Writing around the cliche's
Oct. 12th, 2004 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI think I listen to this album to much, but I cannot help but smile when I hear it. It's such happy music.
It is said, when you cannot write, you should write anyway. If you're having writer's block, write a letter to your mother. To your wife. To your friends. Write in your journal. As long as you have a pencil and a pad of paper, or in my case a laptop, you should try writing every day. Because to do otherwise is to forget how.
So I'm writing. Because I'm starting to worry that I'm burning out. It's been hard, putting out the last eight stories on a very tight schedule. I wonder what I'm going to do next. NaNoWriMo is only eighteen days away, and maybe I'll participate this year. Kouryou-chan's birthday is on a Friday and it's the only real project for next month, so I'm looking at the months and trying to figure out how I would put it all together.
But my real problem is my fear that I'm writing cliche's. If you don't want to know what's coming up, don't read past the break.
Okay, so here are some story ideas I've been playing with:
Aimee: The Imperial City. This story actually concentrates on another character, Filo, a young man who's magical skills are small but who has a knack for seeing what others don't. Think a kind of Young Sherlock Holmes in your typical extruded fantasy world city, only with touches of Eurasian Imperialism along the lines of the Chinese or perhaps Indian lines. Obscure things that would make the story feel less, um, extruded. Lots of chances for the characters to get mixed up in politics. The real crux is your standard power takeover with unwilling tentacle monsters caught up in the whole thing. I could make it very messy indeed for the characters.
Aimee: The Fall of Ircsentai. This story is almost done. It's one of those SF-writer-writes-fantasy stories. If you've got Magic, why not go for it the big stuff? In this case, put your last-city- for-the-long-lived-race in orbit. The bad guys, stymied for centuries as to its location, find it and start a rather subtle attack. Mayhem ensues.
Miri's Service. Set four centuries after the previous story, the world is vastly changed. Due to events not described in The Fall, most of the worlds' magic users are dead, and magic would be mythical to most people if it weren't for the fact that a large chunk of an entire mountain range floats above the terrain. Into this world falls Miranda, a young girl who neither believes in nor has respect for magic, and who is forced to face her own magical inheritance. What she discovers is that the "magicians" of the Guild no more believe in the return of real magic to the masses than she once did and want her only because she is young and beautiful and can be used as a kind of capital in a rather banal bid to make a lot of money. (A lot of my stories are about banal evils; the initiatory villians get into the fixes they did for petty reasons and don't consider themselves bad people; along the way, trying to correct their mistake, they collect real villians who, as in real life, rarely have the intelligence needed to get where they want to be). Miri escapes their plans and has to survive and ultimately expose their plans.
Janae. I have this rather curious obsession with contemporary-with-Columbus era merchant lore, such as the Portugese and the Dutch were conducting. Damn little "urban magic" fiction has been written exploiting this niche. Janae is a librarian for a Guild of warrior mages; she herself is both a swordsmaster and a mage, but is generally thought of as being mediocre in both. The mages believe themselves to be the power behind the throne and maintain a reputation as being good actors, of good standing against the evils of the world, and contrast themselves to both foreigners and to "wild mages" who act outside the guild. In truth, the Guild of Warrior Mages will step on anyone, even an innocent bystander, who gets in their way. I once described this as "The Equalizer as Jedi knight in 17th century Holland." Only without silly glowing swords.
Madships. I call this "The Journal Entries II Project." Basically, this means the story is sanitized of the very last of Mary-Sueism and much of the technology is rationalized in a way that probably involves wormholes; interstellar space is very, very mysterious, and it takes forever to get there this way. Madships is one of my two major JE2 novels that explores the morality of robotics; a lot of common arguments about AIs, transcendence, and morality are explored in this story about a colony of humans that uses AIs waiting for the right moment to go berserk, and the way the Corridor responds to them.
The Emancipation Resistance. A smaller JE2 novel idea. Our heros are "disreputable types, adventurers," as one of them ironically puts it, on vacation on a luxury ferryliner, a four-day trip, when terrorists strike. Their objective is to "free the ship's AI from its enslavement at the hands of humanity." The problem is that the AI doesn't want to be freed, and the terrorists insist that it does, and it will thank them afterwards. A pretty talky novel, I think, with lots of the kinds of discussions that were rampant in Seperate Electrities and Dreamteam Calamities.
