Tag Archives: Plague Confederacy

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).

Limp cabbage

Came close to giving up on a Sunday’s writing this morning as I trudged through a scene with all the suspense of limp cabbage, while characters wandered in and characters wandered out and I, the writer, did a lot of staring at and describing of the tiles. True, they’re interesting tiles and highly communicative of my world’s history and society, but the POV character didn’t have the knowledge to interpret them. It finally dawned on me that I was telling the whole chapter from entirely the wrong point of view: it was the other character who already knew the information I needed to convey and was going to make the choices that at that point were going to advance the plot (ie, cause trouble). I was going to shift into her viewpoint for a second chapter, but now I’m going to rewrite the first from hers as well, and in the meantime I accumulated 3 700 words of a visit to a village in a bottle, which will be the set for a murderous climax, a rather more balanced and charming archnemesis to Creon than I’d originally envisioned, her children, whom I didn’t expect, and the answer as to why Creon and company get shot down. Why can’t I just send groups of characters in quests off to the ends of the earth without having to have them INTERLOCK so tightly it has me practically doing calculus to figure out who has to know and say what, when. But then when I read groups of characters going in opposite directions I tend to only get interested in one group and start skipping chapters. But then I’m also the kind of reader who will take a peek at the end of a book if I get to like someone and the body count is going higher, or the author is showing signs of a predisposition to doing particularly crushing and nasty things. In short, I cheat.