into the game.