There have been books with a lot of travel details. Dracula had the last-act chase. The (intended) final Sherlock Holmes case had a bit of a chase, too. Verne's Around the World... is almost nothing but extensive detail on how exactly you get from Point A to Point B. The World's Worst Books also have lengthly descriptions of characters plodding from Point A to Point B, although they are overshadowed by the same characters making long telephone calls to explain how they got from Point A to Point B.
What I'm leading up to, though, is how different it is today to be writing them.
I'm writing a modern work, which means I can basically use up-to-date schedules, reviews, pictures, and even real-time tracking. I currently have open the Lufthansa reservations page, a page that reviews the Business Class (and only) lounge they maintain at Athens International, and a FlightTracker page showing the exact route of a past flight, right down to how many minutes were spent taxiing.
I also have open pages showing the weather, time of sunset, and lunar phase for the exact date used in the novel (October of last year, if you are wondering).
One could far too easily slip into the mistake of a published, official Tomb Raider novel (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) that descended into an almost stop-by-stop description of a journey through the London Tube. The trick is, as always, to find the details that stick. The places outside of mere numbers like the exact time of sunset or number of seats in an Airbus320 "sharklet" variation, to the places where flesh meets metal; where a human being reacts to the thing. That's why travel books and blogs and reviews are so useful.
And even better is having boots on the ground. Or unlaced shoes in the mere 30" of the so-called "Business Class" of the Lufthansa flight from ATH to FRA.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Shopping Trip
Huh. I just looked around to what the standard was for handling text messages in a work of fiction. There isn't one. Some people (and style guides) are being reactionary and demanding it be treated just like dialog;
"Are you ready?" he texted.
Others are looking to the example of epistolary works like Dracula and setting out each message in an isolated and indented chunk of text, such as:
Are you ready?
But I hold with those like the current crop of YA writers, who are facing the task of depicting a digitally integrated world in which internal monolog and in-person conversations and text chats are all twisted together in a continuous skein. For them, are you ready? is the clear leader.
My "no research" novel is taking enough research it is actually making me feel better about the Bronze Age novel I didn't feel competent to tackle yet. The modern world is so filled with detail, every single thing you try to nail down becomes a rabbit hole. And once you've found them, it is an almost impossible task to communicate to the reader. If you put too much in they'll get confused, if you leave too much out they'll squawk. There is such a surfeit of detail, and everything that does get in needs to be explained. Somehow.
Of course, every single age there ever was, was a modern age. 1860's Kansas City had "gone about as fur as they can go." For me, nailing down whether they used the Murex dye in Mycenaean Crete is a heavy research task, but once I've nailed it down the environment is simple and straight-forward.
Or is it? For us, today, the Bronze Age must remain relatively simple. But people are complex. They always have been. For Kes, holding a purple-dyed thread in her hands, there must have been as many connections, as deep a rabbit hole, concerning that seemingly simple thing. The meaning it had within social systems, within economics. Its connections to the gods and other religious practices. What it reminds her of in the rich natural world around her -- connections that have already been explored for generation after generation of poets and myth-makers.
The advantage to the writer is that all this stuff, thank the gods, remains optional. I can put it in for color, and create context where it will reveal character or deepen theme, or I can leave it unsaid and the reader will not miss it.
Still, all in all, is is tempting to reflect on having to write a generic space opera, all comfortable used furniture and technology and science that I (think) I already know and all of that messy clutter that people drag into their thoughts and conversations is both made up and optional.
(Not that it would ever work. The big problem I have with the generic future setting is, no way people are going to lose that baggage of history. They presumably care less about the American War of Independence than we care about the Battle of Gqokli Hill, but the Information Age is one of those things that's really, really hard to take back. If they want to talk about the campaigns of Shaka Zulu they are going to be able to reference them. At length.)
So I just got 900 words out of my protagonist drinking a glass of ouzo (there was some food involved, as well). I'm still a little split on how many words I want to put in with her joining the other tourists and doing touristy things. That stuff is there for two reasons; to set up for later explorations of what it means to be a Modern Greek, both blessed and cursed with the heritage of the classical world. And to have plain simple (and even instructional!) fun being a tourist in a cool place.
On the larger of the pro sides, my outline said I'd be at 20K before I left Athens. On the con side, I'd really like to, before this weekend is over, write up to the point where she boards the plane to Frankfurt.
At least it is still going quickly. That 900 words was this morning's work. And I'm not entirely burned out for the day. And there's the biggest pro of them all in my current planning question. This is the origin story, and getting on that plane is the first really big step of my history buff and YouTube programmer turning into the Adventure Archaeologist she was born to be.
"Are you ready?" he texted.
Others are looking to the example of epistolary works like Dracula and setting out each message in an isolated and indented chunk of text, such as:
Are you ready?
But I hold with those like the current crop of YA writers, who are facing the task of depicting a digitally integrated world in which internal monolog and in-person conversations and text chats are all twisted together in a continuous skein. For them, are you ready? is the clear leader.
My "no research" novel is taking enough research it is actually making me feel better about the Bronze Age novel I didn't feel competent to tackle yet. The modern world is so filled with detail, every single thing you try to nail down becomes a rabbit hole. And once you've found them, it is an almost impossible task to communicate to the reader. If you put too much in they'll get confused, if you leave too much out they'll squawk. There is such a surfeit of detail, and everything that does get in needs to be explained. Somehow.
Of course, every single age there ever was, was a modern age. 1860's Kansas City had "gone about as fur as they can go." For me, nailing down whether they used the Murex dye in Mycenaean Crete is a heavy research task, but once I've nailed it down the environment is simple and straight-forward.
Or is it? For us, today, the Bronze Age must remain relatively simple. But people are complex. They always have been. For Kes, holding a purple-dyed thread in her hands, there must have been as many connections, as deep a rabbit hole, concerning that seemingly simple thing. The meaning it had within social systems, within economics. Its connections to the gods and other religious practices. What it reminds her of in the rich natural world around her -- connections that have already been explored for generation after generation of poets and myth-makers.
The advantage to the writer is that all this stuff, thank the gods, remains optional. I can put it in for color, and create context where it will reveal character or deepen theme, or I can leave it unsaid and the reader will not miss it.
Still, all in all, is is tempting to reflect on having to write a generic space opera, all comfortable used furniture and technology and science that I (think) I already know and all of that messy clutter that people drag into their thoughts and conversations is both made up and optional.
(Not that it would ever work. The big problem I have with the generic future setting is, no way people are going to lose that baggage of history. They presumably care less about the American War of Independence than we care about the Battle of Gqokli Hill, but the Information Age is one of those things that's really, really hard to take back. If they want to talk about the campaigns of Shaka Zulu they are going to be able to reference them. At length.)
So I just got 900 words out of my protagonist drinking a glass of ouzo (there was some food involved, as well). I'm still a little split on how many words I want to put in with her joining the other tourists and doing touristy things. That stuff is there for two reasons; to set up for later explorations of what it means to be a Modern Greek, both blessed and cursed with the heritage of the classical world. And to have plain simple (and even instructional!) fun being a tourist in a cool place.
On the larger of the pro sides, my outline said I'd be at 20K before I left Athens. On the con side, I'd really like to, before this weekend is over, write up to the point where she boards the plane to Frankfurt.
At least it is still going quickly. That 900 words was this morning's work. And I'm not entirely burned out for the day. And there's the biggest pro of them all in my current planning question. This is the origin story, and getting on that plane is the first really big step of my history buff and YouTube programmer turning into the Adventure Archaeologist she was born to be.
Saturday, April 27, 2019
Buridan's Maker
There are times when being a Maker places one in the same hypothetical position of the donkey caught between two piles of hay, unable to decide which is closer.
You see a thing that looks cool and think about buying it. But then you realize that -- thanks to the skills and tools you've accumulated -- you could make your own. So you circle around that for a while.
Building it isn't a neutral proposition. Is owning the thing worth the time and resources you'd have to invest in building one? Perhaps not. So time to reconsider purchase. Well, since you've now re-valued how much it is actually worth it to own the thing, and you have to subtract the added value of increasing your skills and, of course, that it would be fun to build, maybe it isn't worth buying either.
No matter how long you chase this one around the circle, you still end up stuck between two piles of hay.
(Yeah, I want a hand drum. I have a decent bodhran and a cheap darbuka but what the piece I'm working on cries for is the rough-edged, meaty sound of bare hand on stretched hide.)
I also had the shortest crisis of confidence ever. I've been writing all day, finished the chapter and the draft now stands at 10,000 words. And I've reached that point of exhaustion where it all starts to blur and I can't even make sense of my own writing much less the actual data I'm trying to work with.
I hit a YouTube video about a conflict I'd never heard of (Celtic invasion of Greece in about 200 BC) and in the comments section, people are beating up the video and quoting Pausanius at each other and having ridiculously detailed arguments with single posts longer than any of what I'd thought were overly long historical discussions in mine. Face it, the stuff about who bridged what river is trivial.
But I forced myself into chapter planning for the "Just enjoying being a tourist" breather chapter, and hit another video over dinner to get some ideas, and here is a guy who is doing very nice camera work and seems quite personable but is on the Acropolis and keeps calling the big building they have there the "Pantheon." (Plus a bunch of other just-read-the-signs mistakes).
So am I confident? No. Am I in fact feeling overwhelmed by all that still faces me in the novel? You bet. But I'm still going.
(I've got a hell of a Spartacus going on with my dialog right now. In the big pissing contest, Athena Fox, Signor Cosimo Nardella, and Vash go into lecture mode with identical sentence structure and word choice. I don't even know, now, how I'm going to get everyone's voices distinct.)
Building it isn't a neutral proposition. Is owning the thing worth the time and resources you'd have to invest in building one? Perhaps not. So time to reconsider purchase. Well, since you've now re-valued how much it is actually worth it to own the thing, and you have to subtract the added value of increasing your skills and, of course, that it would be fun to build, maybe it isn't worth buying either.
No matter how long you chase this one around the circle, you still end up stuck between two piles of hay.
(Yeah, I want a hand drum. I have a decent bodhran and a cheap darbuka but what the piece I'm working on cries for is the rough-edged, meaty sound of bare hand on stretched hide.)
I also had the shortest crisis of confidence ever. I've been writing all day, finished the chapter and the draft now stands at 10,000 words. And I've reached that point of exhaustion where it all starts to blur and I can't even make sense of my own writing much less the actual data I'm trying to work with.
But I forced myself into chapter planning for the "Just enjoying being a tourist" breather chapter, and hit another video over dinner to get some ideas, and here is a guy who is doing very nice camera work and seems quite personable but is on the Acropolis and keeps calling the big building they have there the "Pantheon." (Plus a bunch of other just-read-the-signs mistakes).
So am I confident? No. Am I in fact feeling overwhelmed by all that still faces me in the novel? You bet. But I'm still going.
(I've got a hell of a Spartacus going on with my dialog right now. In the big pissing contest, Athena Fox, Signor Cosimo Nardella, and Vash go into lecture mode with identical sentence structure and word choice. I don't even know, now, how I'm going to get everyone's voices distinct.)
Friday, April 26, 2019
A terrible feeling of wheat
Did I mention I hate the predictive speech-to-text on the current iOS?
The crazy gallery reception chapter is almost finished. Just have the bit where a Greek Margaret Dumont presses a protective amulet on her, and a short conversation with the gallery owner just before Penny, done with the marathon bit of improv she just pulled off, has a bit of the shakes and what will only be her first ouzo of the evening.
I'm already at 4K. Does mean I still fall short overall, though. And, yes, I could easily expand any of the existing conversations. I could have painted a more detailed picture of the Minoans, for instance. But this would only, to borrow a phrase, fatten the book, not expand it. What I really need is either more plot...or a "B" plot.
As it is I feel there's a little much already. Especially since a lot of the history and myth being talked about isn't important to the central conflicts. Both chapters 1 and 2 are largely about people showing off their knowledge; chapter 1 is Penny on the Acropolis demonstrating how she's able to have a successful history show on YouTube, and Chapter 2 is a fluid, multi-side conflict masked as polite conversation:
And never mind that the Xerxes story only appears in Herodotus and Caesar had spoken in Greek (if he said it at all). That's history for you. You can always drill deeper. Always.
Yes, there are plot-important things hidden in all of these, but for the most part they are subtle. Still, one can't just have a man jump out with a gun. Because that's not plot, either. Plot is, well, plot. Not description or dialog or action, by themselves, but what those things advance.
