writing_toole

One of the things I've had batting around in the back of my head recently courtesy of the first issue of Shazam (since, let's be honest, Freddy Freeman is pretty damn nice in it, and he's a guy who desperately needs to get laid...) are the non-hero parts of most superhero worlds. It's not an entirely unexplored area -- I rather like Pen Dumonium's After The Heroes, and henchmen get a bit of love in Mom's Dark Secret's Minion Recruitment Seminar and Jumpin' Jack Flash's Hench! -- but it doesn't get the sort of attention that I think it deserves.

Your average superhero world is awfully exciting, even for the non-supers. Besides all the hero and villain nonsense you've got going, there are a whole slew of alien invasions, underground and undersea civilizations, giant monsters, time travelers, dimensional gates, and random events that make life more interesting than in the real world. And just because most folks wouldn't really care (because, let's be honest, a lot of this happens in NYC analogs. If a giant robot started battling the Chrysler Building most folks would mostly be pissed off because it got in their way) doesn't mean it wouldn't affect how they handled their day to day life.

It'd certainly make the morning ritual more interesting. "Let's see, keys, phone, scarf, monster repellent, giger counter... check!" (Though I'd bet you'd see most smart phones in super universe come built in with radiation detectors alongside the GPS and gyroscopes) The traffic reports wouldn't change much, 'cause it's not like flying saucer attacks can make the traffic on the cross-bronx expressway any worse. The chopper pilots would probably be a bit better paid, and better armed, than they are right now, but that only seems fair.

I may have to fiddle around a bit with this. It'd certainly make for some interesting writing exercises. :)

Also, on an entirely different DC note, and apropos of nothing else, I don't care how much control you've got over the light reflecting off your body -- someone's gonna notice you're nude. (Plus, y'know, movie theatre floors.... ew!) That is all.

I've been thinking, as part of my "let's kill writer's block dead" project, about the ramifications of magic in a society.

I'm one of those horrible folks who always wonders about the side-effects of magic (or technology, they're often essentially the same thing) in fiction. It's one thing to have the Heroes and Villains running around with great magic spells and wacky artifacts, twisting the foundations of reality, but what about the folks who are uninvolved? How does magic affect them?

It will, of course. It can't not. It's unreasonable to think that there's some sort of cutoff with magic, where you're either a Great Wizard or have no talent. Even in those cases where the author postulates some sort of "magic gene" that's specific to human beings (which itself is kind of unreasonable, but that's a post for another time) you're going to find that different folks are better or worse at magic, and have more or less talent with it. And, while Magic Barbie may say 'spelling is hard!' that doesn't mean that folks won't try it, at least to the best of their ability.

So, how do things change when a good chunk of the populace can invoke some sort of magical effects?

It's sensible enough to assume that many folks won't have sufficient skill, training, talent, or opportunity to get any good with magic, and that's fine. Schools will probably teach classes in it much the way they teach art or music, depending on the general level of tech development -- medieval level societies probably won't bother with much for most folks, since it's not like most magic effects are worth any effort past amusing tricks for winter nights. Just getting through the day takes an awful lot of work, and that doesn't really leave a whole lot left over for things that don't really help much.

On the other hand, once you get someone who has sufficient talent or opportunity, what then? How does it change a profession to have the practitioners be able to invoke some sort of effects? I don't mean in the obvious and cliche'd cases like soldiers or physicians. They've been done to death. What about the other folks? Jesters, hat makers, florists, bartenders, or bakers?

I mean, what if you were, say, a pastry chef. Would the profession require a certain level of magical talent? You can watch the Food Network now and you'll see the fancy stuff often involved what I'd consider non-taste-related skills (those sugar sculptures don't build themselves) and how would that change if the chef had magic? Decorations that move or glitter, sugar creations that move on their own, little sugar paste birds that actually sing?

