Working on a scene in which a ruler-in-exile meets a man from off-planet she hopes will help restore her to her rightful place. I’m describing what they’re wearing, with in my ears David Gerrold’s plaint (made last year at Rustycon), about women writers who insist on stopping the scene to describe what people are wearing. This he found irrelevant and tedious. Though I piped up that it makes a difference who your viewpoint is: a tailor, for instance, would notice what people are wearing. But I have been rereading some of Baen books free library on my Palm: military SF, and some of those writers go into great detail about military ordnance, its history, its provenance, and its effect on tactics, because it’s all relevant to the story, part of the world building (I like it, but then I like information in a story). I don’t see why clothing should not be viewed in the same way, as a technology, and as world building. I wonder if women writers treat it differently than men. Or whether the divide is between people who have studied history and other cultures and learned to analyse the social languages of clothes. It may be you have to step outside your own culture to be able to understand the language of your own clothes – I know we have one – or several – they seem muted and muddled. And if you haven’t had that perspective, you don’t know just how much clothes say.
Tag Archives: Breakpoint: Nereis
Theme music for a novel
In the process of trying to persuade my various software – including my hacked version of iTunes (I’m still running OS8.6) – to play MIDI files, I came across my collection of music associated with my current WIP: working title, Graveyards of Nereis:
- Sir Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time
- The soundtrack from Gladiator
- The soundtrack from Alexander Nevsky, especially the alto solo “Field of the Dead”
- The “Dona nobis” from the recent Henry V
My original conception of the novel was both darker and more heroic than the way it is turning out. I am at the “sculpture under tension” phase – bits of it springing free and thwacking me – where I am trying to force into a shape and it is resisting. Whether I am pushing against something fundamental in its structure, trying to force the story (and, even more, the characters’ final destinies) athwart itself (themselves), or whether I simply do not have my technique right, is something I can only trust will become clear after the first draft. It would be a more powerful story if I let it become a tragedy. But I cannot yet see how to prevent the tragedy from bringing about a closure that would distort the rest of the story I want to tell.
A long train journey
I might one day find the exact quote I keep paraphrasing, Ibsen’s observation that after his first draft, he felt as though he’d been introduced to his characters, after the second, that he’d been to dinner with them, after the third, that he’d been on a long train journey with them, and after the fourth that he’d known them all his life. I am not yet out of the first draft and I feel I am on a very long train journey. To quote Rita Mae Brown, photosynthesis is far more efficient than writing as a means of earning ones daily bread.
I think I have a problem …
I went to the library to look up two topics, amino acids and spinal injuries. And I came back with papers on:
- sudden cardiac death
- mechanisms of implantation of the blastocyst
- electric fish
- memory in electrosensory systems
- a primer on health economics
- magnetoreception
- proteonomics
- demyelinating disease
- axonal transport
- gamma-secretase (enzyme involved in generating protein deposited in Alzheimer’s Disease
- astrobiology
- postmodern health care
- medicine and SF
And that was me being restrained! All of those have relevance to something I am either actively working on or imminently working on, or are general worldbuildings/lifebuilding references. I could easily have come home with three times that amount. I am an intellectual glutton!
Thank you, Dr. Wallsgrove
For saving the sanity of a poor harrassed SF writer. I have spent most of the weekend on line and at the library researching two crucial topics. I wanted to find out about alternative possibilities for proteins, and their compatibility with our form of life. Unfortunately, having a Ph.D. in biochemistry and some years of work in protein structure, and having had the lifelong handicap of not being able to BS my way through things I haven’t thought about properly, I have to have worked out whether the biochemistry I’m envisioning is plausible and would have the effect I want it to have – even if it is never talked about in the book. I kept running across references to 150, 300 or 700 non-protein amino acids found in plants, but nothing specific about those amino acids – particularly their effect on our biochemistry. But finally – found a whole book on amino acids in higher plants. Yes!! And some of them have been found hitchhiking on meteorites. They are out there. Before that, while still thrashing, I had a chance to reaquaint myself with the Astrobiology Web and its page on Extremophiles (check out Deinococcus radiodurans – bug with 3000X the radiation resistance of humans; it reassembles its genome from fragments), and with the Astrobiology Institute at NASA, and what’s going on with Europa (the IR spectrum of the red streaks on the surface bears an interesting resemblance to the IR spectra of certain extremophiles) and Lake Vostok. I am partial to Lake Vostok (subglacial lake thought to have been isolated by Antarctic ice for millions of years – problem is getting into it without contaminating it).