A Christmas Wish!

As when a pigeon, loos'd in realms remote,
Takes instant wing, and seeks his native cote,
So speed my blessings from a barb'rous clime
To thee and Providence at Christmas time!

H.P. Lovecraft, Christmas Blessings

Crash and burn!

Well, after hitting 100K last night on Sterlings I seem to have fallen into a writing blah. I think it might be time for a two-week revision: go back and fix what's wrong with the last 25K or so, polish the timeline, and get set up.

jaylake turned me on to Justine Larbalestier's technique for writing a novel, which involves a spreadsheet for tracking things. It occurred to me that I had fallen off the metadata wagon a while back and should get back on it. Unfortunately, that means splitting the first epsiode up into individual chapters just for my own sake.

Why should I do this? Because if it's done correctly, generating the spreadsheet becomes automatic. A simple awk script can do it. And it's nice to have a 10,000 meter overview of what's happening. Now all I need is a story code as wacky as the Geek Code and I'll be set.

It's hard to feel too much schaedenfraeud.

Remember that scene in In & Out where the bride suddenly shouts out, "Is everyone in this town gay?" That's what they must be thinking in Colorado's evangelical community. Guess Why.

Who wants a happy ending?

So, as I've been writing through this silly arc of stories, I've been asking myself, "Which couple here doesn't get the happy ending?" Because, y'know, they can't all have happy endings. Saul & Khrystyne are a good subject for a bad ending, but I really want Dove & The Twins to work, and Polly & Zia, and Illonca & Rhiane can't possibly go wrong; those two were written for each other. I suppose I could come up with new characters and relationships just to have things go sour on some people, but that feels like a cop-out. I disagree with Tolstoy; I think he had it backwards. Everyone is happy in their own unique way; it is in our misery that we are all similar. I think that's endemic to the human state: we are made to be anxious, miserable creatures, struggling against one another and our own natures (or, if you're religious, our own sinful state, or our attachments, or whatever); finding happiness and joy is so unlikely, so hard, and so fragile that it must be unique from human being to human being.

I was reminded of this consistent theme in my life this afternoon, oddly enough, while looking through a vast raft of Mai HiME doujinshi and I realized, after going through it, that the fans really, really wanted a happy ending for the most tragic couple in the series. Yukino and Haruka had two lovely tales; Mai and Mikoto had two jokey stories; there was a smattering of scenes for Chie and Aoi, and one nasty revenge story about Nao. And then there were nearly twenty stories about Haruka and Natsuko. If you don't know the storyline, every female character is a "magical girl," but Haruka is the only lesbian character; When Natusko tells her, "I cannot love you the way you want me to," she goes on a wild rampage with her magical abilities, killing far too many people before she's stopped. It would seem that the audience felt that that relationship, among all, was poorly handled. (Yukino may have been gay, or she may just have had a terrible case of hero worship for Haruka. I think I'd prefer the latter.)

So the big deal, of course, going back to my original point, is that for fiction to "feel right," the losers must deserve to lose, they must have some characteristic that makes them lose. Now I just need to figure out what that characteristic really is.