“Who the fuck are they?” I asked.
“That’s the gentry and their servants,” said blond Bev. “All the liars, hypocrites, exploiters, dog-bastards, wankers, janissaries, Monday men, cat-ranchers and people who fly-tip in protected waterways.”
Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London)
That's how it's done
Quote: "He did recall being instantly certain that he had just met either an old friend or a very patient, important enemy."
Lovely. lyrical, unforgettable prose.
I'm looking at how to fold in complicated backstory in First Person. Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London, Jim Butcher's Storm Front, and Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue
Backstory be like (1) lay out the backstory on the bones of the plot, (2) take your time.
I'm mentally highlighting my way through the books in three or four different colors and see how they're woven together.
Interesting that the three authors who immediately come to mind for introduction of backstory are all writing First Person.
* Here's a video of a cat on a roomba. It is not my cat. My cat is smarter than that.
** The dint in "by dint of," you will be pleased to know, is from Old English dynt "blow dealt in fighting" (especially by a sword), from Proto-Germanic duntiz (related to Old Norse dyntr blow, kick.)
This dint is probably not directly from the co-existing dialected dint of C15 that comes to us from PIE "dent" meaning tooth but doubtless they lived on the same street.
"By dint of" as a phrase for "by force of, by means of," is early C14 so it is a fine, strong, ancient little set of words.
*** This picture is a slight exaggeration of the number of cords I have around my desk.
But not by much.
I put this in the background of re-reading. Aaronovitch's Moon Over Soho.
Aaronovitch is so good with deep POV. He uses sophisticated elements to build it -- language, special knowledge, scene reaction, philosophy. Just splendid stuff.
As to the music:
Trumpet – Clifford Brown
Bass – George Morrow
Drums – Max Roach
Piano – Richie Powell
Tenor Saxophone – Harold Land
Delilah
Parisian Thoroughfare
Blues Walk
Daahoud
Joy Spring
Jordu
Brown only lived to be 25
On a Mac this means buying a black plastic box the size of a good novel, fiddling through my barely finite collection of twiddly wires, and then blindly following the directions of Some Guy on the Internet.
The problem with getting advice from YouTube videos is that they're all for systems five or seven years old. Every two minutes the nice geek with the oddly untrained voice tells you to, for instance, "Click on Options" and you discover there is no Options key because they threw that out in the 2015 OS.
Once again, the world betrays you.
You prove inadequate to a task that is completed handily by 16-year-olds.
(Don't ask me about my cell phone.)
You lose.
So you go to Google to figure out where Mac has hidden the action you wish to undertake. And you
Half an hour later you close your eyes and pick at random
because the hell with it anyway.
This is like ordering in an Azerbaijani taverna far, far off the beaten path where nobody speaks any language with which you have a nodding acquaintance,
except less prone to moments of delightful surprise.
I now have an operating back up and a Time Machine
or I don't
and I am back to limping along with my severely crippled version of Word except for (probably) backup.
This is not exactly adulting, but I muddle along.
I came across, "He’d lost an exponential amount of blood," in a book recently.
The weakening of the word "exponential" from meaning
"a number that gets multiplied by itself"
to just meaning "a big hulking, scary number"
is very sad.
We take these delicate, specific, useful adjectives and empty them by the slop-bucketful till they're just one more of the thousand bland, lank, meaningless synonyms for common concepts.
Our word shelves become full of Twinkies and Wonderbread.
Thank god for slang, that's what I say.
Haven't though about this one in a bit, but it cheered me up today.
Lyrics in translation here.
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Super Girl on Tue, 29/09/2020 - 10:50
I'm thinking tonight about how characters deal with the acquisition and use of immense magical power.
How do you write this?
Ilona Andrews, Patricia Briggs, Nalini Singh, and Charlaine Harris handle this by giving other characters lesser but still important powers. The mucho powerful character is part of a continuum. There's shared experience and a knowledge base. There are systems in place.
Often their power arises from discipline, work, study, diligent effort. The character's attitude toward power is signalled by a history of deliberately building that power. They're not so much conflicted. The character gets a magic sword because they've
trained in swordfighting since childhood.
Often characters develop new abilities in immediate response to threat. The action separates acquisition of new
power from a later intellectual exploration and emotional response to
it. The emotional response may be explored in scenes of relative quiet with a trusted advisor.