Speaking of which. Somewhere down the road I need to do a complete dialog pass. This is mostly to get the different speakers sounding more distinct. I also want to listen to a bunch of native speakers (I'm pretty sure I can just search "interview Greek musician" and find something) to get some of those subtleties of word order et al that come when someone isn't speaking their first language.
But also I want to make some distinctions between Penny's voice and the voice she puts on when in the character of Athena Fox. Dialog is one of the places I can underline the access she has to confidence and a projection of competence when she is in character.
(And apropos of nothing, my file names for the current "books" of the narrative are "Agora-Phobia," "Black Forest Hams," and "Owed on a Grecian Urn." If I somehow manage to add to the plot, it might give me a fourth; "What Does the Fox Say.")
I'm already at 4K. Does mean I still fall short overall, though. And, yes, I could easily expand any of the existing conversations. I could have painted a more detailed picture of the Minoans, for instance. But this would only, to borrow a phrase, fatten the book, not expand it. What I really need is either more plot...or a "B" plot.
As it is I feel there's a little much already. Especially since a lot of the history and myth being talked about isn't important to the central conflicts. Both chapters 1 and 2 are largely about people showing off their knowledge; chapter 1 is Penny on the Acropolis demonstrating how she's able to have a successful history show on YouTube, and Chapter 2 is a fluid, multi-side conflict masked as polite conversation:
“Alea iacta est,” Howard raised his glass to us. “The die is cast.”
“Said?” Vash prompted.
“Wasn’t that Caesar?” Safe bet; Howard had all the signs of a military history buff, and that “est” made it Latin. “When he, what was it, crossed the Hellespont?”
Vash shook his head. “The Rubicon. Caesar crossed the Rubicon.”
“Alexander crossed the Hellespont,” Howard amplified.
“So did Xerxes,” I said.
“Alexander threw a spear into the soil,” Howard volleyed back.
“Xerxes had the river whipped,” I replied.
And never mind that the Xerxes story only appears in Herodotus and Caesar had spoken in Greek (if he said it at all). That's history for you. You can always drill deeper. Always.
Speaking of which. Somewhere down the road I need to do a complete dialog pass. This is mostly to get the different speakers sounding more distinct. I also want to listen to a bunch of native speakers (I'm pretty sure I can just search "interview Greek musician" and find something) to get some of those subtleties of word order et al that come when someone isn't speaking their first language.
But also I want to make some distinctions between Penny's voice and the voice she puts on when in the character of Athena Fox. Dialog is one of the places I can underline the access she has to confidence and a projection of competence when she is in character.
(And apropos of nothing, my file names for the current "books" of the narrative are "Agora-Phobia," "Black Forest Hams," and "Owed on a Grecian Urn." If I somehow manage to add to the plot, it might give me a fourth; "What Does the Fox Say.")
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
A Mirror for Which
I don't understand the logic of why the mirror gag is terrible writing.
First person is a strange voice to write in, anyhow. Some people dislike it for anything in the adventure or thriller genre because the very fact that the narrator is telling this story means they survived the events they are describing. I'm not sure this is a real problem. And I don't mean via the counter example of those H.P. Lovecraft characters who scribble their very last moments in their diaries, right up to the final "aaargh!"
No, the really tricky thing in first person is not, to my mind, the presence of the speaker. It is the inferred presence of the listener.
There is a very subtle graduation from the indirect, universal "you" of, "You could drive from London to Greenwich in about thirty minutes on a good day. This was not a good day," to the disconcertingly personal "you" of, "You might not think a 90 pound girl could flip a grown man with a clever bit of Aikido, but..."
In earlier times it was entirely acceptable for the narrative voice to drop a "Dear reader" in here and there. There's the famous Frederik Pohl short story "Day Million," which not only makes the presence of a reader explicit but directly attacks them for their primitive, parochial understanding.
In most modern genre fiction, though, there isn't an implicit listener. In first person, the narrative is meant to feel like the internal monolog of the person having the experiences; not dissimilar to how the simple past tense is used to imply events that are current -- not events which are long concluded.
But it is still very odd that, "I was five foot two and had red hair," is unacceptable, but "I'd been in Dallas for ten years but I'd grown up in Brooklyn" is totally ordinary. And this goes, too, for explaining technical details; whereas the third-person narrative is often forced to chose between raw info-dump or an equally immersion-killing "as you know Bob," the first-person narrator seems more able to get away with going on in extreme detail about things they already obviously know and have no visible reason to be suddenly explaining.
Add to this the comment made by several writers; that first person narrators are allowed to lie to the reader. This is particularly odd if you think about it. In third-person deep penetration (the default for modern genre fiction) the reader is along for the ride in the skull of one person, privy to all of their thoughts and emotions, seeing everything they see (and only what they see.) In first person, you would think that same transparency would be the rule. But it isn't.
Of course first person also has voice. One of the things I like -- but which can also be dangerous -- is that in a third person story internal thoughts are more commonly treated as dialog; "I've got it!" he shouted. I hope I've got it, he thought grimly.
This is used sometimes used in first person, especially when said person is specifically forming a thought. In other times the first person simply "thinks" as part of the stream of narration: "The entire slope was in motion now. This was not good. I swiveled downhill and shoved with all my life on the ski poles. Dammit. The tree line was too far away..."
That said, you can do this (to some extent) in third person as well. Third person deep immersion takes on the color of that third person's voice. This is especially pointed if you are swapping narrators during the story. Each character will see the world differently, focus on different aspects, describe things to their own understanding. You can't take it too far, though; a ditzy third-person could probably get away with, "The dude with the great hair leaned into the window, bare chest glistening," but not, "The cop guy yelled into his radio-thingy and more cop stuff happened." There is a certain lofty perspective, a certain accuracy of observation and clarity of language, that all third person narratives require.
The trap that is impossible to escape in first person is that it does always feel like a motor-mouth internal monolog. Like the person is terribly self-absorbed and narrating their day as they go. Plus, of course, the voice is so present and so constant any verbal ticks are going to in time become extremely annoying.
(A previous and largely abandoned novel, I was going to alternate POV between a third-person narrator, deep immersion on the male protagonist and essentially truthful within his limits of understanding, and first person from the female protagonist but gaudy, sometimes even purple prose and a visibly blatant disregard for the actual facts in favor of a fairy-tale romanticism.)
First person is a strange voice to write in, anyhow. Some people dislike it for anything in the adventure or thriller genre because the very fact that the narrator is telling this story means they survived the events they are describing. I'm not sure this is a real problem. And I don't mean via the counter example of those H.P. Lovecraft characters who scribble their very last moments in their diaries, right up to the final "aaargh!"
No, the really tricky thing in first person is not, to my mind, the presence of the speaker. It is the inferred presence of the listener.
There is a very subtle graduation from the indirect, universal "you" of, "You could drive from London to Greenwich in about thirty minutes on a good day. This was not a good day," to the disconcertingly personal "you" of, "You might not think a 90 pound girl could flip a grown man with a clever bit of Aikido, but..."
In earlier times it was entirely acceptable for the narrative voice to drop a "Dear reader" in here and there. There's the famous Frederik Pohl short story "Day Million," which not only makes the presence of a reader explicit but directly attacks them for their primitive, parochial understanding.
In most modern genre fiction, though, there isn't an implicit listener. In first person, the narrative is meant to feel like the internal monolog of the person having the experiences; not dissimilar to how the simple past tense is used to imply events that are current -- not events which are long concluded.
But it is still very odd that, "I was five foot two and had red hair," is unacceptable, but "I'd been in Dallas for ten years but I'd grown up in Brooklyn" is totally ordinary. And this goes, too, for explaining technical details; whereas the third-person narrative is often forced to chose between raw info-dump or an equally immersion-killing "as you know Bob," the first-person narrator seems more able to get away with going on in extreme detail about things they already obviously know and have no visible reason to be suddenly explaining.
Add to this the comment made by several writers; that first person narrators are allowed to lie to the reader. This is particularly odd if you think about it. In third-person deep penetration (the default for modern genre fiction) the reader is along for the ride in the skull of one person, privy to all of their thoughts and emotions, seeing everything they see (and only what they see.) In first person, you would think that same transparency would be the rule. But it isn't.
Of course first person also has voice. One of the things I like -- but which can also be dangerous -- is that in a third person story internal thoughts are more commonly treated as dialog; "I've got it!" he shouted. I hope I've got it, he thought grimly.
This is used sometimes used in first person, especially when said person is specifically forming a thought. In other times the first person simply "thinks" as part of the stream of narration: "The entire slope was in motion now. This was not good. I swiveled downhill and shoved with all my life on the ski poles. Dammit. The tree line was too far away..."
That said, you can do this (to some extent) in third person as well. Third person deep immersion takes on the color of that third person's voice. This is especially pointed if you are swapping narrators during the story. Each character will see the world differently, focus on different aspects, describe things to their own understanding. You can't take it too far, though; a ditzy third-person could probably get away with, "The dude with the great hair leaned into the window, bare chest glistening," but not, "The cop guy yelled into his radio-thingy and more cop stuff happened." There is a certain lofty perspective, a certain accuracy of observation and clarity of language, that all third person narratives require.
The trap that is impossible to escape in first person is that it does always feel like a motor-mouth internal monolog. Like the person is terribly self-absorbed and narrating their day as they go. Plus, of course, the voice is so present and so constant any verbal ticks are going to in time become extremely annoying.
(A previous and largely abandoned novel, I was going to alternate POV between a third-person narrator, deep immersion on the male protagonist and essentially truthful within his limits of understanding, and first person from the female protagonist but gaudy, sometimes even purple prose and a visibly blatant disregard for the actual facts in favor of a fairy-tale romanticism.)
Monday, April 22, 2019
On to Atlantis!
The writing finally started happening. In fact, it is happening so well right now I'm tempted to take a chunk of the week off work to keep at it. 5.5K in the can now, and ready to hit the crazy chapter at the Atlantis Gallery.
Sure, I was able to save a bunch of text from the previous draft. But there was a lot of re-arrangement and quite a lot of new stuff from scratch. I think I've accomplished a pretty good balance on the opening chapter; showing the situation, making it interesting in the moment but also laying the ground for later chapters, showing the character enough to make her interesting and also leaving the right amount of mystery for later.
I decompressed the opening prologue some, and shifted around the "asides" to make them work better. It is a strange thing I'm trying there; basically this is a fake-out opening, showing the adventurer archaeologist in action only its actually a budget video. I really shied from the usual approaches, like doing it all in italics, but I did want to clue in the reader and, rather more importantly, slip in some background information. So I've reserved the italics for a pair of disembodied voices that comment on the action.
Anyhow. Been messing around with some new approaches to keeping track of the text I shift around. Anything I delete, I shift to a save folder just in case the original was better. I set up macros to color blocks of text, which I'm currently using as green for desired additions, red for things that should probably be deleted, and blue for general commentary.
The problem I think I have is that I treat prose too much like it was, say, lyrics. By which I mean the flow and the rhythm mean too much to me. I've read about writers who block in a scene using vague, general terms then fill in the details later. I can't do that. The difference to me between a Mercedes or a Lincoln as a background detail is not just what each might say about period, location, economic status, but which fits the meter of the surrounding line, brings the sentence to the proper length, has the right vowel sounds.
Which means I really don't have the luxury of skipping over something with a RESEARCH LATER tag and coming back to it after I have a draft in the can. Also, when it comes to details of location and technology and similar, the action IS the thing. I need to know before I write the scene if the character is carrying an axe or a sword, because a sword can go into a scabbard but an axe is going to be awkwardly in their hand the whole time unless there's a sentence there about them setting it down.
So the next chapter may turn out to be really, really annoying. Because there's a free-wheeling conversation that jumps from one thing to another the way conversations do. I know the places I want to go and the personalities involved but not the order or the Traveling Salesman algorithm that takes the conversation where I need it to go.
Sure, I was able to save a bunch of text from the previous draft. But there was a lot of re-arrangement and quite a lot of new stuff from scratch. I think I've accomplished a pretty good balance on the opening chapter; showing the situation, making it interesting in the moment but also laying the ground for later chapters, showing the character enough to make her interesting and also leaving the right amount of mystery for later.I decompressed the opening prologue some, and shifted around the "asides" to make them work better. It is a strange thing I'm trying there; basically this is a fake-out opening, showing the adventurer archaeologist in action only its actually a budget video. I really shied from the usual approaches, like doing it all in italics, but I did want to clue in the reader and, rather more importantly, slip in some background information. So I've reserved the italics for a pair of disembodied voices that comment on the action.
