Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

While surfing the blogs, I came across a
guy who wrote an Emacs interface for MoveableType. Just the thing for me, I thought; all my geekiness in one convenient elisp package…but it wasn’t exactly a convenient package. First I had to download SOAP for MT, so MT could communicate with metablogging tools. Then I had to download a laundry list of things that mt.el, the emacs mode, required: xml-rpc.el, the url package, the w3 package and the elib package. The author provided the first, but I had to check url and w3 directly out of source, and then it took me a while to figure out that yes, elib hasn’t been revised in seven years. (I was reluctant to download something from 1995.)

Nor was this post posted from emacs. When mt.el was finally working, I got an error back from MoveableType itself, saying it couldn’t find the metaWeblog perl module. I think that means that I can no longer put off upgrading to the latest version of MovableType. Wish me luck…

[P.S.] I upgraded to 2.21, though it looks the same as 2.0. There are new geeky things lurking beneath its placid blue exterior, though.

[P.P.S.] Testing from emacs…1..2..3…

[P.P.P.S.] Whoo-hoo! Now there’s an evening successfully
frittered away.

Thanks to Seema for a wonderful link: November is
National Novel Writing Month. It
reminded me of my favorite quote from
rec.arts.sf.composition:
“Hello, my name is Anna, and I write trilogies.” – Anna
Mazzoldi.

From the FAQ:

There’s even a chapter organizer in Boston. I’m not sure whether I’ll do a
fan novel or an original novel, but I’m a sucker for a deadline. Who is with me?

Whenever I balance my checkbook lately (usually on the T), I wonder why I bother. In fifteen years I’ve never caught a bank in a mistake - my arithmetic skills only get worse, and the banks’ better. I may as well give up and take their word for it. They must have really good software.

But I digress. Mozilla has been called a web-designer’s browser, a slow car on the information superhighway, and a toy for geeks who just can’t get over Netscape 2.0. (That last one is me.) My mac is old, so Mozilla was extra slow for me.

But not anymore! I downloaded Chimera, a version of Mozilla with native OSX widgets and other geeky things. And, of course, Tabbed Browsing. You’re nobody if you don’t have tabs.

Speaking of tabs, a new beta of Opera for Mac is out. I’m over Opera, myself, but if buggy open-source betas make you nervous for your Mac, you might want to try a buggy commercial
beta of Opera instead.

Yesterday was Bring My Mac To Work day, so I took the opportunity to download the emacs source tree from
gnu.org and build Emacs for OSX according to the directions kindly provided by the prince of Emacs for Mac, Andrew Choi. I owe him my last three Emacs builds and a few binaries, too. I now have a bleeding-edge Emacs.

Confused? Emacs is a text editor, the way The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy. One you’ve known Emacs, you’ll never go back to vi or Notepad or whatever pale shadow of a text editor you’ve been using. There’s even a wiki devoted to the text editor to end all text editors. If you’d like to try the latest OSX version,
drop me a note and I’ll build an installer for you.

September 30th and October 1st seem to be very popular deadlines. I have
one nonfiction article due on each day, which makes it hard for me to think about
the fiction deadlines coming up on the same days.

October first is the receipt deadline for
Strange
New Worlds VI, the annual Trek amateur mediafic contest. Note that I
don’t say fanfic contest. Since the majority of fanfic themes are
either banned outright or heavily frowned upon, it can hardly
be called a fanfic contest.
Almost all the don’t mess with the characters rules of the
Paramount pay-per-fic media franchise are in effect at SNW. (For more about
SNW as pay-per-fic, see my review of
SNW IV.)

I don’t have enough time to write fanfic, never mind pay-per-fic, and the
only think I have approaching a complete, unpublished story is a chapter of
the ever-to-appear Seven Saga which just wouldn’t gel into a real fic. Should
I give it an emergency plot transfusion, just to sell it into slavery to Paramount?
Nah.

The other fiction contest coming up is much better about leaving story
rights in the hands of the writer.
The quarterly and annual postmark deadline for
Writers of the Future,
the biggest speculative-fiction contest I know of, is
September 30th. Winners get dough along with a week-long writing workshop.
On the downside, it’s run by the L. Ron Hubbard people and, no surprise, doesn’t
allow fanfic. I’ve been reading Writers of the Future XVI, and
finding the fiction a little too speculative for my tastes. I’m hoping for a nice,
juicy space opera before I hit the back cover.

Another upside of WotF is the writing essays scattered throughout the
contest anthology. The best one so far was about…writing. A good story,
Algis Budrys says, should have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the
beginning, you introduce the character, the context and the problem. In
the middle the character attempts to solve the problem and fails - three
attempts, three failures. That’s the rule of three - two is too little, four too much.
Next comes victory, still
in the middle. The end is devoted to “validation”, some sort of external
evidence that the story is really over. The example he gives is “Who was that
masked man?” The character, by the way, doesn’t change - he is only revealed
by the action, not transformed.

Yes, it’s simple, yes, it’s formulaic, and yes, it’s a little odd, but I thought if
I went back to my UFO folder and applied these rules, I might actually come
out with at least one finished story. If I only had more free time…

I was home sick one day this week, and despite being high on antihistamines,
I got more writing done than I usually do healthy. I found it relaxing to have the
whole day ahead of me to write whatever the muse chose to write. For some
reason that doesn’t work with Sundays.

It’s hard for me to get the whole picture of a story in my head with just a few
spare hours after a long day of startup-meltdown craziness. The muse wants her
mental lebensraum. If only fanfic paid the rent, she could have it.
I wonder if so many college students drop off the face of fandom when they
graduate because of the sudden lack of muse-time.

