aggienaut: (Numbat)

   I have discovered the scariest thing about Australia. Something far more terrifying than drop bears, hubcap sized spiders, and snakes that kill you by looking at you! But I'll get to that in a moment.

   I've been doing a lot of writing and thinking about writing lately. It kind of reminds me, I used to try to write a blog post every day for all thirty days of June and what I liked most about it is find there's a clear difference between being "in the zone" and not being. Once you're in the zone you're always thinking of writing ideas, you can't wait to get home and sit down and write about one of the ideas you've been thinking about all day. When you're not in the zone you have something you want to write for some reason or other but its hard to come up with ideas, hard to make yourself sit and have at it.

   I submitted three submissions for the Geelong writing club yearly anthology last week. One of their categories is "memoir" which at first I felt hard to wrap my brain around the definitions thereof but I've since decided I really quite like it. I turned a previous self-introduction from my time slaving away in the steamy bee mines of the Bundaberg Archipelago into a memoir of that time, and in the final hours before the deadline basically rewrote the bit about being surrounded by ebola in Guinea -- I had been trying to expand the very short piece I had written for a previous contest's very short requirements, but just jamming new paragraphs in the middle was simply not working. Rewriting the whole thing allowed me to integrate the parts I liked smoothly with new parts. And then in the last half hour before the deadline I made some quick fixes to a very short story I had written about a ghost and sent it in for their short story category because why not.

   Somewhere in all this I had what felt a bit like a revelation. I basically used the same exact skills and techniques to write my memoirs as I've been using on travelogues, and indeed they could be both, and indeed, I quite rather suspect, that when truly well written a travelogue and a memoir should be indistinguishable! (EVEN if in your memoir you didn't "travel," as I've been exploring with some previous entries about traveloguing about one's home environs)

Does anyone read the alt text? Can I just put captions here?
And here's an entirely unrelated photo of Hokea laurina. I feel like maybe I should crop this photo closer but I like the leafy background.

   Now, most of my stories are "genre fiction" -- Historical fiction, science fiction, zombies, etc, and the Geelong Writing Club previous anthologies seemed to contain absolutely none of this, which is why the ghost story was the best I could come up with. BUT, then I happened to notice the closest university to me, Deakin, had a literary journal, with the deadline a week hence (which was/is today). I haven't read their back issues, but I figure university students will be much more receptive to genre fiction than the older demographic of the Geelong club. On any account, it's what I'm serving them up!

   And the most amazing thing, instead of writing it all the last day (again, today), on Thursday I reprocessed some 6,000 words of previously written stories (who writes new ones for contests, psh). I've repolished and intend to submit later today (1) the historical fiction about the origin of the largest preserved viking poop; (2) the prologue zombie apocalypse story "patient zero;" (3) the story about a swarm of bees finding a new home as told from the perspective of a bee. So now it's the day of the deadline and I'm just sitting pretty here. Except I have one burning question I would like to ask you if any of you could be bothered to read the story -- it begins with him cursing, and rereading it I was like oh I should say what curses he's actually saying, and then, I was like, well, duh, obviously, he should be saying "shit" or "crap" or something ... but then I was starting to wonder would that actually be TOO many excretory references in the story??

   It was interesting trying to adjust these stories for Australian readers. Patient Zero was, in the previous draft, explicitly set in Newport Beach California (when not in Congo) -- I deleted Newport Beach references but, like, a car knocks over a firehydrant and shoots up a fountain of water, but at least in my current vicinity, there actually AREN'T standing firehydrants, the fire brigade carries the above-ground portion of the hydrant on the truck and screws it in on arrival. And in the honeybee story there are squirrels, there are no squirrels in Australia but I decided to leave them. A character is eating a burrito from the Del Taco 99 cent menu, which might seem thoroughly implausible here where the cheapest of the cheap horrible awful fast food will run like $7. But any such adjustments were nothing compared to...


Horror of Horrors
   And then I noticed a peculiar thing. Both this and the other writing contest had had "Australian style rules, singular quotations" written in the submission guidelines. And I was like.. surely they can't mean... oh god they do! It TURNS OUT, Australia has some giant national beef with "double quotation marks," that's right official Australian style calls for 'single quotations.' And not only that, but, brain-bendingly, for punctuation to be 'outside the quotation marks', unless the quote is a full sentence whereupon 'the punctuation mark is placed inside the quotation marks.' In reworking my stories to fit "Australian style" I mean 'Australian style' guidelines, I found myself particularly perplexed about when the punctuation goes in the quotation marks, and when it does not, as sometimes it's a full sentence in the quotes but also part of the outside sentence. So if you're conversant with this bizarre style standard feel free to point out places in my stories where it can be fixed.

   Additionally, I assume you're all on the correct side of the moral schism about the oxford comma, which is that it is ordained from on high by the holiest as holies as a true necessity for life. Well official Aus style is AGAINST the oxford comma ::weeps in despair::, but, because it is a well and truly necessary part of the circle of life the guidelines do allow it when it is necessary for clarity. I picture here an oxford comma melodramatically exclaiming "oh, when you NEED me now you want me, I see how it is!"

