Density Control

Seriously, I do not remember writing being this hard.

Could be I've gotten better, so I'm more aware of what can be done and what needs to be done. Or could be I only think so but I'm climbing into that navel of worrying about things that only make sense within my own over-elaborated Weltanschauung. Or it could be eating all that lead paint has finally caught up with me.

Today has been mostly surgical repair. Had to move a scene, and there was a lot of stitching to try to get it into the new spot. There will be more of that to come; my chapters are currently unbalanced, with two stand-alone scenes at the end of the first Athens sequence that are too short for their own chapters but don't flow enough into each other to be joined into one.

And the numbers still don't add up. Listened to a podcast that gave a too-mechanical breakdown around a three-act structure in which the first "plot point" (essentially, first climax and change of course) happens at exactly 25% (or about 20K in for a 80K target length) and the first act break at 29.6K. Also read an amusing but pointless novel that had no real organizational structure, wandering around aimlessly and arriving mostly nowhere. But then, the elevator pitch could easily be "Bertie Wooster meets Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull" so you are pretty much getting what you came for.

I'm still over-working stuff. I know this, and I'm putting up with it for the moment because I'm still trying to feel my way towards basic things like the character voice, the pacing, the level of detail, etc.

It used to be easier to plot, too. I think. I do wonder if my previous plots were more about stringing action sequences together. But then I look at the first full-length fanfiction I ever did, which was a Sailor Moon AU.

Basically, the lead character never gets her powers and the side characters each go on what are essentially solo arcs. Point being, over each 3-5 chapter arc I was carefully plotting how that character's own particular approach to things could only take them so far. Each arc was also based around a different one of Beryl's four Generals (each in increasing power).

So the climax of each arc was a personal nadir, a failing of the method they'd used so far, then -- usually through a second parallel plot -- Usagi would do something that showed she was still the heart of the team (even if no-one recognized it), the lead of the arc would regain her determination, Kitty Magic would take place, and you know the drill.

(Back when I could sort of draw. Or was more willing to believe I could and try anyhow. By the later chapters Rei had dropped the Miko outfit for a snazzy costume and Spirit Bow, Makoto had a nice leather jacket from her Yakuza friends to go with the demon-killing laser gun, and Ami was in a wheelchair. She got better.)

I wrote a post a while back about how much I like a good pile-on climax. Pretty sure I never posted it. In any case, the example that always comes to my mind is Star Trek TOS, "Journey to Babel." The
Enterprise is saddled with a cargo of bickering diplomats, including Spock's estranged father. Dad falls ill and only a transfusion from Spock will save him. A strange ship is tailing them. Kirk is stabbed by a spy. It all comes together in the third act when the mystery ship attacks and Kirk has to stagger out of sickbay and bluff Spock into thinking he is fine so he will save his father. So the ship is shaking, power failing in sickbay in the middle of the critical operation, the shields are failing and Kirk is bleeding all over the command chair...

Another visual example is Doctor Who, "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit." The Doctor and Rose come to a world suspended by unknown technology just above a black hole. I simply can not put succinctly how well this episode presents a series of points of no return, from the loss of the Tardis to the Doctor's decision to unbuckle from the winch line and fall into the pit. At the climax, in a brilliant series of cross-cuts, the gravity generator fails, the ship is pulled towards the black hole, the planet is disintegrating, the Oud are dying, the oxygen runs out in their suits...

But that's a bit outside the point. I don't need a plot where everything falls together in one huge climax that wraps up all the plot threads at once. I don't even need plot that effortlessly ties the internal and the external, the plot and the theme, the character arc and the mystery and the physical movement all in one. I just need....plot.

Makes me want to do a fantasy. Thing is, I'd find a way of complicating it. The idea I had this morning was to go into the hoary old magic = technology, flip it (technology is treated as magic) but do it within the confines of a non-modern social structure.

See, that's what happens in most stories; when magic is treated as technology it turns into cell phones and personal cars and at least some of the shattering changes to social order and world view accompany them -- even if the writer didn't seem to intend it to be so. That's my big problem with steampunk; there are almost no writers who take the opportunity to present an actual Victorian Age being hyper-accelerated into the vast social changes that occurred in our world by what is essentially a conflation of Industrial Revolution and Information Age.

Instead they present the modern world with top hats. No, worse; that peculiar wish-fulfillment modern world in which social mobility and personal autonomy and opportunities for adventure are available to everyone; something that in the real world is only marginally closer than it was in an older age.

So use every one of the strictures that keeps magic remote from the lives of most people in, well, some traditional fantasy, and apply that to technology. So there is none of the benefit of mass production, economies of scale, etc. Peasants still live and die short lives of grueling work, and wars are still won by who can afford to put the most men on the field.

And I've spent far too long thinking about this. I need to go back to the story at hand, and write it until I know what I actually have in my hand. I need to get through the Germany chapters.

I need to write faster, not better.