But the internal response is explored. In an earlier posting I looked at a book where the two protagonists are destined to in some way become an abstract universal constant.
Like becoming Pi or E=MC2.
This sounds uncomfortable and destructive to a sense of self,
but we don't see the emotional and intellectual internal fallout in the characters as they grow and change.
The author leaves the story before the characters get more than a taste of their universal constant-hood. The author is not looking at that aspect of the story. We don't take step into the apotheosis because is simply not the author's intent.
How is this handled? How well does this work?
I feel as if the author deliberately moves the story slightly into mythos mode. Into traditional storytelling. Eastern European Folk tales and American Indian Folk tales show surreal illogic of character motivation. There's virtually no internals and self examination.
I'll have to reread Zelazny's Lord of Light and see how he handles this.
Well, there's a magical child growing up to be a more-than-human avatar in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Two of them, in fact.
We got Bran who is the Pendragon, son of King Arthur. He's a minor character with magic.
How does he feel about all this?
We don't see deeply into his POV so we're not sure.
This works okaybecause this is a tertiary character. And the author responsibly tidies his story neatly away in the end. In the series farewell scene, we see Bran renounce his potential for magical power. He will be a vanilla human to do human work in the world.
In a couple hundred words Cooper shows us what's been going on in Bran's mind the whole time. It makes an emotionally satisfying wrap up and we didn't have to overbuild a minor character to look at this.
Will Stanton is the more interesting character problem.
Eleven-year-old Will learns he's one of the Old Ones — human incarnations of magic, born to save the world from a rising evil. In four books we see him sweat and suffer and fear his way to agency and power. His internal growth from boy to a powerful adult in a kid's body is convincing and, in many ways, tragic.
The author shows Will knowing and regretting the distance that opens between him and his family and friends. At what point does he cease to become a human boy? Some good internals there.
***
Romance genre studies human emotion. What do the protagonists feel? Authors flay it out on the dissecting table for all to see. They build the plot structure to reveal those feelings. They stud the page with internals and emotional conflict.
Mostly Romance explores the love relationship and at least one emotional conflict. It's interesting to look at magical power as the emotional conflict
Lots to think on.
I read Middlegame by Seanan McGuire over these last few days and enjoyed it. An intricate book with good and interesting worldbuilding. Fantasy action adventure -- is that a thing? Mythos roadtrip?
Interesting, anyway. It's set partly in Berkeley.
Further thoughts:
The protagonists are enduring and brave. Appealing. I like them and want to read them.
Tunnelling down into the book in an analytic manner, though, the two protagonists feel lacking in agency. In part this is because they are children for some of the book.
But I find them oddly incurious about the magic they work.
Other people bestow magic upon them. Others give or withhold knowledge, lie to them, manipulate them emotionally, menace them, rescue them and tell them where to go and what to do.
There is a flavor of European folk tale about the storytelling. The simplified motivation and characterization that is the oral tradition. But in contemporary urban fantasy . . . the real world setting and conventions make me ask myself how the young adult protagonists will deal with the mantle of absolute power that's been thrust upon them.
The kindle edition of Middlegame seems pricey to me, so you might suggest your library buy it. McGuire writes several series. Rosemary and Rue is the start of the October Daye books.
Checking out library books supports funding for the library and it encourages them to buy more of your favorite authors. If you drop favorable mentions and reviews on the internet that will also support your bestie authors.
I had a little problem with the comment aspect of my blog.
I pursued research on the net. Then I did stuff that will probably make it worse.
My actions are in the spirit of the village shaman trying a new varietal of sage in his cleansing ritual. Ya gotta have faith.
Somewhere in the middle of the Twentieth Century technology moved beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend as a whole. Outside our tiny area of specialization we're no more than chimps with socket wrenches. We bang on the metaphorical carburetor and try pumping the gas a couple times and once in a while the thing starts.
Technology is smarter than we are.
I'm drinking a cup of coffee before dawn and listening to my recently-booted furnace wheeze into life.
When I get up in these transition days of spring and crawl out from under the warm covers of my bed and find myself shivering, sometimes I go close the window and turn on the furnace.
Right now I'm thinking about that one small choice. First choice of the day.
It's not that I mind shivering as a matter of principle. There's no moral imperative to stay at 70° plus or minus 4. Discomfort usefully reminds us we're living beings, not enameled birds sitting on a golden bough.
