Naril

NaNoWriMo Discussion

I'm still on track and even a little ahead, with 1900 words last night.

I'm committing pretty hard to the idea that this story is going to have a fairly slow burn. There are two timelines that eventually meet and collapse into one, and I'm cycling between each one with each chapter, and the protagonist undergoes a radical change between them, and then embarks on the actual character arc the real story is taking place on. I expected the construction to be complicated, and so far I've been right. But so far it's been a lot of fun to do the braiding and planning, and I think I can see what the final shape is going to look like, at least for the first, shitty, pass. If I ever get around to doing a rewrite and edits, I can already see places where things can be tightened together, but we'll see if I wind up having that kind of interest in the story afterward. I'm enjoying the journey all the same, though. :3

The Sunday Group

all I'm promising is that the next post won't take 22 days. :3

The Sunday Group

Morgan glanced at Malone, her hands still balled into fists and gathering in Eleanor’s jacket with white-knuckled anger. She was used to living a life of suspicion, but this particular betrayal cut much deeper than she had expected. The Group, its members, and even its mysterious benefactors were supposed to be helping mortals, to defend them when they didn’t even know that something was with an intent to do harm. That was the reason she had sought them out in the first place - well, one of the reasons, at any rate. That was the trouble with being a monster with a conscience; you knew all too well what monsters were capable of.

And now here she was. Eleanor had crossed the line that Morgan had strained against for her entire life, and she’d done it without needing to, and now someone who didn’t deserve it might be damaged forever. Not only that, but the Group was in danger, and no matter what was going to happen, they would need the skills of a Practitioner of the Art. That meant that, at least for now, they would have to work together, they would have to be side by side. Or, at least, two sides, side by side. Malone turned to walk toward the house, and Morgan pulled Eleanor an inch closer.

“You’re supposed to be better than this, Eleanor,” she said in the woman’s ear, her voice a velvet-lined hiss, “You’re supposed to be better than me.” Then she stood and straightened, letting Eleanor’s jacket go and turning away herself.

The Lachallan House stretched into the darkening sky above her, the locks and chains on the door already having been bypassed by someone else in the Group. There were others already inside, the doors gaping open and showing the dust of at least a decade over every surface in the house. Morgan put her hands in her pockets and made her way up the stairs, trying to suppress a shiver that ran down he back that had nothing to do with the rapidly chilling air.

She felt herself coming a little unraveled, the tight control she kept over herself shaken not only by Tragellan’s behavior but by the scope and depth of whatever had been waiting for them at the airport. These...sorcerors, or whatever they were, had managed to tap into some kind of real power, something with a depth that she hadn’t expected and hadn’t seen in so long that she’d hoped to never see its kind again. The car chase alone - what would people think? And, for that matter, why weren’t there any police cars coming or a helicopter hovering over the house? The implications were more than a little troubling.

Morgan nudged the door open with her foot, keeping her hands resolutely in her pockets. She already felt like there was too much to process and the last thing she needed to do was touch something in here, at least for the next few minutes. Through the door, she sawfootprints in the dust, but it only took a moment to see that they were only those of the Group’s - or, in other words, nothing out of the ordinary, or at least nothing that made footprints.. She closed her eyes, shook her head, swallowed down a thick feeling in the back of her throat, and turned back to the car, making her way to the others clustered around Holt.

“Let’s get her inside,” Morgan said, “There’s a parlor off the main room here, with a fainting couch. It’ll get her off the ground and in the light, somewhere Tragellan can take a look at her. Then maybe we can figure out what’s going on.”

She looked at Kennedy, and saw the worry on her face, “This place isn’t…it isn’t good,” Morgan said after a few moments, “I think I know what you saw. It’s much worse than that, but if we stay on the first floor, there’s a lot more that’s…well. Not normal, but safer.”

Malone was standing, which surprised Morgan a little - whatever the totem mask had done seemed to be working, anyway. She thought about offering the woman an arm to lean on while she made her way into the house but - no. Morgan didn't need the after-images of whatever the tiki had done to Malone in her psyche and right now, she wasn't entirely sure what would happen if she touched Malone's skin, accidentally or otherwise. She was, suddenly, aware of the thinness of the jacket she had around her shoulders and her skin prickled in reaction to something that had nothing to do with the chilly breeze.

She watched Manny and Leon carry Holt with all the care they could manage, which was more than Morgan thought. Running on memories and with almost automatic steps, she guided them to a door that hadn’t been opened in decades, pushed it open with a creak. The parlor beyond had been painted in tones that, over time, faded to various shades of ‘alarming,’ but the springs and cushions could still manage. Eleanor fit on a fainting couch and only overflowed it a little, and there were pillows to prop up her head, her eyes open but unseeing. Morgan moved back to the door, and gingerly flicked a light switch, standing well back. With a pop, a crackle, and a couple of fizzles of instantly-blown bulbs, lamps came on in the parlor and filled the place with the warm glow of incandescent light. All the dust, spiderwebs, and everything else a neglected property accrues were thrown into warm relief, but nothing leapt or scuttled out to attack them.