Manumission. I wrote about this before. A novel set in a magical Rome in the same way that Sailing to Sarantium is set in Byzantium. The idea is about a slave-owning Mage who, over the course of the novel, comes to discover that owning slaves is not merely immoral, its economically inhibitory, and "Rome" would be better off without it. I was actually thinking of setting this geographically where Carthage once stood.
Toby and Kasserine. Ah, my "what's popular now" novel. Cat girls, fin d'siecle fiction, and magic. Same world as the previous, only two millenia later. The magic is returning; a group that has held the secrets of alchemy for all this time discovers that it starts to work again. And their target: destroy the cat people, an experiment 2500 years ago in Egypt (al-khem, "from Egypt") trying to create a race of warriors for the Pharoah (Cue Phil Foglio's "Why cats make terrible spies" here) as an "offense against God and humanity." Three people: a clueless British naturalist working in Africa, a cat-woman from Vienna, and a cat-boy from Philadelphia, all end up together, working to defeat the alchemists. Betrayal! Mayhem! Death! An Indiana-Jones kind of story with Philip Pullman-style clerics and, of course, cat girls
Sarah's Reason. And now for something completely different. Well, not really. It's SF, but no AIs, no real robots, nothing like that. Maybe it's technically set at the beginning of the JE2 universe. Sarah Reason is a genetically engineered human (if you've read Bujold, think "furry quaddie") designed to live in zero gravity (normal humans don't do so well, y'know). Her species is designed to reach for the stars. And then humans discover wormholes and her existence becomes, well, if not irrelevant than somewhat awkward. Starting with an existential mess, the story careens into a mystery as the discoverer of the wormhole effect is found murdered, and Sarah may be the prime suspect.
Charlie Stross once said "If you want a career in writing, write three novels, each in a different corner of the genres you love, and try to sell them all, all at once."
He did it. It's time to put his advice into action.
It is said, when you cannot write, you should write anyway. If you're having writer's block, write a letter to your mother. To your wife. To your friends. Write in your journal. As long as you have a pencil and a pad of paper, or in my case a laptop, you should try writing every day. Because to do otherwise is to forget how.
So I'm writing. Because I'm starting to worry that I'm burning out. It's been hard, putting out the last eight stories on a very tight schedule. I wonder what I'm going to do next. NaNoWriMo is only eighteen days away, and maybe I'll participate this year. Kouryou-chan's birthday is on a Friday and it's the only real project for next month, so I'm looking at the months and trying to figure out how I would put it all together.
But my real problem is my fear that I'm writing cliche's. If you don't want to know what's coming up, don't read past the break.
Okay, so here are some story ideas I've been playing with:
Aimee: The Imperial City. This story actually concentrates on another character, Filo, a young man who's magical skills are small but who has a knack for seeing what others don't. Think a kind of Young Sherlock Holmes in your typical extruded fantasy world city, only with touches of Eurasian Imperialism along the lines of the Chinese or perhaps Indian lines. Obscure things that would make the story feel less, um, extruded. Lots of chances for the characters to get mixed up in politics. The real crux is your standard power takeover with unwilling tentacle monsters caught up in the whole thing. I could make it very messy indeed for the characters.
Aimee: The Fall of Ircsentai. This story is almost done. It's one of those SF-writer-writes-fantasy stories. If you've got Magic, why not go for it the big stuff? In this case, put your last-city- for-the-long-lived-race in orbit. The bad guys, stymied for centuries as to its location, find it and start a rather subtle attack. Mayhem ensues.
Miri's Service. Set four centuries after the previous story, the world is vastly changed. Due to events not described in The Fall, most of the worlds' magic users are dead, and magic would be mythical to most people if it weren't for the fact that a large chunk of an entire mountain range floats above the terrain. Into this world falls Miranda, a young girl who neither believes in nor has respect for magic, and who is forced to face her own magical inheritance. What she discovers is that the "magicians" of the Guild no more believe in the return of real magic to the masses than she once did and want her only because she is young and beautiful and can be used as a kind of capital in a rather banal bid to make a lot of money. (A lot of my stories are about banal evils; the initiatory villians get into the fixes they did for petty reasons and don't consider themselves bad people; along the way, trying to correct their mistake, they collect real villians who, as in real life, rarely have the intelligence needed to get where they want to be). Miri escapes their plans and has to survive and ultimately expose their plans.