I like leaving the windows open because it makes me feel part of the natural world, at least that world as expressed by this well-groomed and almost-painfully-cozy small town neighborhood.
It's not precisely "Nature is red in tooth and claw" here -- unless you count the battle of the political yard signage -- but there's sky and bird song and green stuff growing. I can close my eyes and feel a little connected to the oncoming dawn.
She's getting old. She sleeps most of the time now, sitting on the sofa, tucked up close to me. The fur of her muzzle is white. When I take her to the dog park, she mostly sits and watches the other dogs chasing back and forth. When the house cools down over the night she curls up close and circular on her dog bed.
I turn on the heat because I want to keep her warm.
Taking care of the dog is also part of the natural world.
Humans have been doing this a long time.
Shepherdess me, six thousand years ago, would have crunched through the new snow to check out the spring lambs in the early dawn after a chilly night. My dog would be at my heels,or leading me to any particularly vulnerable creature who'd had problems in the dark hours.
When we sat down to share breakfast I'd check her paws and pick cockleburs out of her fur. Scratch her back and fluff her fur and comb her with my fingers. Talk to her as the sun comes up.
So this morning, that was how I communed with the Natural World even in my muffled-up, still and quiet, house.
Me and the dog, man. Me and the dog.
Did my good deed for the day.
Then I saw a rabbit in my back yard that afternoon -- white with brown ears -- and I figured I had found the bunny.
It came to my attention as it ran in and out and around and under the storage shed at the bottom of the garden,
dodging a pack of little kids who were trying to catch it with lettuce and carrots and what turned out upon closer examination to be a parsnip.
There were eight kids,
from age nine downward,
contributed by the neighbors on both sides.
By the time I got my shoes on and collected the cat carrier and went out
there were also two fathers, two mothers, and an abuela.
So I let everybody discuss the matter at length for forty minutes or so
while the rabbit hid in the gopher holes under the storage shed
Then it was time for dinner
and everybody got dragged home
promising to come catch the rabbit tomorrow
and I was left alone with the logomorph.
I went to sit in the grass near the storage shed and wartched the trees.
After a bit, the bunny came out.
It was really a tame little rabbit.
The bunny ate violets
and I sang Ella Fitzgerald songs to it
(Someone to Watch Over Me and Cry Me a River mostly..
Slooowly I inched my butt closer
song by song.
The sun began to set.
SNAP! I grabbed it
and put it in the cat carrier.
I took it to the SPCA. I was messing about in the dark and trying to figure out how to get the little bunny transferred from the cat carrier to one of the cages they have there to receive lost animals after business hours ...
one last employee saw me and came to help and took the bunny off my hands.
I hope the owners come find it.
If not, it is so beautiful and friendly I just know someone will adopt it as soon as the six day waiting period is up.
It was a good day.
I thought about what I do in the later production stages.
"Well," says I, which gives me a moment to organize my thoughts, "I pick out the five or six Emotional High Points of the story and then I look back to see how I have prepared the reader for them."
I expand on that, since we're neither of us in a great rush with something burning on the stove and she is willing to be patient with me.
I says -
You got a few couple places in the manuscript where you want the reader to FEELTM .
-- Not solve a problem or enjoy the sunset or ponder the mysteries of the universe, but get angry or jealous or guilty or sad or ashamed or lustful or horrified
or something.
FEELSTM ya know. Words with emotion attached to them.
Because the reader is there for the FEELSTM, this being fiction.
These five or six scenes of important Feels are almost always going on in the protagonist's POV, btw,
because why would you want to waste this storytelling emotional charge on a minor character's subplot anyhow?
Unless you do want to, in which case that is also cool.
The actual scene attempts to tug the emotions. Yes.
But it does that by having a foundation made of solid blocks of Feels,
rather than just blocks of information.
It's built on scene after scene of Annique missing her mother and hearing her mother's wisdom in her head.
We see Maman again and again through Annique's eyes, with all of Annique's Feels firmly attached.
-- Now Maman was dead in a stupid accident that should not have killed a dog. Maman. Maman, how I miss you. -- p. 5
--The mindless optimism of the English. Who could comprehend it? Had not her own mother told her they were all mad? -- p. 6
-- She laughed, a deep, throaty sound copied exactly from Maman. -- p. 55.