Anyhow. Been messing around with some new approaches to keeping track of the text I shift around. Anything I delete, I shift to a save folder just in case the original was better. I set up macros to color blocks of text, which I'm currently using as green for desired additions, red for things that should probably be deleted, and blue for general commentary.
The problem I think I have is that I treat prose too much like it was, say, lyrics. By which I mean the flow and the rhythm mean too much to me. I've read about writers who block in a scene using vague, general terms then fill in the details later. I can't do that. The difference to me between a Mercedes or a Lincoln as a background detail is not just what each might say about period, location, economic status, but which fits the meter of the surrounding line, brings the sentence to the proper length, has the right vowel sounds.
Which means I really don't have the luxury of skipping over something with a RESEARCH LATER tag and coming back to it after I have a draft in the can. Also, when it comes to details of location and technology and similar, the action IS the thing. I need to know before I write the scene if the character is carrying an axe or a sword, because a sword can go into a scabbard but an axe is going to be awkwardly in their hand the whole time unless there's a sentence there about them setting it down.
So the next chapter may turn out to be really, really annoying. Because there's a free-wheeling conversation that jumps from one thing to another the way conversations do. I know the places I want to go and the personalities involved but not the order or the Traveling Salesman algorithm that takes the conversation where I need it to go.
Sunday, April 21, 2019
You Get a New Fnord!
I got another phish in my email this morning. Proper USPS colors and images. Leading text; "An package containing confidential personal information..."
So I got a new theory. The notorious spelling and grammar of 419 and similar emails is actually intentional. It's a fnord. They are looking for people who don't worry about details, who skim through text and skip fine print. They are looking for people who will be swayed by the emotion of getting a bargain or unearned money or saving their computer from the horrible virus some kind person in Russian just discovered they have.
Or maybe it is a true fnord. People who think they are smart are the easiest people to fool. They want us to gain an unwarranted confidence in our ability to spot these impostors at a glance. Then, when all is ready, the real stuff will roll out...
So I got a new theory. The notorious spelling and grammar of 419 and similar emails is actually intentional. It's a fnord. They are looking for people who don't worry about details, who skim through text and skip fine print. They are looking for people who will be swayed by the emotion of getting a bargain or unearned money or saving their computer from the horrible virus some kind person in Russian just discovered they have.
Or maybe it is a true fnord. People who think they are smart are the easiest people to fool. They want us to gain an unwarranted confidence in our ability to spot these impostors at a glance. Then, when all is ready, the real stuff will roll out...
Friday, April 19, 2019
Islands and Bridges
I'd just shut off the computer last night when I had an insight. Not just to the scene I'd been struggling with, but it showed me a mistake I'd been making for years.
Simply put, it is scenes that don't want to be there.
So the opener for the first chapter is Penny standing on the Acropolis in that flush of giddy joy and accomplishment and disbelief of actually being there. The "I still can't believe I'm actually in Athens!" thing. And this is such an emotional moment I don't want to steal it from her. I'd like to be able to share the whole thing with her, that first day, those first steps on the streets.
I checked flight schedules and the timing works out for an early-morning, as-soon-as-the-shops-open first day (leave SFO at 1700, 17 hour flight with stop-over, arrive ATH 2000 the next day, sleep the sleep of the jet-lagged and up bright and early with internal clock reset. Yeah...that's been my experience with flying towards Europe.)
NOAA has a little calculator for solar angle and azimuth (very neat). I wasted some time trying to figure out how to do azimuth overlay on Google but the options seemed to start with "download and install this, then register here, then..." Or take a screen shot into GIMP and use that as a transparency in a dedicated compass ap. Or just approximate it as ESE and good enough for me. Anyhow; turns out that as you exit the Propylaea on an October morning the sun will be rising behind the Parthenon. (The builders designed the grand entrance so your first sight of the building is at an angle to the Western Facade, not looking dead-on. They knew how to show it off.)
But the scene wasn't working. It felt breathless and rushed and emotionally distant.
And I didn't figure out why until I was getting ready for bed. See, I knew this was a throwaway, a backtrack out of the strict chronology of the surrounding scene. This groundrock, this "Penny is on the Acropolis about to film a lecture" is the place I'm trying to get back to. So I'd been treating any words about waking in the hotel, eating some fruit, walking the wide cobbled way, climbing the long stairs, etc., as something to get through as quickly as possible so I could get the scene back to where it belonged.
And I've been doing this a lot. I have big chunks of text which are, "Don't pay attention to me, I'm just back story or a technical explanation or something. Just breeze through me, don't spend a lot of time thinking about me, the important stuff is back in the real scene."
Hence a lot of rushed, breathless, emotionally uninvolving writing. Even worse, writing that so begrudged the time spent in the detour it left out necessary words. A sort of "They drove. Car. Anyhow back to the story..."
So here's the paradigm I'm going to try to adhere to (more) in future. That the text wants to be on an island of stability. That at every moment, it has a place it belongs to (whether this is a physical location or a less tangible grounding, say in an emotion or a thrust of action or even a mechanical task, "This is the scene explaining how the star drive works.")
For each story beat all the rules of a "scene" still apply. Define the setting, find the purpose, speak to the five senses, have a pacing and an arc. In this case, either treat the pre-Acropolis scenes exactly as I treat the Acropolis scenes, or omit them.
There are still bridges, small chunks of text that are only to bring you from one island to another. But those are small, and there really isn't anything important happening in them.
Actually, the way I'm probably going to deal with this case is stay in the present and collapse the emotional moment into arriving on the Acropolis. So any detour about how the Acropolis looked glimpsed from the hotel shuttle the night before is folded into the immediate past of the narrative tense; "It had gleamed golden in the floodlights glimpsed above the darkened city like a mountain top poking through the clouds and it gleamed rosy-gold now in the early morning light."
Err, yeah, so there was a pluperfect there but the narrator is still in the simple past tense. You get the picture!
Not actual text by the by. Just made up for this post.
Simply put, it is scenes that don't want to be there.
So the opener for the first chapter is Penny standing on the Acropolis in that flush of giddy joy and accomplishment and disbelief of actually being there. The "I still can't believe I'm actually in Athens!" thing. And this is such an emotional moment I don't want to steal it from her. I'd like to be able to share the whole thing with her, that first day, those first steps on the streets.
I checked flight schedules and the timing works out for an early-morning, as-soon-as-the-shops-open first day (leave SFO at 1700, 17 hour flight with stop-over, arrive ATH 2000 the next day, sleep the sleep of the jet-lagged and up bright and early with internal clock reset. Yeah...that's been my experience with flying towards Europe.)
NOAA has a little calculator for solar angle and azimuth (very neat). I wasted some time trying to figure out how to do azimuth overlay on Google but the options seemed to start with "download and install this, then register here, then..." Or take a screen shot into GIMP and use that as a transparency in a dedicated compass ap. Or just approximate it as ESE and good enough for me. Anyhow; turns out that as you exit the Propylaea on an October morning the sun will be rising behind the Parthenon. (The builders designed the grand entrance so your first sight of the building is at an angle to the Western Facade, not looking dead-on. They knew how to show it off.)
But the scene wasn't working. It felt breathless and rushed and emotionally distant.
And I didn't figure out why until I was getting ready for bed. See, I knew this was a throwaway, a backtrack out of the strict chronology of the surrounding scene. This groundrock, this "Penny is on the Acropolis about to film a lecture" is the place I'm trying to get back to. So I'd been treating any words about waking in the hotel, eating some fruit, walking the wide cobbled way, climbing the long stairs, etc., as something to get through as quickly as possible so I could get the scene back to where it belonged.
And I've been doing this a lot. I have big chunks of text which are, "Don't pay attention to me, I'm just back story or a technical explanation or something. Just breeze through me, don't spend a lot of time thinking about me, the important stuff is back in the real scene."
Hence a lot of rushed, breathless, emotionally uninvolving writing. Even worse, writing that so begrudged the time spent in the detour it left out necessary words. A sort of "They drove. Car. Anyhow back to the story..."
So here's the paradigm I'm going to try to adhere to (more) in future. That the text wants to be on an island of stability. That at every moment, it has a place it belongs to (whether this is a physical location or a less tangible grounding, say in an emotion or a thrust of action or even a mechanical task, "This is the scene explaining how the star drive works.")
For each story beat all the rules of a "scene" still apply. Define the setting, find the purpose, speak to the five senses, have a pacing and an arc. In this case, either treat the pre-Acropolis scenes exactly as I treat the Acropolis scenes, or omit them.
There are still bridges, small chunks of text that are only to bring you from one island to another. But those are small, and there really isn't anything important happening in them.
Actually, the way I'm probably going to deal with this case is stay in the present and collapse the emotional moment into arriving on the Acropolis. So any detour about how the Acropolis looked glimpsed from the hotel shuttle the night before is folded into the immediate past of the narrative tense; "It had gleamed golden in the floodlights glimpsed above the darkened city like a mountain top poking through the clouds and it gleamed rosy-gold now in the early morning light."
Err, yeah, so there was a pluperfect there but the narrator is still in the simple past tense. You get the picture!
Not actual text by the by. Just made up for this post.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Blooming 'ell!
I'm struggling through Scene Two but I keep stopping to jot down notes for....the second book.
Graham is really growing on me. He's an educated, opinionated, but extremely well centered anorack. He's a coin collector and metal detectorist and is heavily involved in the politics of getting detecting more socially accepted and legally protected. Penny met (will meet) him on the plane to Frankfurt and that's it for his walk-on in that book.
But next book will be in part around London. Anyhow, as I've been jotting ideas, I've discovered the banter between Penny and Graham is just so much fun.
Anyhow, I'm crawling along from my selected hotel to the top of the Acropolis in Google Street view now, even though I haven't decided if I'm going to describe that part of Penny's day or not (I've spent ten paragraphs of notes so far discussing the pros and cons of putting in as little as two paragraphs of text.)
Beginnings. Nastiest part of any writing, but particularly of a novel.
Edit: And I swear, I made the working title up myself, Chinese menu style, but there really is an Aurelius Dupondius. Described as an exceptionally rare coin, one was discovered in 2007 during a bit of rescue archaeology in the historical center of London.
Graham is really growing on me. He's an educated, opinionated, but extremely well centered anorack. He's a coin collector and metal detectorist and is heavily involved in the politics of getting detecting more socially accepted and legally protected. Penny met (will meet) him on the plane to Frankfurt and that's it for his walk-on in that book.
But next book will be in part around London. Anyhow, as I've been jotting ideas, I've discovered the banter between Penny and Graham is just so much fun.
Anyhow, I'm crawling along from my selected hotel to the top of the Acropolis in Google Street view now, even though I haven't decided if I'm going to describe that part of Penny's day or not (I've spent ten paragraphs of notes so far discussing the pros and cons of putting in as little as two paragraphs of text.)
Beginnings. Nastiest part of any writing, but particularly of a novel.
Edit: And I swear, I made the working title up myself, Chinese menu style, but there really is an Aurelius Dupondius. Described as an exceptionally rare coin, one was discovered in 2007 during a bit of rescue archaeology in the historical center of London.
Practicum; from MIDI to Mixdown
We're overdue for an instructive post. This will be a brief walk-though of the process of recording "Uncharted Worlds."
The original track was composed and arranged by Sam Hulick for the game Mass Effect, and subsequently used for all the games of the original trilogy.
It was recorded, according to Sam, on analog synthesizers for that retro 80's sound.
"Uncharted Worlds" is in the top three most popular compositions of the Mass Effect series, and has been covered multiple times by various fans.
When starting your own arrangement, the first thing to get hold of is a copy of the original track. I always put that into Track One on my Reaper file so I can use it as a reference while I work. The next thing is to figure out the notes. In this case it was easy; sheet music was available from several sources, as well as complete MIDI tracks.
Reaper is a shareware DAW; a Digital Audio Workstation meaning it is a multi-track audio editor with MIDI editing capabilities. It supports plug-ins in several formats including AU and VST and most importantly for this part of the lesson, VSTi; software synthesis instruments. I own several good, cheap, and surprisingly complete third-party libraries, mostly from Garritan, meaning I have available decent approximations of many typical acoustic instruments.