And here is an unrelated winking owl I drew


Next on the Agenda
   Also I've managed to get on some mailing lists or something, I don't know, writing contest and journal submission opportunities are just falling in my lap left and right. It came to my attention yesterday that there's a $10,000 ( O: O: O: O: ) prize up for three chapters of a novel. I suspect serious circles are still looking down their collective noses at zombies as an overdone crap genre of the hoipolloi but well I've already got a first chapter and sketched out ideas for the rest of a novel and I really quite fancy I have enough deeper themes I intend to jam in there to make it worthwhile. Hey Dracula and Frankenstein are "monster genre" classics, zombies need their own (and don't give me that World War Z crap, that's just our crap baseline).


   And speaking of crap, here's a question that occurred to me as I contemplated the cursing at the beginning of the viking story -- are crap and shit entirely interchangeable? Do they have subtle nuances between them? why do we even have two words with the exact same meaning. [edit to add: in the category of unnecessary amount of background effort that will never be noticed, because the characters are presumably speaking proto-Norwegian/Swedish, I suppose I should use shit because skit means the same thing in Swedish but I'm not aware of a crap equivalent in THEIR language]

aggienaut: (Spacecat)

   I've had this idea pertaining to creative writing.

   But first, by way of background. I've recently gotten into this science fiction series, the Honor Harrington Series, anyone else read it? I like it, I mean I've read thirteen of the books in the last few months. I like the universe he's created and all. But there's a big problem: I've become convinced there's really only two characters. Oh sure they have different names and do different things but there's only two personalities that have been cloned over and over again. There's the superlative good guy who is smart and nice and everything good and there's the arrogant blustering bad guy. The main character is the smartest, craftiest, most noble person and gosh dang it people like her, and any semblance of a bad quality she might have are the kinds of crap you answer during a job interview when asked about your greatest weakness, you know, "oh, too much of a perfectionist," "too willing to sacrifice myself for others," and "my limbs don't grow back when shot off so I had a gun built into my hand last time it got blown off." Also she has bionic vision and can read minds. This guy does NOT write complex characters.

   So it got me thinking, there should be a character test. Like, a short story in which the character is put through their paces through a wide range of emotional circumstances and ethical decisions, and one could take this short story and drop in any significant character they're working on to explore how the character's behavior and reactions differ from other characters. ... and if you always get the exact same outcomes maybe you need to work on character complexity.


Completely Unrelated Photo of the Day

Cato is a complex character. Sometimes he chases the other cats, sometimes he helps groom them.


   So I've been trying to think of a story idea with the requisite emotional range, and you know it doesn't even have to be original since this isn't for to be published as a final product, but I couldn't think of anything.

   On the ethical decisions front I was thinking well I guess I could contrive to come up with a sort of classic "trolley problem," situation (has "trolley problem" been an LJI topic yet? It totally should be one).
   And then I remembered the Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek. Depicted in the opening scene of the Original Series movie The Wrath of Khan, it's a training exercise meant to put an officer in an unwinnable situation -- they receive a distress call from a ship in Klingon space, where there seems to be a bit of a cold war on and entering the space could be seen as an act of war -- if the officer attempts to rescue the Kobayashi Maru they inevitably get destroyed by Klingons. That's the basic gist of it, but in countless spinoffs and novelizations, people "beat it" in various ways, and the biggest shortcoming seems to me to be that if the officer in question chooses not to violate international galactic law by proceeding into Klingon space... nothing happens. Seems a bit potentially anticlimatic.
   But anyway this got me thinking of ways to modify the Kobayashi Maru test for my purposes, and as such my thinking kind of stayed in that genre (that is to say, sci fi with the protagonist commanding a spaceship). Then I was thinking I should combine this test with the trolley problem.
   So the combined trolley problem / Kobayashi Maru test I came up with is more or less this: while in command of a starship he learns that a number of civilians have been taken captive from a nearby colony by an enemy ship. He quickly finds that ship and that ship turns to attack him. Now the situation is this, he actually can easily destroy it, but there are more innocent civilians being held captive on that ship than there are crewmembers on his own, so destroying that ship will cause a greater net loss of innocent/good-guy lives. And let us say he can't outrun it, and it is intent on destroying him, and he can't just sit there and take a pounding he must either destroy it or be destroyed. Should create some drama right? I actually kind of want to write this story for it's own sake now. Also I've kinda had a hankering to write some space faring sci fi that doesn't violate any laws of physics except maybe an extremely efficient propulsion system -- no artificial gravity, no faster-than-light, no "inertial compensator" to prevent people from being turned into jelly if you accelerate at 500 gravities...

   Granted, this doesn't answer other pertinent questions I would have liked to explore, like "how does the character perform at work after receiving unrelated emotionally distressing news," or "how long will they stay on hold with the phone company customer service representative and will they give them a piece of their mind," but we might have to drop them into a wholly different situation to explore that one.


   A somewhat related beef I have is how so many authors seem to write people fundamentally differently if the setting is the Middle Ages or contemporary or in the future. I really like historical fiction by Bernard Cornwell but his stories also have some serious character deficiencies (I swear all his protagonists are also all the same guy), and he'd have to believe that everyone who lived in the 10th century just loooooved battle more than anything else. Drop your pirate into a modern starbucks and if he seems like he fundamentally wouldn't fit he's probably not realistic for his own time either.

July 2025

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