In the light, Tagellan moved to examine Holt, and Morgan turned away from the woman - or, rather, everything she reminded her of at the moment. She could feel the other members of the Group’s eyes on her, the questions that were hanging in the air, drawn tight and incandescent.

Morgan drew in a breath, blew it out slowly. She didn't turn around to face the other members of the Group, her eyes closed, memories from decades ago flowing back through her mind.

"All right. We probably shouldn't stay here long, although I can't imagine who might come to look for us," she said. "This place was the headquarters for the Lachallan Society, and it's been in evidence with the FBI for...a very long time. Officially, it's still in the custody of the Bureau, but...well. There's been some mistake with the paperwork, and while the bills are still getting paid and someone comes in once every so often to check on the place, I should expect that almost nobody at the Bureau knows that this place is still on the books." She cleared her throat, "I should know, because I'm the one that did it, and I'm very thorough when I want to be. We'll probably be safe here for a few days at least, but I also don't know if we'll want to stay here that long."

"Most of the worst things that happened here were upstairs. I'm not going to guess which one Kennedy found, but I will say that what's up there...well. There's are reasons that-" Morgan's voice hitched, and she swallowed, "that the Bureau - that I - got involved."

There. That was it. The closest she'd come to admitting the truth, and the closest she'd come to telling anyone in so, so long. She felt her shoulders tense up, felt tears burn at the corners of her eyes. Not tears of shame or anger, but of frustration of what she was certain was going to be a drowning inevitability. Someone would ask, and she'd long since resigned herself to telling the truth: She was one of the things that went bump in the night. She was the kind of thing that the Group - and the Bureau, and the mercenaries - hunted down. There would be consequences, and a long life had told her to prepare for the worst. So far, she hadn't been disappointed.

Would she run? She didn't know. She wouldn't hurt them, certainly. There were other things at stake here, and the Group would need one another far more than they would need Morgan, she was sure. But she also had no intention of being killed by a Tiki mask, no desire to return to the crushing void behind the mind of mortalkind. She flexed her fingers, and closed her eyes.

"I don't know what happened on the highway," Morgan said, "That...thing that chased us. It attacked Malone, and I'm going to guess that stabbing her wasn't the only thing it did. And we need to find out how they knew we'd be here, how much we've been set up." Morgan turned her head a little, just enough to put Tragellan in her peripheral vision, "I'm concerned that this may not be the first time Holt's mind has been invaded. Whoever these people are, they had Holt's sister. They had her blood, and they clearly have a Practitioner among them, or something that's channelling power through them. Making a link wouldn't be out of the question, even while we were on the plane."

She took in another breath, but blew it out in a slow stream instead of speaking further. What came next would be...what came next. They were safe, for the moment, and together, for the moment. There were too many questions, the air was too thick with secrets, and there was too much that wasn't what it seemed to be. Maybe with a little time, they could see a way forward. Maybe they'd find that way together.

Or maybe the next thing she knew, Morgan would have to contend with a silver spike in her spine.

It wouldn't be the first time.

Falling Skies: Wavering Valor (Mecha, Space Opera)

Hm. Do I have the time along with everything else to write a starship captain...

NaNoWriMo Discussion

Over 17,000 words!

I've spent about 16,500 of those establishing who these characters and their world are (while trying to hew pretty close to the idea of "make every scene work on two different levels"), but if you're telling a story about superhumans, you have to eventually show what they can do.

So, our protagonist's sister just tried to kill her.

The Sunday Group

You know, I actually did originally write Morgan for a NaNo a few years ago. I could never quite figure out what story to put her in, so I just occasionally polished who I thought she was and where she came from, and kept her on the shelf as a "maybe I'll figure this out someday." I have a couple of characters like that.

I had planned on writing modern fantasy for this year, but I wound up more interested in outlining something rather different. Maybe Morgan will show up in a full story of her own sometime, but it won't be NaNo - this time, anyway.

The Sunday Group

Well, NaNo and a few other things ate my life, but New Post is written (drunk with sleeplessness) and will be edited sober (in the morning).

You all are lovely. <3

NaNoWriMo Discussion

Just over 9600 words before I went to bed last night.

Like always, dialogue comes much easier than anything else. I do an enormous amount of technical writing, and it's sometimes a job to keep myself from leaping off the Good Narrative track and into the land of Shitty Infodumps. Not only are Shitty Infodumps, well, shitty, but they're very word-efficient and dry, which is not terribly helpful when your goal is word count.

NaNoWriMo Discussion

7150 words, officially still on track, even a little ahead.