It is trivial to take each MIDI track, fire up a VSTi instance in the SFX chain and assign that MIDI data stream to an appropriate musical instrument. The artistic part is figuring out what instruments will sound good for what parts (I experimented quite a bit on this one, trying out different combinations). And, yes, there's a bit of compromise (no library actually has a U-Bass or a Shetland Gue) and the simulated instruments are often very different from the kind of performance you intend to get out of your own instruments. But it allows you to test if the basic ideas of the arrangement are going to work.
The more technical task is making sure you can actually play that part on the instrument you own. First part is checking the range. Go to the track, find the highest and lowest note, check them against your instrument. In my case, the Sutton Hoo lyre couldn't be tuned that high without snapping the strings. (I transposed the part down a fourth, recorded it that way, then used a pitch shifter plug-in to move it back to where it was supposed to be.)
A similar problem was that the lowest note on the tin whistle part fell below the low Bb whistle I owned. I compromised by playing the parts on recorder but playing in tin whistle style (cuts and strikes, finger tremolo, etc.)
Other than that the parts were technically playable, but I didn't care to rehearse for a month. So I recorded two of the parts at a lower tempo and time-shifted them to fit. Another part I split in two because although I could play it at tempo (and did for the video) I had much cleaner notes doing it the other way.
Which naturally segues to recording. With a DAW like Reaper, you can listen to whatever combination of tracks you like plus the output of the microphone you are recording on. With this capability you set up a custom "headphone mix" for each recording pass. You might mute everything but a metronome track, for instance. Or you might play one or more of the MIDI mock-ups as a guide.
Reaper has a primitive but sufficient notation mode, if you are comfortable sight-reading a part. Having the cursor automatically move down the measures, follow-the-bouncing-ball style, is extremely helpful here. I tend to use the piano roll if anything; it really helps me figure out where to enter.
Most DAWs allow loop recording, where you can select a group of measures and loop through them, creating a new recorded track every time. Keep at it until you think you've got a good one in the can. Then stop, mute the spares, and see how it sounds.
Technical details; for this one, everything was captured on a Shure PG81. It is a cardiod condenser with a fairly flat response, rising a bit at 4K and 10K in a way that is generally friendly to acoustic instruments. I ran that through an FP-10 8-channel firewire interface with phantom power and zero-latency monitoring. No acoustic foam, no studio, just a chair and a mic. At typical distances of under a foot, even the traffic noise from outside wasn't a worry.
As you may have grasped from the above, I'm lazy. I'd prefer to get music done then have bragging rights about being able to play a perfect take. So I'll edit if I have to. On "Uncharted Worlds," for instance, the breath I had to take in the middle of the soprano recorder part was a little long. So I stretched the note before it to tighten up. There was also an out-of-tune note on the tenor recorder note that got a pass through the pitch shifter plug-in.
I am, particularly, a lousy drummer. For drums, I'll zoom in tight and make a bunch of micro-edits, slicing the recorded track in order to drag the drum beats closer to the mark.
After that it's mixology. Make a rough mix first, approximating relative volumes, and don't forget that clashing parts can often be clarified by panning them a little. Then on to the plug-ins. Unlike a traditional mixer, there's no channel EQ. Instead you do that with as many instances of various plug-ins that you find useful, as well as compression, limiting, amp emulation, pitch correction, or whatever else gets you the sound you were after. In the example above, the recorder was mic'd dead-on at about six inches and was far too "airy." So I ducked a lot of the sibilant sound to let the pure tone of the fundamental shine through.
Often, in a mix like this, the task for the EQ is to find the most characteristic sound that will make that particular instrument have an individual identity within the final mix. The classical guitar, for instance, has a boxy body resonance around 400 Hz that is very characteristic (but boost this in moderation!) But in the mix of the day, finger noise might be what helps it stick out and give it character...somewhere upwards of 6K.
For reverb, I usually establish a reverb bus and take an AUX send off each instrumental track so each gets a different amount of reverb but they all feel like they are in the same sonic space. Exception is drums, and some solo instruments; the former often like a smaller "room" algorithm, and the latter often calls for something "special."
Don't underestimate the value of automating parameters, either. The above screen-shot show how the volume of various tracks was manipulated constantly to bring them into greater or lesser prominence through the piece.
And that's basically it. Watch your meters, normalize if necessary after exporting the final mix. (Another hint there; drum parts can have transients that are very spiky but don't add a lot to the perceived volume. It takes a fast look-ahead compressor to tame them; I tend to zoom in up almost to the sample level and knock the transients down that way so I can boost the total volume of that track.)
Next time, I'll dive deeper in part-writing, explaining what to do if you only have partial sheet music, or even none at all.
Just to put all the musician-stuff in one place, the instruments were three ukuleles, two recorders, guitar, home-built lyre and a piece of pipe. To play the top part I tuned five strings of the "Mini-Hoo" lyre to the five melody notes. A fourth down, because the tension was too high otherwise. Incidentally, most processing in Reaper is non-destructive; when I went back to duplicate the track for the video all I had to do is bypass SFX on that track and I had my original pitches back again for reference.
The guitar part is six eighth notes which means it changes relative position between measures -- annoying enough I finally muted everything but the metronome while recording it. It was high on the E string and rather than stretch I used a capo (for the first time ever!)
For the bell note I balanced a small steel pipe on two pieces of scrap foam and struck it with the handle of a paintbrush. Then tuned it to pitch in software. This is actually more acoustically complicated than it sounds. To get a free ring you need to support it at the nodes. The first mode longitudinal has the crossing nodes (the points where the bar isn't moving relative to the support) at about a third in. This didn't sound as good as the second harmonic mode, which has three nodes; one center and two closer to the ends. And so forth. So by picking where I put the supports, I could pick which of the first few modes were least muted and most prominent.
Unless you are using a tuned bar, though, the other vibrational modes won't be in harmony with the longitudinal mode (as they depend on diameter and thickness). So in the software, I EQ'd heavily to focus in on the chosen fundamental. Then re-pitched THAT.
I could play the next part on the lute-backed tenor ukulele. But this is where musical choice comes in again. The desired sound was long sustained notes. There's a pedal on an open string, for instance. Problem is, you play a note low on the B string (I'm tuned to guitar top four) then have to quickly dart up the neck for three high notes on the same string. That means a hard cut-off, and the same happens on the way back down. So I divided the piece into two, recorded two separate tracks, then married them in Reaper. If I was a more skilled musician I could play it in one and make it sound good, but...
The soprano ukulele part was too fast. I could just get through the first measures but then it starts throwing in doubled notes. I thought this might be a mistake in the MIDI transcription (some MIDI processes can't handle long notes and will repeat a shorter note instead). But it didn't sound right. when I deleted them from the reference track. So...Reaper can be dialed up or down in playback tempo. Since the guide tracks are MIDI they still sound at pitch, only slower. And the metronome is still there. So I recorded at 75% playback speed, then changed playback of the resulting recording by 150%. Doing it this way meant I had to pitch correct, and although formant-preserving pitch-change algorithms are good they aren't perfect; it does change the timbre of the sound. So a whole pile of corrective EQ on top of THAT.
It was recorded, according to Sam, on analog synthesizers for that retro 80's sound.
"Uncharted Worlds" is in the top three most popular compositions of the Mass Effect series, and has been covered multiple times by various fans.
When starting your own arrangement, the first thing to get hold of is a copy of the original track. I always put that into Track One on my Reaper file so I can use it as a reference while I work. The next thing is to figure out the notes. In this case it was easy; sheet music was available from several sources, as well as complete MIDI tracks.
Reaper is a shareware DAW; a Digital Audio Workstation meaning it is a multi-track audio editor with MIDI editing capabilities. It supports plug-ins in several formats including AU and VST and most importantly for this part of the lesson, VSTi; software synthesis instruments. I own several good, cheap, and surprisingly complete third-party libraries, mostly from Garritan, meaning I have available decent approximations of many typical acoustic instruments.
It is trivial to take each MIDI track, fire up a VSTi instance in the SFX chain and assign that MIDI data stream to an appropriate musical instrument. The artistic part is figuring out what instruments will sound good for what parts (I experimented quite a bit on this one, trying out different combinations). And, yes, there's a bit of compromise (no library actually has a U-Bass or a Shetland Gue) and the simulated instruments are often very different from the kind of performance you intend to get out of your own instruments. But it allows you to test if the basic ideas of the arrangement are going to work.
The more technical task is making sure you can actually play that part on the instrument you own. First part is checking the range. Go to the track, find the highest and lowest note, check them against your instrument. In my case, the Sutton Hoo lyre couldn't be tuned that high without snapping the strings. (I transposed the part down a fourth, recorded it that way, then used a pitch shifter plug-in to move it back to where it was supposed to be.)
A similar problem was that the lowest note on the tin whistle part fell below the low Bb whistle I owned. I compromised by playing the parts on recorder but playing in tin whistle style (cuts and strikes, finger tremolo, etc.)
Other than that the parts were technically playable, but I didn't care to rehearse for a month. So I recorded two of the parts at a lower tempo and time-shifted them to fit. Another part I split in two because although I could play it at tempo (and did for the video) I had much cleaner notes doing it the other way.
Reaper has a primitive but sufficient notation mode, if you are comfortable sight-reading a part. Having the cursor automatically move down the measures, follow-the-bouncing-ball style, is extremely helpful here. I tend to use the piano roll if anything; it really helps me figure out where to enter.
Most DAWs allow loop recording, where you can select a group of measures and loop through them, creating a new recorded track every time. Keep at it until you think you've got a good one in the can. Then stop, mute the spares, and see how it sounds.
Technical details; for this one, everything was captured on a Shure PG81. It is a cardiod condenser with a fairly flat response, rising a bit at 4K and 10K in a way that is generally friendly to acoustic instruments. I ran that through an FP-10 8-channel firewire interface with phantom power and zero-latency monitoring. No acoustic foam, no studio, just a chair and a mic. At typical distances of under a foot, even the traffic noise from outside wasn't a worry.
As you may have grasped from the above, I'm lazy. I'd prefer to get music done then have bragging rights about being able to play a perfect take. So I'll edit if I have to. On "Uncharted Worlds," for instance, the breath I had to take in the middle of the soprano recorder part was a little long. So I stretched the note before it to tighten up. There was also an out-of-tune note on the tenor recorder note that got a pass through the pitch shifter plug-in.
I am, particularly, a lousy drummer. For drums, I'll zoom in tight and make a bunch of micro-edits, slicing the recorded track in order to drag the drum beats closer to the mark.
After that it's mixology. Make a rough mix first, approximating relative volumes, and don't forget that clashing parts can often be clarified by panning them a little. Then on to the plug-ins. Unlike a traditional mixer, there's no channel EQ. Instead you do that with as many instances of various plug-ins that you find useful, as well as compression, limiting, amp emulation, pitch correction, or whatever else gets you the sound you were after. In the example above, the recorder was mic'd dead-on at about six inches and was far too "airy." So I ducked a lot of the sibilant sound to let the pure tone of the fundamental shine through.
Often, in a mix like this, the task for the EQ is to find the most characteristic sound that will make that particular instrument have an individual identity within the final mix. The classical guitar, for instance, has a boxy body resonance around 400 Hz that is very characteristic (but boost this in moderation!) But in the mix of the day, finger noise might be what helps it stick out and give it character...somewhere upwards of 6K.
For reverb, I usually establish a reverb bus and take an AUX send off each instrumental track so each gets a different amount of reverb but they all feel like they are in the same sonic space. Exception is drums, and some solo instruments; the former often like a smaller "room" algorithm, and the latter often calls for something "special."
Don't underestimate the value of automating parameters, either. The above screen-shot show how the volume of various tracks was manipulated constantly to bring them into greater or lesser prominence through the piece.
And that's basically it. Watch your meters, normalize if necessary after exporting the final mix. (Another hint there; drum parts can have transients that are very spiky but don't add a lot to the perceived volume. It takes a fast look-ahead compressor to tame them; I tend to zoom in up almost to the sample level and knock the transients down that way so I can boost the total volume of that track.)
Next time, I'll dive deeper in part-writing, explaining what to do if you only have partial sheet music, or even none at all.