Heck, just being able to pull out fire and frost effects would be handy. Creme brulee without needing a blowtorch (something you couldn't otherwise do in a medieval society) or ice cream on the spot with a blast of cold. You could do all sorts of things that way. I'm not sure it'd fundamentally change some aspects of the profession, but others would be completely different.

The problem, of course, is how would this be anything other than back-story and environmental? What sort of trouble could a pastry chef get into that's interesting enough to read about anyway?

Since I've been hitting the writer's block hard I figured I'd toss this out as it caught my eye. I have, of course, lost the bloody link but this is a writing idea and facts are entirely optional.

The story was about gamma ray bursts. These are astronomical events where, for a few seconds, a godawful huge blast of gamma rays comes spewing out from space. These bursts are some of the most energetic events in the know universe, and most of them come other galaxies. (And, when I say bright, I mean that the bursts are millions of lightyears (or more!) away but as bright as a nearby star. Give the square cube law a bit of thought and feel free to boggle at the amount of energy being spewed out) Some, though, seem to come from closer in and, more importantly, don't seem to be associated with any actual physical thing.

I, of course, immediately thought "wormhole collapse".

Wormholes are a traditional SF Plot Device to get you from pont A to point B without all that pesky dying of old age in between thing that we're kind of stuck with in Real Life. They probably don't exist, and if they do they aren't going to be useful for interstellar travel, but reality's never been something to stop a good plot device.

Generally these things are explained (if they're not just handwaved away) as being caused by the spatial stress between stars or some such technobabble, and it's certainly an explanation with verisimilitude. The problem is that stars are moving, constantly, and if they are warping space then at some point the stress is going to let go in some sort of space-quake.

Or, y'know, a mysterious gamma ray burst.

The interesting story bit there is "what kind of person would willingly work on a space station or ride a ship knowing it could explode into radiation with no notice?" Because, let's be honest, people would. Run the (low) risk of getting vaporized but be able to jump a thousand light years in a minute? Hell yes, we'd get people. But... interesting people. What mix of optimisim, fatalisim, and willing blindness would there be? How would people react? And what would happen to a transfer station if it managed to avoid getting roasted when its wormhole did go poff in a huge blast of gamma rays?

That could be interesting. Not a story I'm likely to write, but still, something to ponder.

And hey, more than four hundred words thinking about it. Take that, writer's block!

Where the mundane protagonist points out to his shifter boyfriend that the whole "gotta change with the full moon" thing comes from the '41 Lon Chaney flick The Wolf Man. As does the allergy to silver, poetry, and aversion to wolfsbane.

The potential for inadvertent comedy in that conversation positively boggles the mind...

Some of the things I'm hoping to get out of plotting the new book in advance is easy foreshadowing and a richness of plot that doesn't require going back and rewriting the beginning bits. I did that with Busted and it worked okay, but it was a pain and I don't think it was as successful as I'd have liked.

The downside to that is a certain... excess of plot and story. There's a large cast in this thing -- two protagonists, at least five major characters, and a half dozen minor characters. Some of 'em are good guys, some of 'em are bad guys, and some aren't really either but they've got their own agendas and that always stirs things up.

Worse, the characters are all adult with plenty of time for interesting pasts and its just so tempting to embellish. Betrayals, secret plots, horrid childhoods, twisted family secrets, and scheming ghosts have all presented themselves, and every one of them works in their own way.

I think I have two and a half books worth of plot so far, and I'm not done. The hardest part about this one isn't going to be writing stuff, it's going to be not writing stuff....

Okay, here's my first shot at a blurb for Love Potion #8. It's supposed to entice you to read without actually giving much of the story away. know it doesn't mention flying islands (dammit) but they're in there.

The story's got a fantasy setting where there's heroism and magic and mayhem, and geography's sometimes as constant as the weather. The same setting as Ben and William (see the sidebar for a link to their stories) tromp around in, more or less, but that's probably kind of beside the point.

