Goodwill Hunting

Turns out it's not so easy to make a story from well-used furniture.

SF and Fantasy are primarily about story. All genre fiction is. But part of what the reader expects is originality. That's a problem there. The more original invention, the less it is a pastiche, a throwback. I thought this was about deconstruction -- and deconstruction is so much the default this days it is hard not to go that direction -- but it really is that we can't invent, today, the way the writers of 1950 would. Or, more importantly, appreciate that invention the way the readers of 1950 would. Our picture of the world is different and the intersection is small enough that staying within the bounds of what we understand they would do is too narrow a box and the results look artificial.

Not to say there aren't a lot of people trying their hands at the consciously retro, and some number making it work (there are probably as many failures in genre fiction that isn't trying to be consciously retro. Sturgeon's Law, after all).

Too many. You might think the well-used tropes and familiar props are easy to pick up, but enough people are also familiar, and have also used them (often in new and interesting ways, as well) that the modern reader is going to be just as familiar with them. If not more so. Once again, there's no easy route. You still have to read up and research and think about what you are doing.

But past that, especially when the invention of truly new worlds or exploration of new technology and science is taking a back seat to the rest of the material, emphasis is thrown on plot. We've emphasized character in different ways, and some of this is expected by the modern reader, but when you are talking pulp the big emphasis is plot.

I'm not a great plotter. The Athena Fox stories are lightweight mysteries in which my protagonist and POV character pretty much walks around learning clues. If they were a video game they'd be a walking simulator.

(And just as well. I liked a lot about Deliver us Mars, probably enough to sign on to the Kickstarter for the third game, but...the platforming sections with the ice pick were ghastly. I do like the action sequences I have in the books, but for what they are, they are best without more of that than they have.)

All of this realization came slowly as I was pulling at threads that didn't even look like they were connected to the sweater. I had set out to work up the top level of the outline, but in the process discovered that I wasn't nearly ready to do so.

Well, now I am there. And this may just take a more detailed and iterative outline because there is a lot of plot there. Not the themes-and-arcs stuff (which is what primarily populates the Athena Fox stories). But the mechanical stuff of fights and chases, sneaking and climbing and surviving and all the rest of the stuff that fills most of the pages of a pulp story.

And it is going to take a while to work out.

Unless...the old-school writers could be seat-of-pants, too. Especially, the more you divorce the mechanics of the action from the mechanics of the universe. You can always have a man come through the door with a gun to get you out -- or into -- a plot problem. Or a jaguar come through the jungle with claws, your choice.

 

Garfield

I am not excited about the book project that's currently on the table. A big part of it is that I don't have anything to say in this one. There's no theme or question -- not like the Athena Fox stories. Well, okay; the Paris book was floundering until I stumbled on "The book will be the death of the cathedral" and that led me to where I wanted to go with the idea of how to read history, and how to explore history without breaking things in the process (always a problem when you are playing a character modeled after Indiana Jones.)

This current book was intended to be built from well-used furniture. Familiar and well-understood sci-fi props. That may not, however, be compatible with a unique or interesting setting that offers something novel. I contrast that with the Venus setting, which may be implausible but at least is diverting.

The problem might also be character. In part because I was thinking pastiche, I was planning an everyman character who can fit equally well in any setting (the way that Equal Temperament on musical instruments makes all scales sound equally good. And equally bad). That removes having an interesting internal conflict or journey, however. And having a rotating cast takes away from having a strong set of interpersonal interactions to drive the story.

So I tinkered a little to see if I could find an underlying theme, or at least something about the setting that wasn't basically a visual style (because that translates poorly to prose.) Raygun Gothic might be amusing but the only direction I can see involves deconstruction; and these days, deconstructed is pretty much the major presentation of that stuff.

Plus, you know, primarily a visual style.

(There's more here, in a subtle way. Just typing "fins" or "chrome" or "googie" doesn't give you a strong sense of place. What does, is going into the functionality and the five-senses stuff. How exactly a bubble helmet works and feels, for instance. And that is backing right into deconstruction again. Plus it is work, which goes against the utility of setting out to build with used furniture.)

I explored the option space to see what were the directions that interested me more. 1960's spaceflight sort of attracted me. Especially given a flip, overly-stylish (even Spy Movie) UFO sort of spin. But think about it; near-future, the actual science de-emphasized so all this is, is a visual style...

What do you know; I just invented Starfield.

Incidentally, the "Deliver Us..." series does a much better job with this aesthetic. Because in Starfield, the ships and spacesuits is just the paint job and underneath is exactly the same bullet-sponge armor and mix of weapons and handy loot crates of your basic looter-shooter. Deliver Us the Moon (I've just started Deliver us Mars and I'm still unsure whether I like that one as much), the setting is the gameplay. Since it isn't a run-and-gun, you are mostly interacting with the tech, or reading logs or talking to people about what can be done with the tech.

(Deliver us the Moon you play as a one-man rescue mission to figure out what happened to the Moon-based beamed-power facility that is keeping energy-starved Earth alive. So you are mucking about with microwave antenna and Helium-3 scrapers...)

And I still want to see if I can get Tiki to work. There's some potentially interesting space to explore re created cultures, exoticism, even urban archaeology. But there are people who have dedicated a life to tiki culture and...what do I really know about the stuff?

Burning man

There's a bit in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year when a fellow in the madness of a full infection breaks out of his house, runs to the Thames and swims "vigorously" across it before collapsing. And as if it was that exercise that had done it, his fever breaks and he recovers, becoming one of the lucky survivors.

I went and watched the Steiner Tunnel burn at UL in Northbrook, IL. And I was not feeling good. Trapped in an old Prius with bad air conditioning in bumper-to-bumper traffic for over two hours in the sweltering Chicago heat, got dropped off at the Field Museum just five minutes to closing -- so much for seeing Sue. Took a short stroll to look at the lake and was really, really suffering.

Somehow kept on my feet all the way to a Target, bought and drowned water and electrolyte drink and...it turned around.

I started feeling strong, and two days later, I'm still feeling pretty good. Good enough to walk to work today for the first time in a long time.

Now if only I could get back to writing. Have been playing The Outer Worlds for inspiration, and ran Stable Diffusion to create a picture of Yma Sumac with a ray pistol. But still on the first phase of outlining the thing.

Have sold...zero copies. Well, I did sell one copy of the first book, but the Paris book? Not a single one. The high water mark right now is 129 pages read in Kindle Unlimited, which is at least through Part I (Kindle Unlimited pages are Secret Amazon Math, not actually anything normally displayed as a page).

Not like I was expecting to make money, but I was sort of hoping someone would read the damned thing. Doesn't do anything for my confidence, or my interest in writing another, if they aren't.