I’m way behind on ASC, as usual, so I just read a set of three-week-old posts about writing fanfic series. Among them was a link to Phoenix Virtual Television. I’ve noticed how virtual series tend to attract non-fanfic readership, and the FAQ for PVT brought that point home when they said that virtual series allow character development, while other fanfic has to return the characters in their original state at the end of the story.

Now there’s a sure sign of someone who hasn’t actually read any fanfic. Voyager has been off the air for a while, but I’m pretty sure that Janeway was never a prostitute, Chakotay a deadbeat dad, Paris a starship captain, Torres a housewife, Tuvok a double agent, Neelix a naked Lothario, Seven a brain-sucking not-so-ex-Borg, Kim lucky in love, or the EMH off-screen. That’s the stuff of fanfiction, along with weddings and babies and angst and character death.

The trouble with writing a fanfic series, I hear, is keeping track of your own canon. I haven’t written any myself (unless the unpublished fragments of the Seven Saga count) and I don’t read any except Lori’s Captain and Counselor. Not that I have anything against series; the show itself is already a series, and that’s enough continuity for me.

By ’series’ I mean a series of freestanding works. A show like Babylon 5 where you find yourself asking, “Who’s that?” and “What the heck is going on?” in every other scene, and the answer, if anyone can provide one, is longer than the commercial break, is not a series but a serial. Soap operas are the classic example of serials, though most serials are closed-ended - serialized novels in magazines, or one-season soap operas in South America. The only thing worse than an endless serial is a pseudo-serial like the X-Files that pretends to have an arc but really just tosses out disconnected bits of rubbish about pox, bees, clones and black oil. But I digress.

Is a series fundamentally more enjoyable than a single “original” work? That’s the question I asked myself when I reached Memory in my rereading of LMB. I doubt I would have sympathized so much with Miles if I hadn’t expected better of him. Does that mean I’m going to go forth and write a million words about Seven of Nine? Probably not.

But I am tempted.

This week has been a depressing one for me as a writer. First,
Signs
bowled me over with its terseness. Movies don’t usually remind me how much
easier it is to tell a story with the characters there, flashing their
facial expressions and flaunting their tones of voice. The medium has so much
power that producers can be infinitely lazy and still get away with it; if, just once,
they do the work, the effect is quite depressing for those of us confined to print.

Even a live storyteller can convey so much more than a flat page - I haven’t
listened to anyone reading flat lately, but I recall the magic of reading aloud. If
you don’t know the story, you have to be a sort of psychic, foreseeing the end
of the sentence early on, guessing the tone on the fly…

So I have a stunning image of a moon crashing into a planet on my
desktop at work. My more cynical co-workers (if any are more cynical than
yours truly) might take it as a comment on the future of the company in the
current economic conditions. A big ocean makes for a mighty big splash. I’m
supposed to be tossing my own moon at other large objects in
Colony, but the lovely artwork on the screen is so much more
impressive than the picture in my mind.

As if that weren’t enough visual depression for one week, I went to
the Museum of Fine Arts last night. Admission is free on Wednesdays, though
I discovered you have to stand in line to get your free ticket now. The free
ticket says $15.00 on it - either they’re trying to impress us freeloaders with
just how much revenue we’re depriving them of, or there’s some sort of
accounting scam going on somewhere.

Where was I? I forgot to check out the textile room, my personal favorite,
but I saw the temporary exhibit of Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century,
from local collections. Some of the miniatures were amazing - I almost believed
that velvet sleeve was popping out of the painting at me, and the rug…you
have to see the rug to believe it. From across the room, the landscapes looked
like light was coming out of them. Looking at tiny, fantastic landscapes (and
even the ones named for real places were invented) I was newly discouraged
in my attempts to describe worlds, or even just trees, in words.

Maybe reading a little poetry would cheer me up.

I’m a proponent of they as the neuter singular pronoun in English.
I came across defenses of singular their back when I used to read
Jane Austen fanfic. In fact,
this page is
probably the very one I came across in my fateful search for Jane
Austen-related material. Many fanfic addictions must begin with such nebulous
desires for more, though most don’t lead to
The Derbyshire Writers’ Guild.

I think Liz was recommending new fandoms as a way to revive flagging
muses. Maybe I should go back to my first fandom - maybe I should write
Jane Austen fic. (For an amusing JA metafic, see
Charlotte’s
Complaint. The grass isn’t any greener on the other side of 1900.)

I have rather romantic ideas about Real Writing (as opposed to fanfiction,
where I’ve seen the worst literature has to offer, and then some). One of
them concerns how you burst onto the scene like LMB and they shower you
with Hugo awards. Not that this was going to happen to me,
mind you, but it was an ideal to strive for.

My personal plan was to get one short story into Analog and
then die happy. I’m not much for planning ahead, though I suspect that getting
published would only lead to more trying to get published, rather than the
contented old age I’ve been hoping for.

What I didn’t expect was to open up a magazine from last month and find
a short story of mine in it. At first I didn’t believe the byline - I write a column
for this magazine, and that could easily lead to typos. Nor was I quite sure,
looking at it after a more than a year, that I’d written the thing. (It did come
back to me after a few paragraphs.)

When I first sent it in, the
editor, like the Real Editor he was, said I was telegraphing the ending and
made some other equally non-encouraging remarks about the story.
I assumed he’d sent it straight to the circular bit-bucket.
Either the new editor has different tastes, or they’re getting desperate for
fiction again. I can’t really complain that
they disinterred the thing and published it, but they could have at least
told me about it. It’s not like they’re paying me - by fanfic
logic, they therefore owe me feedback.

I don’t like this sneaking up on Real Writing. My career should start like a
good plot, at the first significant twist. I wish I had that trick of appearing out
of nowhere like Penny or MJB, but I think I talk too much for that.

I once said a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Aristotle agrees. (The translation is from A New Aristotle Reader, J. L. Ackrill, ed.)