“Murder your darlings…”

[elfs]

One of the most common phrases you hear early in any writing career is “Murder your darlings.” What it means is that you must learn to ruthlessly cull any scene from your story that doesn’t serve the story, no matter how much you love that scene, no matter that it’s the one scene in the whole book that made you cackle with glee and rub your hands in anticipation of the reader’s reaction. If it doesn’t make the whole of the story work, throw it overboard.

I murdered one of my true darlings last night. It was real brain crack. I’ve had this image in my head for ages, even wrote it down and had it out as best I could. It was a lovely scene, all full of royal teenage swearing and cursing at the excessively helpful AI who overcame all her careful outrage and upset and depression and just wouldn’t let her kill herself, dammit, not even in a fall from orbit. Many of my stories contain homages, and this was supposed to be another Masamune Shirow homage: one of the cliche’s of which he’s fond is that everything he writes always seems to feature a beautiful woman jumping off a building: Duenan jumps out of Athena tower in the Appleseed remake, echoing the suicide that opens the original; Motoko can’t pass by an episode of Stand Alone Complex without falling off a building somewhere, and even opened Ghost in the Shell with a fall-off-a-building scene.

Sadly, the scene has disappeared from Fallen Angel. The story of Fallen Angel is one that’s been percolating in my head for years and years, and the idea is simple: in a slower-than-light universe, in a sphere no more than 30 or 40 light-years across, with no contra-physics phenomena, two groups live more or less intermingled, both brought by the same starship thousands of years ago. The first group, the settlers, are living an almost idyllic, arcadian lifestyle. (A close read of the village in the middle of the book will reveal an obvious relationship to another famous pastoral village in literature.) The second group, the crew, have headed off and become part of their starships, living among their machines. These two “empires” are embedded in one another, one using stars bright enough to support Terran-style worlds, the other living among the brown dwarfs and interstellar debris, of which there is much in the neighborhood. After two thousand years of increasingly ruthless experimentation, the Empire of the Crew have made their breakthrough and achieved substrate independence: they can now upload their own consciousnesses into their computers directly, and there’s no need for them to keep around the heavy, wet-filled nanotech life support system they call The Living Water.

The scene I wrote is the one where Princess Heiderome decides she doesn’t want to be in this suffocating, unchanging place anymore, that the routine and obvious brutality of her place have made her crazy and depressed, and she tries to off herself in dramatic fashion, burning up in the atmosphere style, but her EVA suit is too smart for her and saves her.

I’ve had to ditch it in favor of a better scene, ten years after the fact, her adoptive father is telling her re-entry moment from his point of view, and he’s telling it to someone “of the gods.” The scene involves a lot more detail, allows us to get her reaction now that she’s older and, better yet, allows me to re-write her motives. She was much younger when the incident occurred, too young in fact to have made the decision herself. This gives me a conspiracy within the Crew, plus I came up with a reason why she was tossed into an interstellar-capable emergency shell, and even better, when she goes to sleep voices whisper to her. Voices, many many voices, that are afraid of “the gods,” but also afraid of the Crew, should they be discovered. These voices tell her truths she would rather not know, but they are her friends and her comforters.

Far off in space, the ships of the Empire are coming.

There are several working conflicts within the book now, thanks to my deleting the original scene. Heidi is a much more interesting character at fifteen than she was earlier, and although she’s kept the nanotech-added advantages of her birthright– much stronger, a bit tougher, more perceptive, but no faster and unfortunately unable to swim– she’ll be forced to decide which life she wants. The voices she hears are from an entire virch she carries within her, the first successful uploading. Only the people of the virch don’t see it as successful. They have an agenda. The starship coming to her world is looking for her, but doesn’t know which world she’s on. And it’s looking for the virch, but doesn’t know she has it. And people on that ship have an agenda.

And maybe the gods have an agenda of their own.

Huh. I just realized. This might be construed as something of a Superman retelling, with the voices in Heidi’s head a 21st-century version of the Bottle City of Kandor. I don’t know anything about the Superman legend really– didn’t like the movies much and wasn’t a Supes fan, and what little I know about Kandor comes from some descriptions of it in episodes of Legion of Superheroes (which I was a fan of, no surprises there). I’ve never watched Smallville (sp?) either.

Anyway, the falling-from-space scene is gone from Fallen Angel, which is okay: I’ve worked it into an episode of Caprice Starr instead, I think. Can anyone think of a good reason why a space shuttle might be carrying a lot of weather balloons?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Comments

weather baloons

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

If the ship ever passes by gas giants, (or any other planet with an atmosphere) they'd be a really cheap and effective way to drop in a probe and collect data from various altitudes.

(Possibly for later industrial harvesting of raw materials/gasses/etc, if it's a gas giant)

Re: weather baloons

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In this case, we're talking something capable of only Earth-Moon transits, at best.

[funos.livejournal.com]

Last-ditch, slow re-entry, single-person escape pods?

Cheap, safe (less potential for debris) relay satellites?

Instead of weather balloons, how about inflatable lifeboats?

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

"Murder your darlings" is itself a darling, and Sir Anthony should have murdered it and replaced it with a phrase less cutesy and whose meaning was more clear.

Weather balloon uses

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Radar/lidar countermeasures. Balloons pack tightly in a chaff dispenser, inflate to a nice large cross-section when deployed, and inflated decoys have the same ballistic profile as a shuttle as long as they stay in vacuum.

Orbital debris cleanup. Release aerogell-filled balloons into LEO during each planetary approach and get a break on your landing taxes. Debris slams into the balloon and is slowed; after multiple impacts, the debris (and the damaged balloons) fall out of orbit.

Relay beacons. Radio signal intensity drops with the square of distance. Shuttle passengers need their internet fix, and complain loudly when the available bandwidth drops below a terrabaud. Explanation of limited antenna size or transmitter gain aren't accepted. So, shuttles continually spew out balloons. They inflate and expose their micron-thin photovoltaic coating to the sun, powering the thin-film phased-array rectennas which keep the interplanetary porn flowing.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Terraforming. A balloon coated with a catalytic substance of some sort can float high above any cloud layers, and be continually bathed in high-intensity UV light. Or, it could carry a small chemical plant on board, powered by thin-film photovoltaic cells on the skin of the balloon. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? The balloons will shed a continual rain of graphite (or diamond!) dust to drift down to the surface. Sulphuric acid would be turned into sulfur pellets and water, nerve gases would be gently degraded,and so forth.

Strong ground-level winds could damage the coating or canopy, meaning high-atmosphere deployment from a shuttle is best.