Just to put all the musician-stuff in one place, the instruments were three ukuleles, two recorders, guitar, home-built lyre and a piece of pipe. To play the top part I tuned five strings of the "Mini-Hoo" lyre to the five melody notes. A fourth down, because the tension was too high otherwise. Incidentally, most processing in Reaper is non-destructive; when I went back to duplicate the track for the video all I had to do is bypass SFX on that track and I had my original pitches back again for reference.
The guitar part is six eighth notes which means it changes relative position between measures -- annoying enough I finally muted everything but the metronome while recording it. It was high on the E string and rather than stretch I used a capo (for the first time ever!)
For the bell note I balanced a small steel pipe on two pieces of scrap foam and struck it with the handle of a paintbrush. Then tuned it to pitch in software. This is actually more acoustically complicated than it sounds. To get a free ring you need to support it at the nodes. The first mode longitudinal has the crossing nodes (the points where the bar isn't moving relative to the support) at about a third in. This didn't sound as good as the second harmonic mode, which has three nodes; one center and two closer to the ends. And so forth. So by picking where I put the supports, I could pick which of the first few modes were least muted and most prominent.
Unless you are using a tuned bar, though, the other vibrational modes won't be in harmony with the longitudinal mode (as they depend on diameter and thickness). So in the software, I EQ'd heavily to focus in on the chosen fundamental. Then re-pitched THAT.
I could play the next part on the lute-backed tenor ukulele. But this is where musical choice comes in again. The desired sound was long sustained notes. There's a pedal on an open string, for instance. Problem is, you play a note low on the B string (I'm tuned to guitar top four) then have to quickly dart up the neck for three high notes on the same string. That means a hard cut-off, and the same happens on the way back down. So I divided the piece into two, recorded two separate tracks, then married them in Reaper. If I was a more skilled musician I could play it in one and make it sound good, but...
The soprano ukulele part was too fast. I could just get through the first measures but then it starts throwing in doubled notes. I thought this might be a mistake in the MIDI transcription (some MIDI processes can't handle long notes and will repeat a shorter note instead). But it didn't sound right. when I deleted them from the reference track. So...Reaper can be dialed up or down in playback tempo. Since the guide tracks are MIDI they still sound at pitch, only slower. And the metronome is still there. So I recorded at 75% playback speed, then changed playback of the resulting recording by 150%. Doing it this way meant I had to pitch correct, and although formant-preserving pitch-change algorithms are good they aren't perfect; it does change the timbre of the sound. So a whole pile of corrective EQ on top of THAT.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Mystic Crystal Revelation
My "tek" is finally coming along, to the point where I could play a little Maqsum rhythm along with a YouTube lesson. But that's not important.
I sat down at the writing desk* and actually managed to hammer out a revised 800-word prologue chapter. Complete with some physical stunts, some archaeological puzzle-solving by Our Hero, and the requisite glowing crystal Atlantean dingus.
*It's the same desk I'm currently eating dinner at, and if I had moved a little quicker this evening be soldering LEDs at. But the idea is there.
This might have been the most fun research I'll have the whole novel. I found a "paper" (actually, slides from a presentation) at Academia.edu claiming something novel about Minoan burial customs and I can totally use that. I don't need to see if this has any academic standing or if I'm understanding it right, because in the prologue scene everything is supposed to be styrofoam and matt paintings. So is a particular god Hurrian or Hatti, did they have bronze axes or only copper...who cares! I only need to make it look cool.
(The one difficulty in the scene is descriptions. I can't say "horns of consecration" because that makes an assumption that the viewer of the video knows Minoan iconography. I have to say "curving stone horns.")
I figured out my thematic problem. I think. I spent a morning at a cafe and wrote a thousand words of notes basically about her hair. It makes sense in context. The big thing I came to is that "becoming the mask" -- no, even putting on the mask -- isn't even an option until half way through the story. So in that first critical scene at the gallery reception she's not hiding behind her created character, because she has never immersed herself in that character in a real-world situation.
And the other thing is that the fact that Athena Fox is fictional is a totally open secret. In the reception scene, the challenge is to do a good acting job; nobody there thinks the character is real. But this is true later in the book(s) as well. The conceit I'm going with here is something many actors, and most stage magicians, have faced; the "Yes, but" response. As much as the magicians protest, or even demonstrate, that their act is nothing but trickery, the best they will get from one small segment of their audience is, "That may be, but even if you aren't aware of it yourself you do have Real Powers."
(The most piquant actor equivalent is the action star who despite protests get smacked on the nose by a fan who is totally sure they really can block a punch as well as their character can.)
I sat down at the writing desk* and actually managed to hammer out a revised 800-word prologue chapter. Complete with some physical stunts, some archaeological puzzle-solving by Our Hero, and the requisite glowing crystal Atlantean dingus.
*It's the same desk I'm currently eating dinner at, and if I had moved a little quicker this evening be soldering LEDs at. But the idea is there.
This might have been the most fun research I'll have the whole novel. I found a "paper" (actually, slides from a presentation) at Academia.edu claiming something novel about Minoan burial customs and I can totally use that. I don't need to see if this has any academic standing or if I'm understanding it right, because in the prologue scene everything is supposed to be styrofoam and matt paintings. So is a particular god Hurrian or Hatti, did they have bronze axes or only copper...who cares! I only need to make it look cool.
(The one difficulty in the scene is descriptions. I can't say "horns of consecration" because that makes an assumption that the viewer of the video knows Minoan iconography. I have to say "curving stone horns.")
I figured out my thematic problem. I think. I spent a morning at a cafe and wrote a thousand words of notes basically about her hair. It makes sense in context. The big thing I came to is that "becoming the mask" -- no, even putting on the mask -- isn't even an option until half way through the story. So in that first critical scene at the gallery reception she's not hiding behind her created character, because she has never immersed herself in that character in a real-world situation.
And the other thing is that the fact that Athena Fox is fictional is a totally open secret. In the reception scene, the challenge is to do a good acting job; nobody there thinks the character is real. But this is true later in the book(s) as well. The conceit I'm going with here is something many actors, and most stage magicians, have faced; the "Yes, but" response. As much as the magicians protest, or even demonstrate, that their act is nothing but trickery, the best they will get from one small segment of their audience is, "That may be, but even if you aren't aware of it yourself you do have Real Powers."
(The most piquant actor equivalent is the action star who despite protests get smacked on the nose by a fan who is totally sure they really can block a punch as well as their character can.)
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Life is a giant game of wiki-surf
I hate weekends.
Well, I really need them to try to rest and unwind from work week. But I spend every week accumulating a giant list of things I won't have time to work on until the weekend. Setting up way too much expectation and ending up Sunday night feeling like I wasted an opportunity.
##
That's the thing, you know. Every time you learn something, or create something, you also create a sort of promise or obligation. You wrote a fanfic? Congrats -- now you have fans who are waiting for you to write something more. You learned how to run a lathe? Well, guess what? Now you need to find things to lathe to justify having spent that effort. And then stay at it because skills get rusty if not used. You built something? Good, now build a better one with all that you've learned.
And, sure, especially in the Digital Age we all of us have invested countless hours in learning how to work pieces of technology (especially software programs!) we will never, ever, need to use again. But as you age you also accumulate skills that you simply don't have the time, energy, interest in keeping up. I can't tell you how many people I've met who spent two years, three years, six years studying violin but haven't picked one up in longer than they can remember.
Everything is also connected in huge branching, multiply cross-linked trees. You get interested in ukulele and that gets you interested in guitar, in music theory, in Hawaiian culture, in Tiki kitsch. Which gets you into rock music, fast-Fourier transforms, colonialism, Buck Rogers. And every one of those new interests is clamoring at you to give it some time. Especially after you've given in and taken a look and its good money after bad, all the way down.
##
So I've got a half-dozen projects I'm contemplating at the moment. Most of them want me to buy something, though, and since I just made a big credit card payment (still paying off the Greece vacation) I'm loathe.
Making a drum: I can scrounge some but even building an improvised steam box means buying a chunk of PVC. I can bend without but I'd get better results with a spring steel bending strap ("only" twenty four bucks at Stew-Mac). I can force myself to using recycled scrap wood for the bending form but the head? Yes; I experimented with mylar, cotton-poly, oiled muslin, sized muslin (the latter wasn't bad, especially when I took a tip from tabla players I'd met and, lacking wax, put some wood putty on to add weight). But the decent sound comes from hide and that's yet another purchase. Even if there are goat skins sold locally.
Making a ukulele is going to be more, even if I avoid the temptation of Stew-Mac's catalog. But that's not currently on a front burner. I still have a box in the closet that's filled with parts and plans for a solid-body uke or two, and that box was stashed before I discovered Road Toad strings and the kinds of new instruments those opened up.
I've been thinking about video technology as well. I'm going to try throwing together a miniature LED-based soft-box. I can do the first one with what I have lying around, even though by the time you add labor I might as well have dropped the thirty bucks a pair of plastic ones cost on Anklezone. The more intriguing idea, though, is the combination of a retroreflective surface with an LED camera ring for low-hassle chroma-key. Glass beads don't come cheap, though...and somehow all my lengths of scrap green LED strip-light are already gone.
##
Writing, though. No work and a nice sunny day and it is terribly hard to keep from dozing off and feeling pressured to get "something" done just doesn't help. I've reached a tentative approach to the thematic issues I mentioned a post or two ago, and am currently trying to puzzle out just what the opening "tomb" looks like so I can re-write that scene.
This is far, far from me believing there was even a slim chance I'd have a rough draft done before the last show opened. That show is now closed and I'm having to rewrite what draft I have from the very first word.
Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people who don't sweat the details like this, whether they are people who self-publish through Amazingbone or a surprising number of best-sellers. And I have to admit I'd probably worry about Getting it Right even if I was trying to do a generic fantasy novel. My excuse for the current is this is pushing all my buttons; I care about supporting good science, and I care about reproducibility. Much of this story is framed as travel advice and I'd really rather that was good advice. And the rest is joining a current debate on ownership of history about which many people feel...strongly.
So, yeah.
Well, I really need them to try to rest and unwind from work week. But I spend every week accumulating a giant list of things I won't have time to work on until the weekend. Setting up way too much expectation and ending up Sunday night feeling like I wasted an opportunity.
##
That's the thing, you know. Every time you learn something, or create something, you also create a sort of promise or obligation. You wrote a fanfic? Congrats -- now you have fans who are waiting for you to write something more. You learned how to run a lathe? Well, guess what? Now you need to find things to lathe to justify having spent that effort. And then stay at it because skills get rusty if not used. You built something? Good, now build a better one with all that you've learned.
And, sure, especially in the Digital Age we all of us have invested countless hours in learning how to work pieces of technology (especially software programs!) we will never, ever, need to use again. But as you age you also accumulate skills that you simply don't have the time, energy, interest in keeping up. I can't tell you how many people I've met who spent two years, three years, six years studying violin but haven't picked one up in longer than they can remember.
Everything is also connected in huge branching, multiply cross-linked trees. You get interested in ukulele and that gets you interested in guitar, in music theory, in Hawaiian culture, in Tiki kitsch. Which gets you into rock music, fast-Fourier transforms, colonialism, Buck Rogers. And every one of those new interests is clamoring at you to give it some time. Especially after you've given in and taken a look and its good money after bad, all the way down.
##
So I've got a half-dozen projects I'm contemplating at the moment. Most of them want me to buy something, though, and since I just made a big credit card payment (still paying off the Greece vacation) I'm loathe.
Making a drum: I can scrounge some but even building an improvised steam box means buying a chunk of PVC. I can bend without but I'd get better results with a spring steel bending strap ("only" twenty four bucks at Stew-Mac). I can force myself to using recycled scrap wood for the bending form but the head? Yes; I experimented with mylar, cotton-poly, oiled muslin, sized muslin (the latter wasn't bad, especially when I took a tip from tabla players I'd met and, lacking wax, put some wood putty on to add weight). But the decent sound comes from hide and that's yet another purchase. Even if there are goat skins sold locally.
Making a ukulele is going to be more, even if I avoid the temptation of Stew-Mac's catalog. But that's not currently on a front burner. I still have a box in the closet that's filled with parts and plans for a solid-body uke or two, and that box was stashed before I discovered Road Toad strings and the kinds of new instruments those opened up.
I've been thinking about video technology as well. I'm going to try throwing together a miniature LED-based soft-box. I can do the first one with what I have lying around, even though by the time you add labor I might as well have dropped the thirty bucks a pair of plastic ones cost on Anklezone. The more intriguing idea, though, is the combination of a retroreflective surface with an LED camera ring for low-hassle chroma-key. Glass beads don't come cheap, though...and somehow all my lengths of scrap green LED strip-light are already gone.
