Elf Sternberg

Gack. I just opened a folder in my documents directory entitled "Steampunk Sexbots." I'm sure it will involve cerebral musings on William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and zombies.

No, not those zombies. These zombies.

It's all James Nicoll's fault for showing me this in the same breath we were discussing the Christian response to sex with robots.

Having been laid off has been something of a curious mix for me.  My day so far has evolved into something like this: Get up around 6:30.  Get the kids out the door by 8.  From 8:30 am to 10:00 am I do the serious job searching: I answer emails, look up job listing, contact recruiters, send out resumes and deal.  I take a break from 10:00 to about 10:30, and then work more on the job search until noon.  Omaha and I usually break for lunch together.  In the afternoon, I do another 90 minutes of work, this time on my portfolio projects, and then another break, then another 90 minutes.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much time for writing.  Even without the commute, because I’m home I have to deal with the kids when they leave and get back: packing lunches, getting dressed, and then homework and extracurricular activities.

But I did find time to write this evening, and did about a thousand words.  It’s a centaur/centaur scene between two of my green-furred foxtaurs, one of whom has revealed a terrible secret (”We’re not the same species anymore”), and the other of whom is about to reveal, not so much a secret as a terrible cultural defect.

If only I didn’t hear Shatner’s voice every time the male lead opened his mouth.  But it’s nice to be writing again.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

I had this idea: A traditional Dyson sphere, what most of us singularity-as-a-setting writers now call matrioshka spheres (poor Dyson, to be remembered for the bad SFnal version), where lots and lots of little solar-powered polises live in huge cloud-like orbits around the sun. Gazillions of human analogues live in these things and 99.99% of them don’t do much more than play World of Warcraft and their equivalents. Every once in a while one of these polises suddenly needs a lot more CPU power, maybe because its population is going after a boss-level, or there’s a huge gathering thar requires a lot of environmental rendering. Whatever the case, the polises would like to have a mechanism for borrowing computrons from neighboring polises to do the rendering. Distance and orbital times make calculations difficult, but eventually promises of future returns on borrowed processing time become commodities traded just like the more predictable “hard” commodities of out-system manfacturing resources.

All of this is very boring, so specialized quasi-conscious AIs are tasked with figuring it all out. The post-human overseers who leave their entertainment realms to manage theses systems are rock stars, wealthy in some way, empowered perhaps to make decisions and dole out favors. The AIs, meanwhile, are looking through the optimization space to make sure the polis they’re programmed to oversee has the best possible deals, maximizing speedups and minimizing slowdowns.

The day comes when someone is called upon to make good on a contract, and fails to deliver. Big. An adventure goes south, pixellated and trashed. And while the adventurers in the game are disappointed, the overseeing AI overreacts and pulls its contracts in, refusing to deal until its neighbors, some of whom are coming into a functional transactional range and others are moving out as orbits proceed, until they demonstrate significantly greater transparency.

Everything goes sour in the time it takes light to traverse the solar system twice as people realize that the promises the AIs have been making have no basis in real deliverables, and the promised adventures aren’t going to happen and, worse, the promised entertainments to be delivered out-system to the manfacturing base that provides maintenance and parts for this bread-and-circuses civilization aren’t going to happen, and the manfacturers either shut down or go slow-and-local. The intra-Mars orbit civilization starts to slow down as more and more resources are dedicated to preservation, and a great depression settles onto Sol.

And then the aliens invade, I suppose. Or something.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Muse and I have been on a tear the past two weeks. First, she delivered on Moi Neuroses and I have a solid rough draft, and she's been pushing forward on Wishing Well: Homecoming, a kind-of wrap-up where Wish assembles all the thoughts she had during her trip out to llerkin and comes to some important conclusions. We've been in a relentless "Finish it or Kill it" mood, which brings us down to the question of when should a story be abandoned.