And so on and so on.
The reader's emotional belief in Annique's pain and shock at Maman's betrayal comes not from explanations and reasons, not information or backstory or assumptions about a mother and daughter relationship.
It's dozens of little Feels scattered everywhere.
TL:DR version: When you want to punch up a late stage manuscript, consider looking at the big-ticket Emo scenes. Track back to make sure the emotion of that scene is supported by previous Feels.
*****
photocredits
"Van Gogh used for a painting only some tubes. Never all. For his
masterpiece, Night Terrace he used: Prussian blue and viridian and
some carmine for the blue air and the door in the front. Yellows were
only chrome lemon and for the orange he used the chrome lemon and
geranium lake."
Massively impressive. His painter's pallet carried two colors of blue.
side note: viridian in 1888 contained traces of chromium oxide borate as a byproduct of production. Modern viridium doesn't, so modern fakes don't. Though I suppose art counterfeiters have caught on to that by now
Technical weakness in the presentation of the soldiers who are closely associated with Mulan. The final group of five or six who survive to the end. The strike team.
There's physical differentiation between them. That's good. But give them nicknames. Give them something distinctive in their outfits. Have something one of them won't eat. One whistles as he strolls around. One is anxious and wakes up with bad dreams. One tells shaggy dog stories.
The movie differentiates with individual backstories, which they confide to Mulan.
More interesting, I think, to give the revelation of backstory to the group. The pessimist among them has one view. The optimist, the humorist, the prima donna, the playboy show who they are as they react to the same story.
We've seen this group building in a thousand war movies. Army unit, cops at the station, or criminals doing a heist become a close-knit group. Showing Mulan joining such a group would add an interesting dimension. It is a missed opportunity, I think.
Hollywood knows how to economically differentiate within a group.
I have written characters who just bubble with these virtues. Do we always write about traits we admire rather than traits we happen to have?
Anyhow, I was mulling on things like . . .
Can we write suitably upbeat stories about protagonists who are not and never will be heroic?
If we did, would those be better stories?
More honest work?
More perceptive creations?
Can we sorta compromise by writing strong and virtuous protagonists, but including ordinary weak, realistic, conflicted characters as well-regarded secondaries?
I thought about this while I was buying barbeque from Mel's here in town. I am trying to find a barbeque place.
Hhere in town Mel's didn't please me. I will feed the rest of it to the dog Mandy who is less picky. But Mel's is well regarded. Goes to show something.
I've decided we need all sorts of stories for all sorts of readers and there's no harm in writing what comes naturally even if it isn't very realistic.
So I'll pretty much do what I want and not worry.
Wikipedia says
"The word biscotto, used in modern Italian to refer to a biscuit (or cookie) of any kind, originates from the medieval Latin word biscoctus, meaning "twice-cooked". In other countries, the term "biscotti", used as a singular, refers only to the specific Italian biscuit known in Italy as cantuccio."
So now you know enough to talk intelligently about æ•biscotti.
I am passing along an exciting discovery I made yesterday.
Many biscotti are disappointing because they are not crispy and hard. They are just biscotti-shaped ordinary cookies. Whole Foods, which is often excellent in the baking department, makes disappointing biscotti.
They are not cooked enough to dry them out.
Whole Foods and most of the recipes I find on the net missunderstand the whole concept of "Twice Baked."
Here's how to twice-bake Whole Foods biscotti.
Take the Whole Foods, already-cooked biscotti home
and put them on a baking sheet in a 200° F oven
for two and a half to three houses.
It's not quite "immediate quite good biscotti"
but it is "two or three hours later, quite good biscotti."
Store in a tightly sealed jar. They should last weeks.
This is labelled philosophizing because I find food philosophical.
* * * * *
A couple weeks ago I withdrew from Twitter and FaceBook and Word Wenches. I did this because I was getting burned out by social media.
I wasn't writing.
So I'm putting the little snippets I would normally drop into Twitter into the blog here.
It's bleeding off the urge to chatter mindlessly online.
.
* * * * *
.Night balances day. Darkness balances light.
It's a good day to think about balance in life.
Also a good day to put a lighted candle in the window to delight oneself and the passers by.
Also a good day not to set the house on fire.
Precizați site-ul sursă, dacă preluați traducerile mele. Merci!
Share music and kindness! :)