Muse Assault!
Dec. 6th, 2006 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, last night, I was sitting down at my desk and wondering what I should write now. Obviously, Sterlings isn't done, so I thought I'd concentrate on a few unfinished chapters in there. Press Release (in which Elf reveals that he is a F#%!@#!%# Idiot for forgetting, somehow, that a society built "on the best moral and ethical guidelines of 21st Century Continental Europe" (ha ha but seriously) will also have a free press and reporters who want to go on the First Contact mission!) and Risky Invitations (in which Dove learns what the Twins are and continues to wrestle with what she wants her future to be) are in various stages of completion, but neither appealed to me.
Oddly, I would have thought the Dove story more interesting (it has better sex), but I kept canoodling on Press Release because I thought it presented the more interesting conundrum. We humans live with null hypotheses, for example that something is not alive until we see characteristics that correlate with our experience of living things. In Press Release, Sterling journalist Eha Sigma goes and visits a virtual reality where people actually live out their lives, and discovers a world where the null hypothesis for mindfulness is not valid: everything she encounters is potentially thoughtful.
But I was still out of the general mood to write when my muse assaulted me on the couch and said, "You're bored? Bored? Here!" She proceeded to dump into my brain a big unfinished undigested chunk of story. She reminded me that I'd left behind in the Sterling home systems a couple thousand Pendorians, over half of which were civilians establishing financial and informational ties with this lost colony. The stream of consciousness contained brief images: a cruise ship, our heroine-- who's a satryl by the way, my muse thinks there are too many humans in my current arc, like that'll be much different-- on a beach sipping a tall drink with a little umbrella in it, a dank room behind a bulkhead, a hand holding a gun, the heroine and a Sterling woman sipping tea, someone thrown overboard, a dance floor...
Sigh. Wretched girl. It's not enough that I'm three titles deep: "The Journal Entries: Reservations: Sterlings." No, she has go tack on a subarc: "The Journal Entries: Reservations: Sterlings: Polestar." I've already got the first thousand words in there, including this awful bit of dialogue:
Oddly, I would have thought the Dove story more interesting (it has better sex), but I kept canoodling on Press Release because I thought it presented the more interesting conundrum. We humans live with null hypotheses, for example that something is not alive until we see characteristics that correlate with our experience of living things. In Press Release, Sterling journalist Eha Sigma goes and visits a virtual reality where people actually live out their lives, and discovers a world where the null hypothesis for mindfulness is not valid: everything she encounters is potentially thoughtful.
But I was still out of the general mood to write when my muse assaulted me on the couch and said, "You're bored? Bored? Here!" She proceeded to dump into my brain a big unfinished undigested chunk of story. She reminded me that I'd left behind in the Sterling home systems a couple thousand Pendorians, over half of which were civilians establishing financial and informational ties with this lost colony. The stream of consciousness contained brief images: a cruise ship, our heroine-- who's a satryl by the way, my muse thinks there are too many humans in my current arc, like that'll be much different-- on a beach sipping a tall drink with a little umbrella in it, a dank room behind a bulkhead, a hand holding a gun, the heroine and a Sterling woman sipping tea, someone thrown overboard, a dance floor...
Sigh. Wretched girl. It's not enough that I'm three titles deep: "The Journal Entries: Reservations: Sterlings." No, she has go tack on a subarc: "The Journal Entries: Reservations: Sterlings: Polestar." I've already got the first thousand words in there, including this awful bit of dialogue:
Mava said, "Promiscuity is socially unacceptable, smoking is unknown, chemical dependency is less socially acceptable than obesity. Quod erat demonstrandum."Now I just have to make sure that Mava's girlfriend, whoever she ends up being, is not an airhead.
"Oh, you speak French?"