Cybernetic Control Authority started life as a role-playing game scene, and I thought I could adapt it to a Journal Entry. As it stands, it's not too bad: "Cheyenne versus the Terminator," ending up as a huge diplomatic brouhahah.

The problem is that there's no sex scene, and no real justification for one. Muse's response is that I should try making the story bigger. "You need a reason for Cheyenne's behavior in Robots of the Deep Versus the Vampire Girl of Fallow Five; maybe this is the chance The Deep takes, here and now, to seed the universe with Encompassment Enforcers, and Cheyenne becomes programmed, unknown even to her, to be one of them." Grief, I'm not sure I want to write another novel, though. I've got too many already.

Still, looking through the catalog of unfinished works, it seems that I'll be finishing quite a number sometime soon. And the queue will get deeper.

Oh, but Muse has more for me. Last night she said, "You complained that the family reunions in the Honesty and Heroine arcs are too similar. Okay, let's play with Heroine, since the backstory in Honesty is too solid. Does Dove have a sister?"

Wretched girl.

I think Muse is trying to tell me something. Caprice is ordinary fiction, and if she ever gets a lover it'll be a pretty mundane kind of MF relationship. A lot of the Journal entries have been FF (or FD) recently, the standout exception being Dove of course.

But Muse has been pestering me with Yowler stories recently, and I think she's trying to tell me something. Here's what we've come up with so far, not including the novel (which isn't erotica):

• Iowa Stray 1909 (MM)
• Jake and Jinme 1947 (MM)
• Lost in the Woods 1978 (MF)
• Boy from Brazil 1984 (MM)
• Club Boy 1999 (MF)
• Boxless 2005 (MM)
• Sleepy 2008 (MM)

That's a lot of male/male stuff in there. Now, "Iowa Stray" has a complete first draft and is in revision, which means (Sigh) I'm going to have to create a new page for it on the website. "Jake and Jinme" is almost done (the fight scene and the mostly off-stage MF scene between Jinme and Lyon at the end need to be written, but it's definitely getting close. Probably about 7000 words total, I'd say), and the rest are all just 500-word summaries.

Yesterday, I just couldn't stand it anymore. I sat down, opened up a blank file, and started writing Heroine Souls, the next Dove San Cioni story. Muse had been playing with it on the sides, tempting me, and dammit I did pass 50,000 words in Caprice Starr, the story's a heck of a mess, and I kinda know what Chapter 9 10 is going to be about, but right now I'm a little burned out after 45 days straight.

I needed some comfort writing. Muse delivered, in spades. I've been struggling to write Caprice, struggling to do 1,000 words a day. I haven't made it every day. Apparently, just writing porn with familiar themes of neurotic characters dealing with emotional situations is my comfort writing, because in two days I did almost 7,000 words. It's just (1) set-up: show Dove and the Twins settling in toward the end of their first year together. Domestic bliss of a sort, with long and involved threesome sex scene. Be affirmative about their affection for one another and how the infatuation is wearing off but the relationship is still working. (2) conflict: Dove's mothers show up, and Dove's conflict is immediate. For the past year, she's been able to pretend that she doesn't need their affirmation. Now she has to either prove she doesn't need it, or earn it. Or both. Or something in the middle. Show an attempt at make up; show Dove and the Twins having Bad Sex. (3) resolution: someone makes a decision. Something important and significant to the story, even to the series. Dove and the Twins have make-up sex that's better and more meaningful.

(Actually, I have one very strong idea for how the story will end, and it's one of those things that's got my brain twonked: the Twins come to an understanding about human/robot relationships that might turn the whole idea of the Encompassment over, or it might affirm just how important the Encompassment was, or it might just be unique to them and Dove. Whatever it is, it's different from Purpose as it's been understood in the Journal Entries, it's a more mature kind of relationship between Dove and the Twins. My problem is that it's such a unique problem to the Journal Entries, even if I am trying to write my way around the whole issue of 'friendly AIs', that I'm afraid no one else will get it.)