Janae. I have this rather curious obsession with contemporary-with-Columbus era merchant lore, such as the Portugese and the Dutch were conducting. Damn little "urban magic" fiction has been written exploiting this niche. Janae is a librarian for a Guild of warrior mages; she herself is both a swordsmaster and a mage, but is generally thought of as being mediocre in both. The mages believe themselves to be the power behind the throne and maintain a reputation as being good actors, of good standing against the evils of the world, and contrast themselves to both foreigners and to "wild mages" who act outside the guild. In truth, the Guild of Warrior Mages will step on anyone, even an innocent bystander, who gets in their way. I once described this as "The Equalizer as Jedi knight in 17th century Holland." Only without silly glowing swords.
Madships. I call this "The Journal Entries II Project." Basically, this means the story is sanitized of the very last of Mary-Sueism and much of the technology is rationalized in a way that probably involves wormholes; interstellar space is very, very mysterious, and it takes forever to get there this way. Madships is one of my two major JE2 novels that explores the morality of robotics; a lot of common arguments about AIs, transcendence, and morality are explored in this story about a colony of humans that uses AIs waiting for the right moment to go berserk, and the way the Corridor responds to them.
The Emancipation Resistance. A smaller JE2 novel idea. Our heros are "disreputable types, adventurers," as one of them ironically puts it, on vacation on a luxury ferryliner, a four-day trip, when terrorists strike. Their objective is to "free the ship's AI from its enslavement at the hands of humanity." The problem is that the AI doesn't want to be freed, and the terrorists insist that it does, and it will thank them afterwards. A pretty talky novel, I think, with lots of the kinds of discussions that were rampant in Seperate Electrities and Dreamteam Calamities.
Manumission. I wrote about this before. A novel set in a magical Rome in the same way that Sailing to Sarantium is set in Byzantium. The idea is about a slave-owning Mage who, over the course of the novel, comes to discover that owning slaves is not merely immoral, its economically inhibitory, and "Rome" would be better off without it. I was actually thinking of setting this geographically where Carthage once stood.
Toby and Kasserine. Ah, my "what's popular now" novel. Cat girls, fin d'siecle fiction, and magic. Same world as the previous, only two millenia later. The magic is returning; a group that has held the secrets of alchemy for all this time discovers that it starts to work again. And their target: destroy the cat people, an experiment 2500 years ago in Egypt (al-khem, "from Egypt") trying to create a race of warriors for the Pharoah (Cue Phil Foglio's "Why cats make terrible spies" here) as an "offense against God and humanity." Three people: a clueless British naturalist working in Africa, a cat-woman from Vienna, and a cat-boy from Philadelphia, all end up together, working to defeat the alchemists. Betrayal! Mayhem! Death! An Indiana-Jones kind of story with Philip Pullman-style clerics and, of course, cat girls
Sarah's Reason. And now for something completely different. Well, not really. It's SF, but no AIs, no real robots, nothing like that. Maybe it's technically set at the beginning of the JE2 universe. Sarah Reason is a genetically engineered human (if you've read Bujold, think "furry quaddie") designed to live in zero gravity (normal humans don't do so well, y'know). Her species is designed to reach for the stars. And then humans discover wormholes and her existence becomes, well, if not irrelevant than somewhat awkward. Starting with an existential mess, the story careens into a mystery as the discoverer of the wormhole effect is found murdered, and Sarah may be the prime suspect.
Charlie Stross once said "If you want a career in writing, write three novels, each in a different corner of the genres you love, and try to sell them all, all at once."
He did it. It's time to put his advice into action.
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write block sucks
Date: 2004-10-12 07:57 pm (UTC)All I need to do try to make it flow right and layer it right.
Or I write about my dreams....I'm getting tired of my dreams. I'm trying to veiw people in personal level and listen and watch their body lanagues.
Being a writer you do have to go under cover and do research.
Re: write block sucks
Date: 2004-10-13 09:16 am (UTC)Re: write block sucks
Date: 2004-10-13 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-13 10:06 pm (UTC)Don't worry I can wait.