More coal, Snooty!
Jun. 30th, 2007 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs"A story is about a character who has a problem, how he goes about solving that problem, the obstacles that prevent him from solving the problem, ending with a final expression of the problem and (usually) a clear resolution of that problem."
In the past seven days I've been writing like a demon, managing an average of 2000 words a day even though I didn't write at all on Saturday. I've been maintaining a positively professional pace on the Danjuma story.
The premise of the story is simple: Danjuma is a pot-addled human being living in a run-down equatorial town that the AIs keep as a sort of minimal social capital reserve park for people like him. Drugs of all kinds are cheap and plentiful, but Dan is sticking to the basics; he has a weird sort of "organic" sensibility: you can mess with its genes all you want, but if it doesn't grow you don't want to put it into you. He has a vague and undefined unease toward nanotechnology or brain implants. Most of the people with whom he shares his ghetto share many of these characteristics.
The difference between Dan and his acquaintances (Dan is hesitant to call any of them friends) is that Dan has been teaching himself a useful skill. Nanotech and implant technologies have delivered various perceptual experiences to thinking people and psychopharmacopoeia has become something of a lost art. Dan is single-handedly, and without anyone knowing it, reviving that art. His goal is to create the perfect marijuana, the one that will for all time erase Dan's discomfort with just being. Dan is barely 20 years old and he has no idea what to do with himself, lives in a subculture that creates lonesomeness, and yet nobody has never taught him what to do with himself when he's alone.
And then someone mails him a companion robot. To make matters worse for Dan, she's not human like him, but shaped like the short-furred feline species, she doesn't seem to be very bright, and she doesn't speak. The closest he can get out of her is a name, Meia.
Dan is very conflicted, but both sides of his internal conflict put up very weak battles, because Dan doesn't believe himself to be a very strong person. That belief feeds back into his withdrawl from any battlefield. He doesn't have many values.
Except he learns very quickly that he does have values about how Meia should be treated. About how others should perceive her. Part of that is due to his own, sucky childhood, with grasping parents who had him as a status symbol, and part of this is due to an innate humanity that far too many people lack. It is linked, ultimately, to an innate ethic Dan (and other people have) to a fitful, pathetic, but ultimately beautiful sense of generosity. A generosity that will war terribly with Dan's other big problem: along with his quest for the perfect pot, Dan may have, almost by accident, created the perfect coffee. When he becomes aware of just how valuable that formula is, what will he do to protect his intellectual property?
(Uh, what are the intellectual property rights regimes in the Pendorverse? Hmmm....)
But I've sorta run out of steam now. The story has become more like work, there must be effort to polish this crude crystallization of an idea into a jewel of sex and literature. And this always happens. What is the story about, dammit? I want to write big, powerful stories, and I always end up with these little, introspective idea books, like "Is it okay if, at the end of the story, Dan is still smoking pot? Is it okay if he never falls in love with Meia? Is in okay if part of his self-worth is defined in terms of income?" At first, it started out as an "escape from the slow slide to halting state," and now, like all my stories, it's asking for more.
Amusing aside: I googled for "halting state" to make sure that there were adequate explanations for what it meant. Charlie Stross's book Halting State has completely swamped any serious discussion of Turing mathematics, and the first ten links are about him. Good man.
[Explanation of the subject line, here]
In the past seven days I've been writing like a demon, managing an average of 2000 words a day even though I didn't write at all on Saturday. I've been maintaining a positively professional pace on the Danjuma story.
The premise of the story is simple: Danjuma is a pot-addled human being living in a run-down equatorial town that the AIs keep as a sort of minimal social capital reserve park for people like him. Drugs of all kinds are cheap and plentiful, but Dan is sticking to the basics; he has a weird sort of "organic" sensibility: you can mess with its genes all you want, but if it doesn't grow you don't want to put it into you. He has a vague and undefined unease toward nanotechnology or brain implants. Most of the people with whom he shares his ghetto share many of these characteristics.
The difference between Dan and his acquaintances (Dan is hesitant to call any of them friends) is that Dan has been teaching himself a useful skill. Nanotech and implant technologies have delivered various perceptual experiences to thinking people and psychopharmacopoeia has become something of a lost art. Dan is single-handedly, and without anyone knowing it, reviving that art. His goal is to create the perfect marijuana, the one that will for all time erase Dan's discomfort with just being. Dan is barely 20 years old and he has no idea what to do with himself, lives in a subculture that creates lonesomeness, and yet nobody has never taught him what to do with himself when he's alone.
And then someone mails him a companion robot. To make matters worse for Dan, she's not human like him, but shaped like the short-furred feline species, she doesn't seem to be very bright, and she doesn't speak. The closest he can get out of her is a name, Meia.
Dan is very conflicted, but both sides of his internal conflict put up very weak battles, because Dan doesn't believe himself to be a very strong person. That belief feeds back into his withdrawl from any battlefield. He doesn't have many values.
Except he learns very quickly that he does have values about how Meia should be treated. About how others should perceive her. Part of that is due to his own, sucky childhood, with grasping parents who had him as a status symbol, and part of this is due to an innate humanity that far too many people lack. It is linked, ultimately, to an innate ethic Dan (and other people have) to a fitful, pathetic, but ultimately beautiful sense of generosity. A generosity that will war terribly with Dan's other big problem: along with his quest for the perfect pot, Dan may have, almost by accident, created the perfect coffee. When he becomes aware of just how valuable that formula is, what will he do to protect his intellectual property?
(Uh, what are the intellectual property rights regimes in the Pendorverse? Hmmm....)
But I've sorta run out of steam now. The story has become more like work, there must be effort to polish this crude crystallization of an idea into a jewel of sex and literature. And this always happens. What is the story about, dammit? I want to write big, powerful stories, and I always end up with these little, introspective idea books, like "Is it okay if, at the end of the story, Dan is still smoking pot? Is it okay if he never falls in love with Meia? Is in okay if part of his self-worth is defined in terms of income?" At first, it started out as an "escape from the slow slide to halting state," and now, like all my stories, it's asking for more.
Amusing aside: I googled for "halting state" to make sure that there were adequate explanations for what it meant. Charlie Stross's book Halting State has completely swamped any serious discussion of Turing mathematics, and the first ten links are about him. Good man.
[Explanation of the subject line, here]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 05:01 pm (UTC)And the engineer is the famous Sooty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sooty), a character from British children's TV.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 07:02 pm (UTC)Hope this helps - Pteryxx