##
Writing, though. No work and a nice sunny day and it is terribly hard to keep from dozing off and feeling pressured to get "something" done just doesn't help. I've reached a tentative approach to the thematic issues I mentioned a post or two ago, and am currently trying to puzzle out just what the opening "tomb" looks like so I can re-write that scene.
This is far, far from me believing there was even a slim chance I'd have a rough draft done before the last show opened. That show is now closed and I'm having to rewrite what draft I have from the very first word.
Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people who don't sweat the details like this, whether they are people who self-publish through Amazingbone or a surprising number of best-sellers. And I have to admit I'd probably worry about Getting it Right even if I was trying to do a generic fantasy novel. My excuse for the current is this is pushing all my buttons; I care about supporting good science, and I care about reproducibility. Much of this story is framed as travel advice and I'd really rather that was good advice. And the rest is joining a current debate on ownership of history about which many people feel...strongly.
So, yeah.
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Two characters in search of a concept
But first, the plot bunny of the day. There's a bit of optional overheard dialog in Mass Effect 3; "We need to design a gun that shoots Thresher Maws" (a very, very, very large example of that species had just killed a Reaper on the Krogan homeworld). So....what about going with biotech as the best chance to stop the Reapers? After all, the grafted-on endings of the third game reframe the Reaper cycle as being something about the inevitable conflict of "organic" and "synthetic" intelligences. Shepard herself is (after the first twenty minutes of Mass Effect 2) a fusion of both. And there's a tiny, tiny fetch-quest in the third game where you collect the material to Jurassic Park up some dinosaurs...for Krogan warriors to ride into battle.
It would be awesome. It also touches on another theme. The basic themes are cooperation, strength in diversity, and particularly in Shepard's case, indomitable determination. Well, these are similar themes to the original Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen; short, one-trick stories where the remorselessly logical city-sized killing machines of the title were owned by organic life being messy and complicated but ever so tenacious.
(And it being, you know, a third-person shooter sort of game, a meat-sack with a rifle is exactly the tool needed to take down a hostile base, starship, giant whatever. They might have weapons that can burn cities but get marines inside and their fate is just the same as a 20th century tank that's driven too far ahead of its crunchies.)
Hey, there's even more connection to the game. The big third act on Tuchunka is the effort to reverse the Krogan Genophage. Which was largely thanks to...Mordin Solus, everyone's favorite fast-talking, Gilbert-and-Sullivan singing, Scientist Salarian. So make Mordin the hero of the story, the one who leads the effort to gather all the civilizations of known space together to stop the Reapers. After all, "Someone else might have gotten it wrong."
So on to the topic. The problem I'm continuing to have with the current novel is with the basic underlying concept. How it works. If it works. I was reading the Scalzi-blog yesterday and they were talking about Impostor Syndrome. That is an idea I had for Penny/Athena. She's very much not a real archaeologist. She will end up in situations where she has to try to do the work of, pretend to be, or get mistaken for a real archaeologist.
But actually it is more complicated than that. This core element comes from a lame attempt to do an end-run around the impossibility of the Adventure Archaeologist archetype, and all the associated Lost Cities and Booby-trapped Tombs and Ancient Super-Weapons baggage. But, you see, I'm still on the fence about whether this stuff turns out to be just as much nonsense in the book as it is in the real world, or whether something different but just as implausible ends up actually being true.
On the smaller scale it seems to work. Various people can mistake Penny for her creation Athena, or at least treat her like it. And she can both get into situations that you would think only the fictional Athena would get into, and get out of them with stunts only that same fictional adventurer should be able to pull off. And lampshade it constantly, of course.
But...an actual Atlantis? Or, rather, something just as ridiculous? I don't know if it works.
Which is probably why every time I try to hit the first scene where Penny is (possibly!) mistaken for either a professional archaeologist or for someone who actually goes traipsing around the world addressing people in six languages (when they aren't shooting at her) and digging up the local equivalent of Excalibur (King not necessarily included), I run into problems.
I want her to have a conflicted relationship with the role. To recognize that playing Athena can get her into places...and into trouble. And to recognize that the character archetype and, more broadly, pseudo-archaeology and other misconceptions about archaeology are both wrong and potentially harmful.
So I keep veering back and forth about whether she is fully conscious of what she's trying to pull off as she acts her way through a situation, or whether she immerses in the role. And there's where Impostor Syndrome comes in; she of course recognizes she doesn't have, on one hand, the real-world professional skills she is pretending to, and on the other hand, the Protagonist skills of an Indiana Jones type. But does she think of this as pretending to be Athena and getting away with it, or that when she "dons the mask" of Athena -- lets herself be immersed in the character -- things become possible? I can't decide.
And there's specific issues with the first story. Basically reader trust and the contract with the reader. Played straight, in this key scene in a reception at a classy antiquities gallery we have an average-girl passing herself off as a professional and showing up people who might actually have degrees in the appropriate fields. And various people (herself and others) are speaking confidently and persuasively about a couple of pseudo-archaeological concepts.
At this point the reader doesn't know that these theories are going to be shown up as garbage. They might assume that this version of the Dorian Invasion is my own personal hobbyhorse as well. They also don't know that Penny is going to be very firmly lectured by an actual practicing archaeologist on just how insulting her pretense is.
There's an unconnected thread as well. This is the origin story, and large parts of the first half are Penny learning how to actually be the world traveler she pretends to be when she plays Athena. So the first chapters will show her visiting the typical tourist spots and acting like a typical tourist and seemingly not realizing all that she's getting wrong. Which is to say; I'll be looking like I only looked up the typical tourist places and if I visited, acted like the Ugly American.
Oh, and did I mention that she is making mistakes, mistakes about history, mistakes about dates, mistakes about people that she's not going to realize she made until many chapters later? First person she has dialog with, she describes as an Eritrean immigrant. Actually, he's a resident and his family has been in Greece for generations.
So, yeah. I want to keep the reader long enough to get to where Penny re-visits Athens. And gets out of the big Western-style hotel to live a little closer to street level. And where she questions the Return of the Heracleidae story she was told earlier. And where all the everyman-hero and Chosen One garbage is taken and thoroughly shaken out.
And here's another thing I'm on the fence about. There's a real tendency for the First-Person Sarcastic character to drop pop culture references everywhere and I'm trying to avoid that. There's enough to deal with (and enough wealth in potential historical references) that I don't want the narrator to be constantly comparing what is happening to something from a recent movie or, worse yet, a video game.
Trouble is, this is a legit part of her backstory. Her YouTube channel paid for the trip. Some of the conflict comes specifically from the way social media can leap on and amplify something (like the stupid Dorian theory someone in the story just dragged out). And, heck, if I'm talking about the reality of travel, talking about travel in the world of Google Street View and e-tickets and selfies is, well, part of the story.
Thing is, it would make sense with her character and background and within the larger plot -- all the way out to the meta-plot about public perception of what an archaeologist is, etc. -- for her to be media savvy, image conscious, social-media active, etc. And for various key plot points to unfold via the new technologies.
Here's some specific examples. I already have in my notes that the bad guys are tracking her across Europe because her too-helpful business manager has been updating her Facebook status for her. And a key moment in her shift to immersion in Athens is when her phone is damaged during her unplanned swim in the Adriatic and she's forced to interact more, actually ask for directions and attempt to read street signs and so on. (And it also figures in the plot where the bad guys lose track of her and thus it isn't until she returns to the gallery that...) Heck, I even had a thought about someone thinking the evidence was destroyed until she tells them she uses cloud storage for all the pictures she took (and the incriminating picture had its flag set, alas, to public).
Some of this, heck, most or even perhaps all of this, can be solved with sufficient skill. For instance, the same reception where the Dorian nonsense is trotted out, someone else is going on about Atlantis. All that might be necessary is to carefully frame it so both stories are presented in the same way, thus planting that necessary doubt even as the narrator takes the former at face value. Heck, Biro, the Athenian student whose dad cooks a mean tsebhi, could be shown rolling his eyes as Penny hails yet another taxi.
But this still doesn't answer my basic questions.
It would be awesome. It also touches on another theme. The basic themes are cooperation, strength in diversity, and particularly in Shepard's case, indomitable determination. Well, these are similar themes to the original Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen; short, one-trick stories where the remorselessly logical city-sized killing machines of the title were owned by organic life being messy and complicated but ever so tenacious.
(And it being, you know, a third-person shooter sort of game, a meat-sack with a rifle is exactly the tool needed to take down a hostile base, starship, giant whatever. They might have weapons that can burn cities but get marines inside and their fate is just the same as a 20th century tank that's driven too far ahead of its crunchies.)
Hey, there's even more connection to the game. The big third act on Tuchunka is the effort to reverse the Krogan Genophage. Which was largely thanks to...Mordin Solus, everyone's favorite fast-talking, Gilbert-and-Sullivan singing, Scientist Salarian. So make Mordin the hero of the story, the one who leads the effort to gather all the civilizations of known space together to stop the Reapers. After all, "Someone else might have gotten it wrong."
So on to the topic. The problem I'm continuing to have with the current novel is with the basic underlying concept. How it works. If it works. I was reading the Scalzi-blog yesterday and they were talking about Impostor Syndrome. That is an idea I had for Penny/Athena. She's very much not a real archaeologist. She will end up in situations where she has to try to do the work of, pretend to be, or get mistaken for a real archaeologist.
But actually it is more complicated than that. This core element comes from a lame attempt to do an end-run around the impossibility of the Adventure Archaeologist archetype, and all the associated Lost Cities and Booby-trapped Tombs and Ancient Super-Weapons baggage. But, you see, I'm still on the fence about whether this stuff turns out to be just as much nonsense in the book as it is in the real world, or whether something different but just as implausible ends up actually being true.
On the smaller scale it seems to work. Various people can mistake Penny for her creation Athena, or at least treat her like it. And she can both get into situations that you would think only the fictional Athena would get into, and get out of them with stunts only that same fictional adventurer should be able to pull off. And lampshade it constantly, of course.
But...an actual Atlantis? Or, rather, something just as ridiculous? I don't know if it works.
Which is probably why every time I try to hit the first scene where Penny is (possibly!) mistaken for either a professional archaeologist or for someone who actually goes traipsing around the world addressing people in six languages (when they aren't shooting at her) and digging up the local equivalent of Excalibur (King not necessarily included), I run into problems.
I want her to have a conflicted relationship with the role. To recognize that playing Athena can get her into places...and into trouble. And to recognize that the character archetype and, more broadly, pseudo-archaeology and other misconceptions about archaeology are both wrong and potentially harmful.
So I keep veering back and forth about whether she is fully conscious of what she's trying to pull off as she acts her way through a situation, or whether she immerses in the role. And there's where Impostor Syndrome comes in; she of course recognizes she doesn't have, on one hand, the real-world professional skills she is pretending to, and on the other hand, the Protagonist skills of an Indiana Jones type. But does she think of this as pretending to be Athena and getting away with it, or that when she "dons the mask" of Athena -- lets herself be immersed in the character -- things become possible? I can't decide.
And there's specific issues with the first story. Basically reader trust and the contract with the reader. Played straight, in this key scene in a reception at a classy antiquities gallery we have an average-girl passing herself off as a professional and showing up people who might actually have degrees in the appropriate fields. And various people (herself and others) are speaking confidently and persuasively about a couple of pseudo-archaeological concepts.
At this point the reader doesn't know that these theories are going to be shown up as garbage. They might assume that this version of the Dorian Invasion is my own personal hobbyhorse as well. They also don't know that Penny is going to be very firmly lectured by an actual practicing archaeologist on just how insulting her pretense is.
There's an unconnected thread as well. This is the origin story, and large parts of the first half are Penny learning how to actually be the world traveler she pretends to be when she plays Athena. So the first chapters will show her visiting the typical tourist spots and acting like a typical tourist and seemingly not realizing all that she's getting wrong. Which is to say; I'll be looking like I only looked up the typical tourist places and if I visited, acted like the Ugly American.
Oh, and did I mention that she is making mistakes, mistakes about history, mistakes about dates, mistakes about people that she's not going to realize she made until many chapters later? First person she has dialog with, she describes as an Eritrean immigrant. Actually, he's a resident and his family has been in Greece for generations.
