Drizzle account going away.

Attention, those of you who care. My account (and email address) at drizzle.com is going to be defunct within the next few days. If you send me email on a regular basis, the account elf.sternberg (at) gmail.com will be the best contact for the forseeable future.

Thanks!

I lack antagonism!

I've been running through the Sterlings series again, doing three separate things: create more tension within the Sterlings contingent by pointing out that there are deep philosophical and political differences among the three worlds within the Sterling government, use those philosophical differences to create more tension between my characters and their environment, and to clean out a ton of cruft. I estimate that Ken Rand was right, and that at least ten percent of my story is overwritten cruft that my fingers automagically churned out to make my daily quota for NaNoWriMo.

One thing I realized as I was reviewing it is that the Dove's story lacks an antagonist. There are antagonizing influences around her, the ones that first jar her out of her stifled, content little world, and then the ones that try hard to stuff her back, but they're not the antagonists; instead, it's her own misgivings about leaving behind her stifled, content little world that antagonize her.

Reading about characters waffling between conventional and radical existences has been done to death, and would probably boring if it weren't for the odd context and great sex. But that's just my take on things. I'm still not sure where she's headed, but she's pretty stuck right now.

Much erotica is based on this premise, of freeing oneself from stultifying conventions that may or may not be protective or, more to the point, may not be protective any longer as cultural or technological change makes the protection irrelevant. It makes me wonder if erotica needs a willful antagonist, or if the character's own agony is sufficient.

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Hot, cute, sadly deluded men. (Scroll down, probably SFW.)

An old friend, long misremembered

Thirty years ago, when I was just ten, my parents took me on a trip around the Mediterranean. The trip lasted ten days and was one of the strongest memories I've carried with me all these years. We went to many places that have long since ossified into romanticized memories of what Greece and Italy were like back in 1977. I remember clearly Korfu, and Venice, and many of the other places. I remember smacking my head on a hanging sign of a butcher shop and getting back to the hotel so bloody my mother fainted. I remember that was the one summer I really got along with my sister.

I had a bit of a flashback this evening. I was doing research for a story (Sterlings: Polestar) when I came upon a webpage for the Stella Solaris. It wasn't until I came to the view of the dining room and the Purser's foyer that a wave of flashbacks hit me. I had been in those rooms. That was the ship.

The Stella Solaris sailed until 2003, when she was sold for scrap and broken at Alang, India. She could have sailed until 2010, at which point the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) would have dictated a massive retrofit of lifeboats and survival gear. Even then, the hull and engines seem to have been in great shape, but the ship, with her 660 passenger cabins, was no longer economical compared to the money-making 3000+ passenger monstrosities that ply the sealanes these days.

I feel saddened by that. Even in 2001, with her disco-era patina still on clear display, the photographs show an elegant and airy vessel, and I regret having missed a second opportunity to travel on her.