Goats on conventions!

One of my favorite comic strips has long been Goats!, and seeing as I've just come back from Norwescon, this week's strips have been particularly special. Jon and Diablo are at an interdimensional SF convention, and some of the lines are just special:

"I don't think this could get any creepier."

"We could go to the Tasha Yar Memorial Erotic Filk Festival."

"You're a great reminder to keep my expectations low, Diablo."

And:

"There's four panels on managing cross-species confusion in interdimensional massively mammalian furry/plushie online social networks. That's just this afternoon."

Writing the genuinely nasty character

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was struggling with a story arc for Sterlings, the moral of which was that relationships don't always work. I mean, the basic theme of the three major arcs in Sterlings as they stand now are about a modest and conventional dating couple finding love because they were looking for it, a couple having wild sex who are adamantly opposed to falling in love and how their world gets turned inside-out when they realize they are, and a couple from two vastly different cultures who fall in love almost at first sight and then have to work hard to understand what's happening to them and to make their respective cultures understand.

I could see, in the truncated Khrystyne arc that her relationship with Saul wasn't going to last, but it was going to be a genteel breakup. Saul's just not kinky enough and both of them are too polite. I didn't want to write that; I don't think anyone wants to read that.

For me, every new character is a bit like a blind date. I have to learn what the character is like, get a feel for his or her skin, and integrate their tics and habits into my writing. The antagonist character for my fourth arc, Emma, is a genuinely nasty character with a temperament I don't know that I can really empathize or understand. My description of her is of a bitter post-modern humanities academic, one of those people for whom "things that bother me" becomes "events that mediate contrapositive identities," her public and private personalities are her "role-oriented multivocalities," and her discomfort at being in Pendorians space is described as "a standing antisociality contrasted with a hyperseductive original otherness."

But more than that, Emma is an ungrateful character. Everything that happens is about her; when her lover, Jacie, loses a lot of weight Emma takes it as a personal attack upon her own appearance and worth. When Emma is offered Pendorian immortality her objections are about how this prevents her from ever having a legacy; to maintain her reputation, she'll have to adapt and evolve forever, and the promise of having a healthy tomorrow becomes the burden of staying relevant. Emma's crisis hits a high note when she comes to realize that the mediated AI panopticon of the planet Discovery makes it impossible for her to create a whispering campaign to wreck Jacie's reputation.

All of this will be from Jacie's point of view since I tend to write from my protagonist's viewpoint anyway, but I still have to get inside Emma's head enough to make her reactions comprehensible to the reader. The catalyst character F'Riijyan ("call me Reason, everyone else does") will be even more baffled by Emma than Jacie will be.

I know a lot about Emma, but not a whole lot about how she feels. I don't empathise with her. Most of my characters who hurt their relationships and friendships do so when they're careless and they miss an important detail, but they don't do so deliberately. Emma doesn't miss a thing except empathy; she's genuinely narcissistic to the point where everyone she meets is either a potential tool, irrelevant, or an impediment to be swatted as hard as necessary to make go away. I worry that I couldn't actually write such a character and that Emma will come out more cardboardy than usual.

Character models and their problems

This afternoon, I stopped by the local pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions that Omaha and I had called in, some of her epilepsy medicine and some fexofenadine, an allergy med, for myself. The allergy pills were generic, and differently shaped this time from the last time, and oddly smaller. They had run out of medium bottles for Omaha's med and they only had these bottles as big as my forearm.

While I was waiting, I saw a pretty young woman her early 20's come in to get a prescription. My first reaction when seeing her was that she could have been a perfect model for Shandy Oxenhollar, the catalyst character for the next Misuko & Linia story: a little soft and short wearing beaten brown cargo pants and aging bomber jacket, reddish-brown gently curled hair, big glasses, big breasts, and a cheerful smile. She even had a grey sweatshirt tied around her waist, just like the character.

I was wearing my glasses, which give me 20/15 vision, what I'm used to having. I could read her prescription from where I sat. It was clear on the label of one of those large bottles in which you usually get prescription cough syrup. Methodone. And I thought to myself, no, that's not a problem I'm giving to Shandy. She's got enough already.

Should she be reading that?

"Dad, what's a concubine?"

This was Yamaraashi-chan's first strange question of the evening. Apparently her big sister gave her the first Xanth book, A Spell For Chameleon, and I have to wonder if it's really the right book for her. There's a scene in there where some demoness is offering herself to the hero, and that's one of the offers she makes. I read her the dictionary description, "A woman who cohabits with an important man."

A little later, she was playing with her stuffed plushes: Silver-- a ragged kitty, Crystal, a cute toy dragon, and Cthulhu. Yes, that Cthulhu. And she asked me, "Dad, what does Cthulhu really look like?"

So I pulled my copy of H.P. Lovecraft's Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre off the bookshelf and read to her the scene where Cthulhu emerges from his pit, judiciously edited. "Everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned."

She said, "That's so cool! I'm gonna read that whole book!"

I wonder if I should let her. Her mother exposed her to a ton of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other violent fare when she was much younger and Omaha and I have worked hard to recover the kid that was inside her, but there comes a time when one has to accept that kids will read what they want, and literary violence is very different from television violence. And if she learns something-- Goddess knows Lovecraft had a very respectable vocabulary-- maybe that won't such a bad thing.

I can't stop her from reading Spell for Chameleon, she's halfway through it. It's a heck of a step up from the Magic Treehouse or Droon series. But... should I let the almost-ten-year-old start reading, uh, Lovecraft?