So, yeah. I want to keep the reader long enough to get to where Penny re-visits Athens. And gets out of the big Western-style hotel to live a little closer to street level. And where she questions the Return of the Heracleidae story she was told earlier. And where all the everyman-hero and Chosen One garbage is taken and thoroughly shaken out.
And here's another thing I'm on the fence about. There's a real tendency for the First-Person Sarcastic character to drop pop culture references everywhere and I'm trying to avoid that. There's enough to deal with (and enough wealth in potential historical references) that I don't want the narrator to be constantly comparing what is happening to something from a recent movie or, worse yet, a video game.
Trouble is, this is a legit part of her backstory. Her YouTube channel paid for the trip. Some of the conflict comes specifically from the way social media can leap on and amplify something (like the stupid Dorian theory someone in the story just dragged out). And, heck, if I'm talking about the reality of travel, talking about travel in the world of Google Street View and e-tickets and selfies is, well, part of the story.
Thing is, it would make sense with her character and background and within the larger plot -- all the way out to the meta-plot about public perception of what an archaeologist is, etc. -- for her to be media savvy, image conscious, social-media active, etc. And for various key plot points to unfold via the new technologies.
Here's some specific examples. I already have in my notes that the bad guys are tracking her across Europe because her too-helpful business manager has been updating her Facebook status for her. And a key moment in her shift to immersion in Athens is when her phone is damaged during her unplanned swim in the Adriatic and she's forced to interact more, actually ask for directions and attempt to read street signs and so on. (And it also figures in the plot where the bad guys lose track of her and thus it isn't until she returns to the gallery that...) Heck, I even had a thought about someone thinking the evidence was destroyed until she tells them she uses cloud storage for all the pictures she took (and the incriminating picture had its flag set, alas, to public).
Some of this, heck, most or even perhaps all of this, can be solved with sufficient skill. For instance, the same reception where the Dorian nonsense is trotted out, someone else is going on about Atlantis. All that might be necessary is to carefully frame it so both stories are presented in the same way, thus planting that necessary doubt even as the narrator takes the former at face value. Heck, Biro, the Athenian student whose dad cooks a mean tsebhi, could be shown rolling his eyes as Penny hails yet another taxi.
But this still doesn't answer my basic questions.
Friday, April 12, 2019
Read Ryder
I was musing on the thirty-minute walk back from work what a Mass Effect: Andromeda story would look like. Here's the thing; I like Ryder as a character and I like idea of the situation she finds herself in, but I hate the execution. Similarly, there are some fun ideas in the world building but it all falls very flat (and well before the end).
There is potential, though. With the death of the Pathfinder, the only man who seemed able to inspire the shell-shocked colonists and lead them to a new home, his daughter is in a unique position; potentially able to save the expedition if she is only good enough...and if she can only get others to trust her. In the game, though, there's almost no question and she really doesn't have to earn that trust. It just happens. No tension, like I said. I want to read the story where she has to fight for this, both against those who doubt her and against her own internal demons.
The expedition is desperate because their selected "Garden worlds" turned out to be anything but. They need to find fertile ground before they can even afford to thaw out the rest of the colonists. Let's leave aside any thoughts of hydroponics and space industry for the moment and accept this as a challenge. Except the game immediately undercuts this by showing; 1) Kadara, the requisite hive of scum and villainy where deserters from the expedition are surviving quite nicely, thank you. 2) Aya, the verdant homeworld of the Angara, an alien civilization that is open to diplomatic approach. 3) The Krogan colony, who look at the scorching sands and dangerous wildlife and say, "Hey, this is our kind of world!"
Instead Ryder spends the game running around solving Sudoku puzzles so some handy alien machines can magically fix the radioactive deserts and acid lakes. To which there is so little in-game effect most players stop bothering after the first few.
So...where is the option to colonize the Angaran homeworld by force? Or at least have some Milky Way faction strongly considering it. Or where is the option to recognize novel approaches (and needs, and physiologies) and recognize that the Krogan can colonize where humans can't, or that the shattered airless moon is actually just great for some nice big pressure domes, or that the rebels have figured out something useful and the colony leaders are either total idiots or there was a lot more to the attempted mutiny than anyone is saying.
And then there's the Kett. Who are sort of an organic version of The Borg; they've perfected a mutagenic virus that turns other humanoid life forms into more of them. They approach this with a religious fervor, truly believing that this is a gift they bring to other races. Well, where is a real philosophical exploration of whether they are right? Especially if it turns out the Kett form is an adaptation that can better survive the mysterious conditions of the Heleus Cluster than most of the Milky Way species can.
So, yeah, the problem is that one might, just might, be able to write a decent story with this material, but really you want to just trash half the world-building and do the damn thing right (or, at least, better.)
The first sequence of the game is Ryder awakes on her colony ship, the ship runs into some sort ofnegative space wedgie Mysterious Energy, takes severe damage, and is on the point of having to abandon ship. Ryder, her Pathfinder father, and a small select team take one of the surviving shuttles down to the very scary looking planet which is in the process of being ravaged by the Mysterious Energy in hopes of finding a way to save the ship.
Long story short, they run into an alien species who shoots at them, check out the Ancient Building of Alien Technology the other aliens were trying to get into, Ryder Senior throws a switch turning off the lighting storms and then falls to his death. Everyone else goes back to the colony ship which is mysteriously not damaged nearly so badly now and they all fly off...never to return to that planet again.
I say, fie on this! Ryder's dad is killed much, much earlier. The ship remains in danger. The planet is potentially viable. Ryder and the remains of the Pathfinder team have to survive and understand what is going on and struggle all the while to get the panicking people on the critically damaged colony ship to trust her, with the big turning point where they abandon ship and land on the planet she has staked all their chances on.
And then they have to deal with the Angara, and there are diplomatic overtures with the Kett, and a struggle of competing philosophies both of which seem to offer clues to the puzzle of what the Mysterious Energy is, what connection it has to the Ancient Aliens, how physics itself is different in the Heleus cluster and how the Milky Way immigrants can survive and adapt.
Oh yeah, and Sam, the talkative AI that was illegally placed in Sara's brain by her own father, is looked on with a lot more suspicion, including by Sara herself, and those suspicions are partly born out when Something Goes Wrong.
There is potential, though. With the death of the Pathfinder, the only man who seemed able to inspire the shell-shocked colonists and lead them to a new home, his daughter is in a unique position; potentially able to save the expedition if she is only good enough...and if she can only get others to trust her. In the game, though, there's almost no question and she really doesn't have to earn that trust. It just happens. No tension, like I said. I want to read the story where she has to fight for this, both against those who doubt her and against her own internal demons.
The expedition is desperate because their selected "Garden worlds" turned out to be anything but. They need to find fertile ground before they can even afford to thaw out the rest of the colonists. Let's leave aside any thoughts of hydroponics and space industry for the moment and accept this as a challenge. Except the game immediately undercuts this by showing; 1) Kadara, the requisite hive of scum and villainy where deserters from the expedition are surviving quite nicely, thank you. 2) Aya, the verdant homeworld of the Angara, an alien civilization that is open to diplomatic approach. 3) The Krogan colony, who look at the scorching sands and dangerous wildlife and say, "Hey, this is our kind of world!"
Instead Ryder spends the game running around solving Sudoku puzzles so some handy alien machines can magically fix the radioactive deserts and acid lakes. To which there is so little in-game effect most players stop bothering after the first few.
So...where is the option to colonize the Angaran homeworld by force? Or at least have some Milky Way faction strongly considering it. Or where is the option to recognize novel approaches (and needs, and physiologies) and recognize that the Krogan can colonize where humans can't, or that the shattered airless moon is actually just great for some nice big pressure domes, or that the rebels have figured out something useful and the colony leaders are either total idiots or there was a lot more to the attempted mutiny than anyone is saying.
And then there's the Kett. Who are sort of an organic version of The Borg; they've perfected a mutagenic virus that turns other humanoid life forms into more of them. They approach this with a religious fervor, truly believing that this is a gift they bring to other races. Well, where is a real philosophical exploration of whether they are right? Especially if it turns out the Kett form is an adaptation that can better survive the mysterious conditions of the Heleus Cluster than most of the Milky Way species can.
So, yeah, the problem is that one might, just might, be able to write a decent story with this material, but really you want to just trash half the world-building and do the damn thing right (or, at least, better.)
The first sequence of the game is Ryder awakes on her colony ship, the ship runs into some sort of
Long story short, they run into an alien species who shoots at them, check out the Ancient Building of Alien Technology the other aliens were trying to get into, Ryder Senior throws a switch turning off the lighting storms and then falls to his death. Everyone else goes back to the colony ship which is mysteriously not damaged nearly so badly now and they all fly off...never to return to that planet again.
I say, fie on this! Ryder's dad is killed much, much earlier. The ship remains in danger. The planet is potentially viable. Ryder and the remains of the Pathfinder team have to survive and understand what is going on and struggle all the while to get the panicking people on the critically damaged colony ship to trust her, with the big turning point where they abandon ship and land on the planet she has staked all their chances on.
And then they have to deal with the Angara, and there are diplomatic overtures with the Kett, and a struggle of competing philosophies both of which seem to offer clues to the puzzle of what the Mysterious Energy is, what connection it has to the Ancient Aliens, how physics itself is different in the Heleus cluster and how the Milky Way immigrants can survive and adapt.
Oh yeah, and Sam, the talkative AI that was illegally placed in Sara's brain by her own father, is looked on with a lot more suspicion, including by Sara herself, and those suspicions are partly born out when Something Goes Wrong.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Build it and they will drum
I picked up a cheap Typhoon darbuka* and have started learning the strokes (my doum and tak are...okay...but the dak or left-hand tak is going to take a bit to develop. Unfortunate, because it's the rolls I need for the song I'll be working on soon). The sound is a little too...bright? Metallic? Anyhow, it doesn't seem right for the Gue piece I'm trying to record now.
I want yet another drum. Something like a 12" side drum that's 4" deep and has a goatskin head. I could build one... but it turns out the techniques of bending wood appropriate for guitar and ukulele are different from those best for bending drum shells. So much for building a drum as a learning project on the way to building a uke.
Thing is, do I want to build a uke? That's the real question.
It's a strange place to be. Way back when, I started making music on keyboard and rack-mount synthesizers. You'd compose something for, say, violin and guitar and piano, but you'd play it all on a keyboard, capture your performance as MIDI data, and plug that data into a machine that made sounds like violin and guitar and piano.
I talked to musicians and read about orchestration and the thought started even way back then that you'd get better results with that keyboard and those rack modules if you had experience with the "real" instrument.
Meanwhile I was in theatre, and learning how to make things that looked like they were made of polished wood and solid brass but were really plywood and styrofoam and paint. And instead of making things that worked, we made things that looked like they could work and then faked it with fishline, hidden lights, sound effects, re-purposed toys.
My paychecks improved enough over the years to where I could actually afford a decent computer, and make the move to Software Synthesis; the same electronically-created guitar sounds, but without so many trailing wires.
I still dreamed of getting my hands on a real trumpet or even a real violin, but that was a dream that seemed financially out of reach.
Meanwhile the Maker movement was changing the options. I welded for theatre but TechShop offered the chance to work metal in an entirely new way.
I did pick up a ukulele along the way. The face of mass production was changing in the electronic age, and there were starting to appear $40 instruments that actually played.
Yeah, I'd owned a recorder for years. A couple of them (recorders are cheap, as long as you stick to the higher-pitched members of the family). But the uke was an eye-opener. Your first experience with a guitar is going to be buzzing frets and painful grooves in your fingers. A uke has such a light action it doesn't do that. You can start chording the first day. And gain the confidence to face that full-sized steel-string later.
The Maker movement was growing, with processes formerly used only in big companies moving to the small shop and the individual maker. And thanks to the VA, I got a membership to the local TechShop and was able to try some of that myself.
This changed utterly how I looked at prop construction. Sure, I could and still did fake it with styrofoam and paint when appropriate, but I could now actually build out of "real" materials. Metals and hardwoods and so forth were no longer out of reach.
And then I got a day job. The title is a lot less prestigious than "Resident Sound Designer" but boy does it pay more.
That revolution in production was still going on. I took a chance and blew a couple hundred on an electric violin. And that opened the gate. As the paychecks kept coming in, I realized I was able to afford, first, a Chinese-made trumpet, then, an actual German-made student-quality acoustic violin.
And I was learning enough in the process that I could take the risk of cheap instruments and trust I could fix them or work around them anyhow.
