Elf Sternberg

Code Fairy can Shut. Up. Now.

"I gotta arc idea for ya."

"Mph. Fuck you."

"You can't. I'm just a muse." She pouts so prettily. "But, I got this idea. See? Listen, it's for a Journal Entry, and it builds on the ideas in Miao, Umechan and the rest of Pale Shadows. See, it's about this guy, and he finds a robot like in Miao, but it seems to be unpowered so it's kinda more like one of those love dolls, and he's not sure what to do with it, but..." She goes for a while, describing the scenario in excrutiating detail.

"So, who does he end up with?" I said. "The original woman, the second or third, or the robot?"

"Dunno. I figured you'd figure out some way to make the first woman and the robot work together."

"Muse, it's midnight. Go to bed."

"You'll write it, yeah?"

"Eventually." She pouts. "Eventually, okay?"

"Meanie."

"G'night, Muse."

One of the lessons of GTD that I've never quite learned is that in order to meet your own needs about GTD, you need to have a reward at the end of the tunnel, something more immediate than "the pleasure of accomplishment" that encourages you to finish the task before you.

The Muse and I have therefore come to an understanding: On a writing day, if I finish 1000 words of work on Caprice Starr, I'll allow myself to turn my attention to any shiny I have hanging around (and believe me, I've got a lot of shiny). My hope is that Caprice will become shiny enough that she'll start to self-sustain and I'll be able to do the full 2,667 words per day on the Caprice Starr series itself, but in the meantime The Muse is satisfied that the shiny ideas won't get lost in the day-to-day work of writing a novel.

Holding multiple stories and hundreds of characters in my head is pretty easy; I do it all the time, obviously, and keep them all pretty well-segmented. (Some would argue, and I would agree, that I tend to work on classes of characters: This month, my stories are all about neurotic young men placed in alienting environments.) It will be more interesting if can maintain a hard continuity throughout the entire novel and then use that continuity succesfully into the rest of the series.

And lest my friends start to worry that I'm a little crazy, well, yeah: I've had "The Muse" as shorthand for the crazy ideas I get while I'm driving or showering, just out of the blue, like the shiny ones she gave me in the first memo: "Why don't you write a story about a young woman whose father left her and his manservant purposed robot behind when she was very young? Here, it's first person told from her point of view, I hope you don't mind," and "Why don't you write a story about an adult woman who's unhealthily attached to a security 'bot she was given when she was very young? Here, it's third person told from the outside, I think you'll like the format."

And The Muse has a sister, Code Fairy. She tends to bug me in the shower. She's more practical: "You've written six dialogs in the past three weeks; I bet you could refactor a 'create a dialog' class out of that mess."

There are days when I just want to bind and gag my muse. But I bet she'd enjoy that. I'd promised myself that I'd go back and revise older works, but for some reason I sat down in the bus yesterday afternoon, opened up a blank file, and started writing. 1,314 words later the one-act Androids are Like That I'd mentioned a few days ago, questions about what qualifies for legal protection under traditional Corridor law, and one of Rache's [NSFW] little twisty stories had collided in my head.

Rache is a bit of a phenomenon: she seems to be writing a story a day, and her collection is already as big as mine. Her style is direct and her plots are crude although they're getting better and twistier. Her vocabulary is better than most and her grammar's at least as good as any magazine fiction out there. Her stories are contemporary, all over the map, often kinky and out there, and come straight from the pornoverse. Don't expect my kind of writing when you read hers.

But I thought to myself, "Oh, okay, I can just write a Rache story. Pornoverse things do happen in the Journal Entries universe from time to time, like they happen in real life."

But, nooo, my muse has to have fun with me. The opening sentence launches with, "I'm looking for a friend I can turn off and leave off for a while without feeling guilty about it." The protagonist, a woman named Taim (a name coughed up by my random name generator and so perfect it had to be kept), ends up buying a pet. Characters need to be something, so Taim is a coolhunter whose specialty is identifying "things to be found in coffee shops next year that people are likely to buy on impulse." Taim's major flaw is that she herself often impulse-buys without knowing why, which is how she ends up with Wolf, a big, dumb, utterly unwolflike, friendly, nonsentient(? gryn), used robot dog whose former owner had a reputation before she sold Wolf and, as they say in the Corridor, "retired" (yeah, you can totally see where this story is going).

I've discovered one of my problems: I have to struggle to tell (as opposed to show) anything. I've gotten so good at creating backstories that can be revealed through dialogue and action without resorting to "As you know, Bob" moments that boiling such a backstory down to a single paragraph told by the narrator makes me uncomfortable. My voice is very much one of the narrator as limited-omnicient follower: I tell you how the character is feeling right then, but if you need to know about his history, I want to show you how he knows that history and processes it, rather than just tell you about it. I want my own fingerprints on the story to be as light as possible. I'm not so comfortable with being a revealer.

Shardik stories can get away with this and be short stories because they're in the first person: our hero can just reminisce or ruminate as required. But third-person shorts require a bit of telling. I need to figure out how that works to my satisfaction.

The day I left to go camping-- leaving behind every writing instrument I own except for my beloved Miquelrius A5 Quadrille notebook and a Jetstream Uniball Finepoint Blue pen (gosh, no, I'm not at all picky about my tools, why do you ask? And why is the Jestream Finepoint Blue a special order item now? What's up with that?), my Muse assaulted me on the road and said, "Y'know that break between Book 2 and Book 3 of Aimee? The one where you can't think of a good reason why Darynn should go to the Imperial Capital? Well, here's your plot! Eight chapters, fully plotted, with a main character and a protagonist and everything. And it maintains the same format used in Aimee one. Boom, instant consistency!"

Fucker. Of course, the second I did have a chance I wrote it all down. Now I have to actually write the story, not just the outline.

On Saturday of the campout, naturally, my other Muse shows up and says, "You know that problem you have at work with unit testing? If you inherit and extend the Forms manager's startTag() method to embed a comment field about the validation state, and add an implicit method to run the validator but not actually commit anything or change the view, your problem will go away."

Of course, I wrote that down as well.

Problem number one: I can't write The Talented Princess until I finish Nymphs in November. I promised myself that.

Problem number two: "We're in the final phase of development, so you can't make any infrastructure changes to the application server now. And we don't have time scheduled in the next rev for it either."

Why do these things happen when I can't be productive about them?