Muse was so deliriously happy the past two days that she cheered and gleed and then said, "I've got three more for you! You know your catgirl/catboy universe?"

"The yowlerverse? Yah?"

"How about you write one set in the late 1970s? What would yowlers be like then? Disco! Cocaine! Catnip!" She giggled.

"Okay, it's silly. I like it. And?"

"How about one set today, in Seattle? You could write about the chill. Send a catboy to the club."

"Okay, but... where's the angle?" She leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Remember Andrea? The Vogue, 1998?"

I paused for a moment, and remembered, and said, "Oh. Oh, oh! You're an evil girl!" She giggled. "Okay," I said, "What's the third?"

"A catgirl works at Pike Place Market, at one of the fishmongers. Not the flying fish place, how about the clam place across the way?"

"And?"

"You're the writer, you figure it out."

"Muse!"

Muse and I had an argument last night. We're in that prickly stage with each other, the one where writing a book has become an effort, and it's not a sexy book, and Muse spends most of her time thinking about writing sexy stories. I'd turned down her latest idea and she got all mad with me. "I can't believe this. You're throwing away a perfect opportunity for more sex, especially weird, kinky sex! The Sterlings setting is perfect for this kind of thing! You had a fabulous idea with Polestar, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but it hasn't gone anywhere," I said.

"You haven't had time," she said. "I understand that. But really, think about it: such a heavily genderqueered setting. They're under attack by unknown forces. They have a bioconservative outlook. Athena is an 888B-Agro/Ind ST-plus five world, according to your notes; they'd have all the resources they needed, especially if they're not entirely sure they trust their newfound Pendorian friends but they're grabbing up all the Pendorian G-level tech they can find."

"Muse, I don't have time for this either."

"But, but... It's perfect. Under the Shadow of the Big Gun..."

"Is stupid," I said. "Huge gun emplacements, especially surface-based ones, are such a bad idea I don't know where to begin. The last one was the Hochdruckpumpe Cannon, and all it did was make a great big target for Operation Crossbow."

"The Free Worlders don't know that!" Muse said. "Maybe this was all part of a big push to get people involved. They can't ignore the huge gun in their midst, and the reason it's there."

"Maybe," I sighed. "They certainly know the Hochdruckpumpe didn't work. They must have taken a copy of Wikipedia with them."

She said, trying to change the subject, "If you take the ideas you had in Kyama, and transplant them to the Sterling-Dark War, you create a perfect setting for all kinds of illicit genetic engineering hijinks done by people without a lot of depth of experience with gene-e or its unintended consequences." I gave her my best glare. "Look," she says, getting desperate, "The gun doesn't have to work. Maybe it's a fraud. A reminder of what they're up against. Or it's just decrepit. Decaying. You'd like that."

"Muse, really. I don't know if it'll get written..."

"You just don't like my ideas anymore."

"That's not true," I said. "I love your ideas. True, we haven't been building the audience we used to, but that's partially my fault. I haven't been working so hard on the marketing end. I don't know where to put my stuff to pimp it most effectively anymore. It's not like there's just one outlet. And we have other things to take care of these days. Like writing mainstream."

"You mean like... Caprice." She nearly sneered the last word.

"You liked Caprice in the beginning."

"I didn't know it was going to take so long!" she said. She sighed. "Okay, I'm sorry. You'll file it away?"

"Of course I will," I said. "I have good ideas of my own now and then. Maybe there's a Y's-only orgy club in there, and your gene-e experiment goes there."

Her eyes twinkled. "Ooh, ooh, I can see that happening! And the X who loves her and doesn't know she's a gene-e sneaks in to figure out where her girlfriend goes some nights, and... Ooh, ooh. Let me work on this!"

"Yeah," I sighed as she bounded off. "You go work on that. Come back with more for me to do."