I went back to the composing bench with the idea of doing the synthesis-based stuff I'd always been doing but folding in a part or two from a real instrument to improve the articulation and realism.
But then it occurred to me I'd collected enough instruments by this point to actually be able to play all the parts. And that was a really attractive idea.
The prop-building was still going on and the revolution in electronics led me to lean more and more on computing power; "fix it in the mix" works for props as well as it does in the recording studio (or, rather, on the DAW.)
Thing is, I already came out of sound design where altering real sounds to new purposes was a central part of the game. I'd long been exposed to the variety of a similarly utilitarian approach to music, from the washtub bases of various folk music traditions to the experiments with vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens of composers like John Cage to the hectic and oft-compromised business of live sound where often you had to improvise some combination of mic placement and board EQ to get the sound that was musically appropriate for that night's show.
So it really shouldn't have taken the arrival of a jointer-planer at the shop I work at to make me think of making musical instruments -- leveraging the available processes and skills in working real materials other than styrofoam and paint -- that could be used in a musical way -- leveraging here the skills both in playing technique (on "better" instruments) and in musical understanding of how to make use of those sounds and, of course, the electronic tools that could warp and shape the result to fit into a final composition.
There's an element of experimental archaeology in this (going along with my renewed interest in history) as well as ethnomusicology. And that's a dangerously attractive road; not only does every instrument have a playing tradition and an idiom that the composer can learn either to mimic or to learn from, instruments also have a building tradition that the luthier could chose to learn.
My own Shetland Gue is a visual mimic of Charlie Bynum's museum replica, down to the stick bow and the twisted-fibre tailpiece. But I was entirely happy to use power tools to build it.
And that's where I am now. I am conflicted musically, as I want to go in so many directions and finding the hours to practice becomes increasingly problematic (heck, finding storage space is becoming problematic!) I wish I could do as a composer friend of mine did and pick a dozen sounds (yes, on the rack mount synths, but the principle still holds) and just work within their sonic possibilities.
And, yes, the "bardic cover" idea is still amusing. Doing not just acoustic covers of existing music, but doing them with archaic instruments whenever possible, seems like both long-term fun and a decent "brand."
But I like all music, and all instruments excite me. I'm not the type to just do guitar, do everything on that guitar, and, yes, admittedly get very good on that guitar. I'm not cut out to be an ace, but rather a jack.
And same goes for instrument building. As attractive is the idea of getting deeper into tonewoods and sinew and hand-axes and natural materials -- and the concurrent idea of recreating ancient instruments -- is the idea of finding ways to laser-cut and machine and electronify and create things that are unique. And, yeah, to find how the available technologies, both the newest CNC mills and the old theatrical standbys, could be used to make things that look one way and play entirely different.
Like...a playable Goddess Harp.
* Darbuka, doumbek, dumbek, tarbuka, tabla....the closest thing you'll get to an agreement on what to call the "Middle-Eastern Goblet Drum" is that the "Turkish" style with the exposed tuners should probably be called a darbuka.
I want yet another drum. Something like a 12" side drum that's 4" deep and has a goatskin head. I could build one... but it turns out the techniques of bending wood appropriate for guitar and ukulele are different from those best for bending drum shells. So much for building a drum as a learning project on the way to building a uke.
Thing is, do I want to build a uke? That's the real question.
It's a strange place to be. Way back when, I started making music on keyboard and rack-mount synthesizers. You'd compose something for, say, violin and guitar and piano, but you'd play it all on a keyboard, capture your performance as MIDI data, and plug that data into a machine that made sounds like violin and guitar and piano.
I talked to musicians and read about orchestration and the thought started even way back then that you'd get better results with that keyboard and those rack modules if you had experience with the "real" instrument.
I still dreamed of getting my hands on a real trumpet or even a real violin, but that was a dream that seemed financially out of reach.
Meanwhile the Maker movement was changing the options. I welded for theatre but TechShop offered the chance to work metal in an entirely new way.
Yeah, I'd owned a recorder for years. A couple of them (recorders are cheap, as long as you stick to the higher-pitched members of the family). But the uke was an eye-opener. Your first experience with a guitar is going to be buzzing frets and painful grooves in your fingers. A uke has such a light action it doesn't do that. You can start chording the first day. And gain the confidence to face that full-sized steel-string later.
The Maker movement was growing, with processes formerly used only in big companies moving to the small shop and the individual maker. And thanks to the VA, I got a membership to the local TechShop and was able to try some of that myself.This changed utterly how I looked at prop construction. Sure, I could and still did fake it with styrofoam and paint when appropriate, but I could now actually build out of "real" materials. Metals and hardwoods and so forth were no longer out of reach.
And then I got a day job. The title is a lot less prestigious than "Resident Sound Designer" but boy does it pay more.
That revolution in production was still going on. I took a chance and blew a couple hundred on an electric violin. And that opened the gate. As the paychecks kept coming in, I realized I was able to afford, first, a Chinese-made trumpet, then, an actual German-made student-quality acoustic violin.
And I was learning enough in the process that I could take the risk of cheap instruments and trust I could fix them or work around them anyhow.
But then it occurred to me I'd collected enough instruments by this point to actually be able to play all the parts. And that was a really attractive idea.
Thing is, I already came out of sound design where altering real sounds to new purposes was a central part of the game. I'd long been exposed to the variety of a similarly utilitarian approach to music, from the washtub bases of various folk music traditions to the experiments with vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens of composers like John Cage to the hectic and oft-compromised business of live sound where often you had to improvise some combination of mic placement and board EQ to get the sound that was musically appropriate for that night's show.
My own Shetland Gue is a visual mimic of Charlie Bynum's museum replica, down to the stick bow and the twisted-fibre tailpiece. But I was entirely happy to use power tools to build it.
And that's where I am now. I am conflicted musically, as I want to go in so many directions and finding the hours to practice becomes increasingly problematic (heck, finding storage space is becoming problematic!) I wish I could do as a composer friend of mine did and pick a dozen sounds (yes, on the rack mount synths, but the principle still holds) and just work within their sonic possibilities.
And, yes, the "bardic cover" idea is still amusing. Doing not just acoustic covers of existing music, but doing them with archaic instruments whenever possible, seems like both long-term fun and a decent "brand."
But I like all music, and all instruments excite me. I'm not the type to just do guitar, do everything on that guitar, and, yes, admittedly get very good on that guitar. I'm not cut out to be an ace, but rather a jack.
And same goes for instrument building. As attractive is the idea of getting deeper into tonewoods and sinew and hand-axes and natural materials -- and the concurrent idea of recreating ancient instruments -- is the idea of finding ways to laser-cut and machine and electronify and create things that are unique. And, yeah, to find how the available technologies, both the newest CNC mills and the old theatrical standbys, could be used to make things that look one way and play entirely different.
Like...a playable Goddess Harp.
* Darbuka, doumbek, dumbek, tarbuka, tabla....the closest thing you'll get to an agreement on what to call the "Middle-Eastern Goblet Drum" is that the "Turkish" style with the exposed tuners should probably be called a darbuka.
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Uncharted Worlds
So I hauled my ukulele through the local woods (not an unusual euphemism) to get some footage. Snagged some free footage off YouTube (simpler than jumping through all the hoops at the free stock footage sites), and cut the video.
Trying to keep things simple. Really, I'd rather be playing music then messing around in video editors. Especially free video editors (unlike the usual suspects, making smaller frames which zip around the screen is practically impossible in the editor I'm using. So I have to reach for different language in order to highlight the various instruments being performed.)
At least the show is down. I can spare a little more time towards writing...music and prose.
Trying to keep things simple. Really, I'd rather be playing music then messing around in video editors. Especially free video editors (unlike the usual suspects, making smaller frames which zip around the screen is practically impossible in the editor I'm using. So I have to reach for different language in order to highlight the various instruments being performed.)
At least the show is down. I can spare a little more time towards writing...music and prose.
Monday, April 1, 2019
Dorian Inversion
So I decided to write my "Shetland Gue Improvisation" in Dorian mode. For no particular reason. D Dorian, which is basically the related minor of C Maj, only with that major sixth.
That is to say, it is the white-note scale (only starting one pitch up). Since my soprano and tenor recorders are pitched in C Maj, I get the D Dorian just by starting on the second hole from the bottom (if you are wondering what the Dorian mode sounds like, think Scarborough Fair). My penny whistles are a little more troublesome. The D whistle starts on that D, but plays in D Maj. My low Bb whistle comes closer; starting from the second hole it plays C (which is in D Dorian), then the D, then...Eb. And there's no fork fingering for E♮ -- it can only be played with the more difficult half-holing.
Things get more intriguing with my two lyres. The Gue should probably be tuned with the melody string on D, being the root of the D Dorian scale. The fourth is strongwith this one in the Dorian mode and traditional for the interval to the drone anyhow, bringing it to a G natural. Which, funny thing, is the pitch of my other two recorders, the alto and the sopranino, as members of the recorder family are pitched a fifth apart.
The downside to this idea is that the drone is (sort of by definition) always sounding, so it really should be tuned to the tonic. This is one of the dirty secrets of modes, really all modes (including major and minor). You are playing from the same collection of twelve notes. The only things that define your composition as being a Maj or it's related Minor or some other mode entirely is the relative frequency of major versus minor triads in the harmony and what note the composition ends on (and neither of these are cut-and-dried).
Oh, yes. And because of the design of the Gue, traditional playing style gives you only five scale tones. If you are tuned a fourth up (to the G) the highest you can reach is the root at an octave. There's no way to play the root of a II or III chord. (not to mention that drone D isn't in the II or III triad -- it only shows up in in a II7.)
My 3/4 size Sutton Hoo lyre has only seven strings. Typical is to tune diatonic, say tuning in C Maj but starting up a third. Remember what I said about wanting to be able to play the IV, or or V chord? Well, if the root of the chord is already on the fourth string, you can only play the second degree of the chord before you run out of strings, having to flip around to the first inversion for the top of the triad. If your bottom note is already the third degree of the scale, you can play all the way up to the V chord and still be in root position.
But again that means you can harmonize to a melody in D Dorian but you can't play it: not without jumping the octave for the root, second, and the leading tone below the tonic -- which the C recorders play quite easily, of course.
Yah. Music theory is another one of those places where a seemingly simple set of starting axioms turn out to lead to a giant set of contradictions.
That is to say, it is the white-note scale (only starting one pitch up). Since my soprano and tenor recorders are pitched in C Maj, I get the D Dorian just by starting on the second hole from the bottom (if you are wondering what the Dorian mode sounds like, think Scarborough Fair). My penny whistles are a little more troublesome. The D whistle starts on that D, but plays in D Maj. My low Bb whistle comes closer; starting from the second hole it plays C (which is in D Dorian), then the D, then...Eb. And there's no fork fingering for E♮ -- it can only be played with the more difficult half-holing.
Things get more intriguing with my two lyres. The Gue should probably be tuned with the melody string on D, being the root of the D Dorian scale. The fourth is strong
The downside to this idea is that the drone is (sort of by definition) always sounding, so it really should be tuned to the tonic. This is one of the dirty secrets of modes, really all modes (including major and minor). You are playing from the same collection of twelve notes. The only things that define your composition as being a Maj or it's related Minor or some other mode entirely is the relative frequency of major versus minor triads in the harmony and what note the composition ends on (and neither of these are cut-and-dried).
Oh, yes. And because of the design of the Gue, traditional playing style gives you only five scale tones. If you are tuned a fourth up (to the G) the highest you can reach is the root at an octave. There's no way to play the root of a II or III chord. (not to mention that drone D isn't in the II or III triad -- it only shows up in in a II7.)
My 3/4 size Sutton Hoo lyre has only seven strings. Typical is to tune diatonic, say tuning in C Maj but starting up a third. Remember what I said about wanting to be able to play the IV, or or V chord? Well, if the root of the chord is already on the fourth string, you can only play the second degree of the chord before you run out of strings, having to flip around to the first inversion for the top of the triad. If your bottom note is already the third degree of the scale, you can play all the way up to the V chord and still be in root position.
But again that means you can harmonize to a melody in D Dorian but you can't play it: not without jumping the octave for the root, second, and the leading tone below the tonic -- which the C recorders play quite easily, of course.
Yah. Music theory is another one of those places where a seemingly simple set of starting axioms turn out to lead to a giant set of contradictions.