Opinions? If it needs a rewrite, this'd be the time to say before I work on the formal pitch. (That's a lot more spoilery, so alas no posting of that one)

I've been working away on Love potion #8, which is the current project. I figured I'd make this a fully done, good enough for the majors, book, so I've been approaching it that way and doing a goodly amount of prep work for it before I started doing much writing. (Or even pitching it at <3, so here's hoping they like it when I'm done... :) )

Both Yankee and Busted were plotted as I wrote, and while that worked okay I wasn't as happy with the end result as I wanted to be. I don't want that for Love Potion, so before I do anything else, I'm getting all my plots in order, figuring out first what the plots actually are, and then what the major events on each plot line are. After that I see about weaving the things together and adjusting as I need.

This, as you might expect, is a bit of a pain, especially as I'm not that great a planner. Still, I think it'll be worth it, knowing what happens and when, along with the motivations for all the characters. Theoretically I could just place the characters and let them go, letting their personalities and situations dictate their actions, but being fully free-form like that makes for really annoying rewrites. (What I've found in the past is that characters collide in inopportune places, and then I have to go back and change situations so they miss each other, or hit each other -- it seems like it'd be easier if that were all laid out to start with. We'll see)

With any luck I'll be done with that this weekend, and then I can get the pitch and blurb put together and off. (Blurb here, pitch to <3) Here's hoping....

I'm going through the edits for for Busted, looking at the place that rykaine has made notes to the text before it gets finalized, and I'm reminded again why it's a good idea to keep your audience firmly in mind when writing. In this case the audience is generally, though not not exclusively, young straight women without kids. That's not, in itself, a big deal, but as I'm not straight, a woman,particularly young. or childless it does mean I've got a different perspective on things, and that can sometimes cause trouble.
( Read more... )
As a for example, in Busted there's a scene where Joe gets Toby ready for bed, and as part of it he ends up fairly wet. I didn't think anything of it -- it's was drawn from real life, and is one of those potential hazards of being around sleepy young boys. Normal, probably inevitable, and unexpected if you've no experience with kids. Like, y'know, Joe. Not being circumcised makes the odds of things being messy quite a bit higher, too.

The folks who beta'd the story for me didn't blink about that bit. They were all either gay guys or women with kids old enough that they'd had to deal with the vagaries of chil (and adult men), and as far as I can tell didn't blink an eye.

When the <3 folks were frowning at the book in prep for ebooking, though... they found it kind of creepy, and not in a good way. Creeping out your audience is a Bad Thing,  so... that scene's getting a bit of a rewrite before it's made permanent.

Guess I get to save the edited-away story for when the boy-child starts bringing home girlfriends... :)

Nor is it Britain. It's amazing how often I forget that.

I'm working on the outline and settings for Love Potion #8, and damn if I wasn't falling onto the old "fantasy worlds all look like western europe with zappy and pointy ears" trap, AKA 'The Tolkein Syndrome'. (Well, maybe not the pointy ears bit. I'm a fan of Irish mythology -- the Good Folk will fuck you up if you're lucky and they don't like you. If they're actually fond of you then you're doomed in so many creatively unpleasant ways)

I hate when that happens. It's lazy writing is what it is, because it means I haven't thought about something I'm doing. Even if it turns out that's what I want it should be that way because I chose it, not because I forgot about it. Bleah. This is a fantasy after all. If I want a realm full of goddamn floating islands connected by gondolas and filigree aqueducts, then I can have that.

And, y'know, I think I do.

But courtesy of teromain , I found Mordred's Lullaby, and I've been playing it on and off most of the day. (Along with the rest of the album. I ended up dropping $30 on music the past two days. Dammit) That's kind of driven everything else out -- I'm going to have to write the love potion story now, and the damn thing's going to be Epic!, which is always a problem.

Ah, well, at least there'll be exclamation points. And banter in the face of overwhelming odds and cranky bastards. That'll keep things interesting.