I'm headlong into how the first public reveal of metahumans goes, and laying down the foundations of the familial dysfunction and emotional complexity that this story is going to need. I'm very deliberately making sure that these two aren't orphaned, because that's the lazy way to build some of the narrative structures I'm going to be needing. Characterization at this point is necessarily broad, but the complexity and shading will come along with the narrative.

I wish I'd done more outlining; the way this story is coming together I'm having to do a scene skeleton before each block of writing. Normally I work from broad arc descriptors, but I've also never done this kind of temporal skipping before. Ann Leckie makes this look so easy, hah!

The Book Club

OH BOY LET'S TALK ABOUT BOOKS

I recently made my way through a pair of space opera-flavored trilogies, one was okay and the other was incredible.

First, The Bobiverse, which is:

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
For We Are Many
All These Worlds

All by Dennis E. Taylor.

The premise for The Bobiverse is great: A normal person, killed in a car accident in 2016, wakes up in the mid-distant future to discover his brain has been scanned into a computer, and that his new job is to be a self-replicating von Neumann probe, searching the galaxy for new life, new civiliations, and new challenges. The only problem is that he's also woken into a horrifyingly believable political nightmare, and humanity atom-bombs itself into certain doom by chapter 12. The series has several interesting conceits - copies of the titular Bob all develop their own personalities and individual quirks, which is generally reflected well in the prose (and marvelously performed by Ray Porter, the audiobook narrator). The Bobs are all basically stable and basically decent people, at least by their own metrics, and what conflict exists between them is generally handled well.

The story falls down in its failure to examine many of the subjects it brings in any particular detail (in particular, the idea of personal immortality) and a general lack of narrative focus. There is some fairly unpleasant handling of a romantic relationship between a Bob and a (at the time) flesh-and-blood human, and I cared neither for the arc of those characters or the ultimate resolution. The final book in the trilogy wanders far too much, and the series' principal and concrete antagonist is given much less time in the story than they deserve, which is something that makes their ultimate threat somewhat abstract.

Really, this is a story that wants to exist in a crossroads between The Martian and Old Man's War, and I would say it doesn't quite get there. There are Big Ideas, but they are left unexplored. There's a Big Bad, but the interactions with them are perfunctory, and the lasting impact poorly examined. There are moments of emotional resonance, but few landed where they were supposed to, and one in particular made me angry rather than satisfied. Still, for all that, the story does move quickly, the prose is conversational, often funny, and deeply accessible. If you like stories where the author "did the math," Taylor does manage that and occasionally in spectacular fashion. It wasn't bad, but it could have been so much better.

----

Next, The Imperial Radch, which includes:

Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Sword
Ancillary Mercy

All by Ann Leckie.

The Imperial Radch series is one where all of the trappings of space opera are present, but are turned, gently, on their ear. There is a vast empire, and it's not very nice, but our protagonist used to be one of its soldiers. But they aren't leading a rebellion, or at least, they don't set out to. Breq, the last surviving fragment of an intelligence once inhabiting the warship Justice of Toren, begins her story with a singular and familiar purpose: vengeance. For herself, for everything she was, for everything she might have been, for everything she was forced to be.

There are secrets Breq knows that are only revealed to the reader slowly; her ambitions and machinations are opaque until exactly the moment that they aren't, and the world she inhabits is shockingly rich. There are no clean, clear answers in this story, no objective good defeating objective evil. You are sympathetic to Breq, of course, but she is messy, complicated, existing in a universe that feels tarnished and alive and real in a way that feels effortless and complete. Breq's evolution from where she begins the story is subtle and profound. The scope of the story steadily expands, a vast and intricate mechanism that once wound up, scythes through the setting in a way that at first seems surprising, and on reflection, is the only way the story could have gone.

I loved this series, virtually without qualification. It is rich and dense, but without a Stephenson-style self-aggrandizement that requires you to sit through info-dumps. The story is driving and complex with emotional resonance, self-reflection, and examination of some very Big Ideas. The world has the constant feeling that Leckie knows much more about it than she's putting down on the page, and those splashes of detail lend vitality and constant excitement to the setting, which exists as both part of and in service of the narrative.

The series also has hive-mind sex, a schizophrenic Emperor whose mind is made of hundreds of clones of themselves, extensive asides about tea (and why it's important to have a good set of dishes), and a scene with Breq literally standing on the hull of her sentient starship while firing a handgun at warships coming to kill her, because she knows something they don't. It's a story that spans a few years and millenia, with ghost stories that involve entire starships, linguistics jokes, and a protagonist who will terrify you while you're rooting for her success. It feels fantastical and modern, prescient and contemporary. This is different from Bujold, and I would argue better (although I adore her writing), more ambitious than Scalzi, and more thoughtful than Heinlein or Niven or Pournelle ever could have been. I'll say it again: I loved this series.