I ought to be working on something commercial, but no, Muse likes the angel story so much I wrote another 1200 words into it today. We have our hero Gabriel, his girlfriend Jill, the "good" (for some definition) angel Mahazioth, whom you've met, and then we have the "bad" angel Lahmai and the "good" demoness Hushai, and I have a seven-days sort of outline.

The trouble is, day seven's outline entry reads simply, "And all hell breaks loose." And I'm not sure what Muse means by that.

Oh, and Muse also gave me an idea for a steampunk episode that fits in the Journal Entries universe. "But you can't write it until someone in Polestar talks about the missing ship from the Sterlings mission, so you'll have to finish Polestar first."

I can't believe how tired I am. I barely did anything. After a quick breakfast, I drove Omaha over to the caucus center so she could help set up for the thing at 1:00, then quickly hurtled over so cheapie haircut place so Kouryou-chan could get her bangs whacked, then back to the house to pick up Yamaraashi-chan and take her to the caucus as well.

I did not get to caucus. Kouryou-chan had her rehearsal at 2:00, so I had to drive her up to the theater, then turn around and hit Jo-Ann's fabrics for some bondage rope. Drapery rope isn't hemp, but it's so pretty, especially in the glowy blues and reds that you can get.

Afterward, I had about an hour of downtime. I went to a cafe and tried to write, but the place was too busy and I had forgotten my headphones. I was sandwiched between a businessman constantly calling up his secretary and telling her to index this article or that document, and two gentlemen who were upset that Bill Maher had banned a 9/11 Truther book on the grounds that truthers were gaming the system, and they thought Maher was just part of the vast conspiracy to keep the truth out of the hands of the American people. So, instead, I concentrated on creating a demo environment for my presentation DWIM Structured Text Generation for the Web using Python.

I never got a chance to use the rope. Just as I was getting ready to go out, I got a call from my date. One of her kids is down with a high fever, and she didn't want to leave.

I told her that was okay. I'm not feeling well right now. I think this gastroesophegeal problem is worse than I thought; even with a high dose of Prilosec, I'm still suffering constant sore, acidic throat. And the high Prilosec doses is just making the part of me below the stomach unhappy.

I did finally get about 500 words into a story. Just something new that I thought of in a keffy state last night. One of those annoying things Muse brings me: a man and a woman on a high promontory, overlooking a long valley at the far end of which humans with crude chemical rifles and whips enslave much larger furries. My hero, Jack, is not given to polite speech:

"Those are pines. Those are imported pines. I'd bet my left testicle that this is one of those Terran seedship projects. Those white creatures might be natives of the project, but they're DNA all the way through. They just look like the biggest fuckin' albino Mustela I've ever seen. Only more... human, I guess. Like they didn't put enough ferrets in the blender."

"Jack!" Bonya said. "You can be so disgusting."

"We're not going to find out from here," he said. "It's as sterile as an asteroid up here. We need to go down there, get botanicals, and get something from the furry guys."

I had the strangest dreams last night. The second dream was more like a sensation... for some reason I dreamed that I had lost my wristwatch and missed it terribly. I haven't worn a wristwatch for over a decade. When I woke up, I kept rubbing my wrist, wondering where the watch had gone.

The first was even a little stranger. I had read, in some bad romance novel, recently, one of the protagonists' friends (guess she'd be contagonist, perhaps) say "Men are dogs."

I dreamt a world where that was literally true. There were women, and men were dogs: reliable, dedicated, loyal, and perpetually horny.

I wonder if I could write a story about that:

My first lover was a Samoyed. They're pretty rare, but someone has to be breeding them somewhere. He liked wearing Hawaiian prints, but somehow his white hair and broad, white-furred ears made those hideous colors work for him. I loved his ears, but then I've always loved dogs's ears.

He was like so many dogs. I gave him my virginity because he was so gentle and so sweet. His short, fuzzy tail waggled back and forth when I told him that I wanted him to be first. He even said he'd be gentle. I think it was his first time too.

Damn, now I want a backstory and a viability story and the whole nine yards.

Silly muse.