New stories posted, but no new ones written recently.

[elfs]

Three new stories: Mice and Malice, The Most Basic Human Need, and Vacuum Dancing. Enjoy!

But... Confession time. I haven't written anything fictional since last Thursday. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I decided to tackle Fragility again and that feels like a brick wall to me. I've never really been able to get into the head of a rich, spoiled, elderly woman (since I'm none of those things) and that's exactly what my protagonist happens to be. By making Fragility a side-line to Honesty, I was hoping that I could take some of the really good energy I generated and re-invigorate it. Maybe not. It's sad, too, because I had some interesting conflicts built up in later stories that require that I get the character of Isabelle Mannheim rolling.

Okay, here's what's up. I feel compelled to finish The Ritacha War, at least, because I've already posted more than half of it and it is, really, well, done. A little spit and polish and the last couple of episodes are ready. After that, The llerkin Revolution will come through. It's short-- only six episodes or so, none of this thirty-something episodes that were RWar.

After that, I wanted to expand out into other parts of the Pendorverse. (Ick. Did I just use that word? I guess I did.) It's not as neat as Ken's little view of it pretends to be. There are still places out there that deliberately have scarcity to appease the egos of individuals (yeah, writers go after Clinton or Bush, but nobody really wants to make a point of Robert Mugabe; we know he's evil. If that's true, why the fuck is he still in power and being feted by The Axis of Weasel?) There are other political factions that have their own agendas. There are evil folks out there; not merely the blindly xenophobic Sinox, but both those who honestly think they're doing the right thing for themselves and their people, and those who are simply vengeful on a universe that has taken away their capacity to be "great" as they see themselves. So I have The Taking of Gabrielle and The Kemper Assignment.

I wanted to write steampunk and mess with the llerkin past some more. So I have The Lost Crew Of the Palantir, which takes some non- heroes and crash-lands them on a distant world where they have to make deals with the locals to assemble enough of their crashed starship to make a gradio and call home.

The more I think about it, one of the subplots of A Century of Solitude is just going to have to go away. A pity: it means I'll have to toss one story written entirely in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets (aren't you grateful?) and my second ghost story.

But it does mean that I'll be able to post Dreamteam Calamities without a qualm. And there's much more to that series than there is to Century.

A lot of my stories are riffs. There's a riff on the old Space:1999 "robots who don't know evil" episode. In my case, it's not "don't," it's "can't," and the tragedy that comes with that particular problem.

Then the next two stories set in the Honesty series, then Fragility 1, then Honesty 4.

After that, the series jumps a thirty millenia into the future for a pair of series: Embrace, Empire, Extinguish and Petri Dish. The first is about half-done; it's about a character who, according to his (Pendor's) culture's beliefs, cannot be killed; for very specific reasons, he realizes that sometimes this belief is not sustaining. The second is a bit of a riff on, well, if you know who, you'll know who fast enough. Here's a hint:

"I know now. I understand why, in your language, the most common profanity you have is 'grief'. When you live like this, with everything material thing available to you, the only thing you have to fear, the only thing you can really suffer from, is a tragedy of the heart." I gave her a smile I didn't feel. "Grief is the only emotion worth hating."

The problem is that I like to bounce around as I come up toward the end of a story. I like to look at different things, come back to it with a fresh feel. Eventually they do get done-- it's just a lot slower than I care to think.

Comments

[creepingcrud.livejournal.com]

[shame one apparently can't use lj-cut in comments; spoilers here]

Hmm. Although I like most of the Kolya & Furry stories, I didn't like "Mice and Malice". It feels a little too pat, with some implications I don't care for. Everything seems to move a little too quickly - Furry's mad, Liz is fed up, Kolya is unnaturally oblivious, there's some brief conversation, and suddenly everythings on track and there's a (rather nice) anal scene. The problem is that it doesn't seem consistent with Kolya's character through the rest of the stories. It feels almost like he knew perfectly well what was going on and was waiting to get caught. It's possible, I suppose, that this is the case, it doesn't feel right to me. Beyond that, it bothers me that Furry never talked to him about this for months. Obviously, as far as the blame on Kolya goes, it's not as though he has to be psychic to figure out that Furry's hurting, unless she's an exceptionally good actress, but you'd think after a century they'd feel safe enough together that she could tell him that she had a problem with what was going on instead of waiting until things got to the breaking point. They've demonstrated enough basic conflict resolution skills in the past to make this feel wrong to me.

It's possible, I guess, that this will get followed up on and developed more, but as it stands, it's unsatisfying. That said, "The Most Basic Human Need" was nice, and "Vacuum Dancing" was absolutely lovely.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In my defense, I must say that Mice and Malice was written sort-of as a coda to my own self-destructive relationships, and much of what's going on in it is based on real life. Maybe the latter two are "lovely" because they're completely fantasy, unlike the first one, and so don't need to be constrained by trying to make reality fit into fiction.

Kolya's not "unnaturally oblivious"; he's simply so comfortable with his relationship with Furry that when it starts to unravel he doesn't even notice; he's long past the point where the habit of "checking in" with his partner has dissipated into mutual assent. This is more or less what wrecked my life six years ago, and I was trying to depict it in a character I thought would accurately do so.

[creepingcrud.livejournal.com]

Being young and not exceptionally experienced (one relationship of three years which, when it was unravelling, was fairly clear about why it was doing so), I can accept that stuff happens in relationships which I don't yet understand. I guess basically what you're saying is that by virtue of how long things had lasted without any major screwups, Kolya was taking it on faith that if there was a problem, Furry would bring it up, and thus he didn't need to pay as much attention himself. Given that, it makes a bit more sense.

Beyond that, reality is often lovely, and so are many of your stories, regardless of how farfetched (or not) they happen to be. I've enjoyed reading them. Thanks.