Trick Pony

Still not writing. Had one of those rapid trains of thought today and put down notes on two stories in progress...but still not ready to write them. I am not feeling "blocked" (whatever writer's block really is). Perhaps a bit burnt out. Mostly, I just don't feel like, well, anything. Practicing music, cleaning house, playing games...none of it interests me. I am looking forward to weather that makes me less reluctant to get some walking and and perhaps more exercise than that.

Meanwhile I'm just randomly spinning wheels. Reading/watching a bunch of reviews to try and get some sense of what F&SF has been up to since I was last an active reader in the field.

Messed around with StableDiffusion some more. Been trying a couple of different base models. I'm inpainting a bunch already -- the example I posted a while ago didn't work out quite as planned because it was pretty much there in the first pass. Most of the images I play around with are made in the inpainting and were very different in the first pass.

Still so lazy I'm using Paint3D (which Windows keeps reminding me will be deprecated for good with Windows 11...so much so, it won't even let me "open with..." any more, forcing me to open the ap first). But last time through, even with the exceptionally primitive tools (I bought Affinity Photo but it is loaded on the other machine) I was able to do a sketch stage instead of going straight for blobs of color.

And I was very surprised when I found the anatomy coming back to me. The fingers remember, even if my brain had forgotten. Not that I was ever good or ever will be good, but is nice that all that time I spent trying to learn artistic anatomy isn't entirely forgotten.

In any case, each LoRA has things it is good at, and each LoRa has its own peccadillos, presumably through over-training on a limited image set. Use a LoRa for a cowboy hat and your character will turn into a red-head. Or dinosaurs will appear in the background. So inpainting is necessary, and switching the LoRAs, and since each checksum model has different LoRAs written to it, switching the base model as well.

All in all, not a good system for someone who is by nature a tweaker. Too easy to get bogged down making the rounds with different combinations and different prompts, trying to bring the different parts of an image into agreement with each other...especially as AI keeps throwing up new ideas you hadn't thought of originally and get excited about following up, necessitating yet another round of changing everything else to fit...

***

Also made a connection between two bad "kinda wish I was writing that instead." I really think now I wrote myself into a corner with Penny. Her strength is as an everyman hero. I started the series determined to give her as much of the skill package of her alter-ego as I could manage in a semi-realistic series. She may not be able to speak seven languages, but as of this point can read the Greek alphabet, Katakana and a few basic kanji, and put together a full sentence in French.

The worst hole I walked myself into was letting her accept that she could do this stuff. Well, it seemed unrealistic that she still doubted herself. But this gives her a confidence that clashes with the idea of the ordinary person thrust into adventure. 

And her increasing comfort with history and with travel in the contemporary world also take away something that was very handy; as a fish out of water, she can be as confused as the reader is by new places and new concepts.

In any case.

This whole imaginary conversation flashed into my head; say "Story" is happening to a pair of ordinary people, pushing them into stock roles. The guy so strongly rejected the Adventure Archaeologist thing it rebounded. Now he's got the delights of suddenly being able to read Babylonian Cuneiform (something he never had time to study). The gal is less happy, as she is turning into the Strong Female Character. She doesn't wearing black jeans and leather jacket now, and being able to beat people up is cool, but she has a great relationship with her sisters and extended family and is far too trope-aware that her character archetype doesn't have such things...

The best I can say is that understanding more clearly the thing I COULD write from these elements has clarified for me that I WONT write it. It bores me even more unutterably than the rest of my current life.

Theme and variations

Of course it can't be that simple. Yes, there is something missing in books I have written and books I plan to write. But I haven't properly identified that thing, and if I could, I might be able to find one that worked.

The idea of MICE is attractive...

 ...but can be misleading. These can be good analytical tools, but less useful in constructing a story because elements don't always fit neatly into the boxes we create.

There was an episode of Writing Excuses that had fun reconstructing "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" as primarily an Event story (three goats cross a bridge. There's a troll), a Character story (three goats want to cross a bridge -- the goats are our protagonists here), a Milieu story (there's a bridge with a troll under it), or an Idea story (um...don't take advice from your prey?)

This is a bit facile. The point is more the focus and the attention. If we start with the goat's longings for the meadow across the bridge, this clear goal, then we are telling a character story. If we start out depicting this setting, on the other hand...but what, then, is a scene-setting description? Or a prologue? Or a false protagonist? Or an early inciting incident?

My own star example is Jumanji: Into the Jungle; a character story (the kids gain insight and self-confidence) wrapped around a world story (they go to Jumanji) wrapped around an Event story (they fight to save the world of Jumanji).

***

It is more tempting to think in terms of a theme/idea/conceit/focus that runs through the book and underpins the action -- if possible, motivating it. Horizon Zero Dawn of course mates the player's experience with Aloy's experience in a number of ways, right down to the game mechanics -- the basic gameplay loop of killing machines for parts -- being at the basis of the world's economy, Aloy's progress through the game, and the reason why the world is so fucked at the moment (and will be so for at least one more game...Guerrilla hasn't said, but I'm personally thinking two!)

This is failing me as a tool for figuring out why I think some of the Athena Fox books worked and some didn't, though. The Japan book has the perhaps simple idea of Tatame vs. Honne; inside versus outside, private versus public, mask versus real feelings. This was not just internalized in the characters (Penny forced by the...okay, call it the Event of the story...to wear the mask and finding herself Becoming the Mask) but also in structure, with the rising action of part three being penetration ring by ring (quite literally) into the cult holding the secrets she is after.

Maybe it worked there because it was part of Becoming the Mask, and that was connected to the basic form of a spy/infiltration story. And that novel was schizoid anyhow as it really falls into five parts; an overly long prologue when the Event is just some weirdness in the background, the Training Montage which takes up most of Act II, the Tokyo sequence which is really an uneasy bridge between the training and the infiltration, the Infiltration of course, then the James Bond returns to Piz Gloria as Penny starts having high-speed snowmobile rides and fistfights with yakuza.

So what did I learn here? That either my analytical tools are no good, or the novel is too messy. Probably both.

Why do I think the Desert book is going to be any better? From outside it still looks like a mixed bag. Basically the heart is a somewhat difficult concept; the myth of the desert as an atomic wasteland. From one perspective -- the perspective Penny is introduced to as her car is stopped by one of the occasional White Sands Missile Range closures of I-70 -- is that this isn't really her America. This is military-industrial complex doing things somewhere deep in this inhospitable blasted plain.

And when she says something like that to one of the people investigating the dead body, that person snaps back with a "Try being us." "Us" being the neuvomexicanos who were once ranchers there before General Groves and others called Eminent Domain. But that's a bit of a sideline, as the desert lives and even flourishes (turns out being a closed-off military reservation is better than being farmland for some of the wildlife). And that in turn links to the idea of life -- in this case, specifically, the human species -- working their way from Lucy to a future in the stars if they don't manage to nuke themselves first (Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox).

Which brings us to nuclear secrets but these are old secrets and the key to unraveling the mystery has to do with loyalty and belonging...like the workers at Los Alamos, coming back to the mesa to sweep floors near where they once owned a house and land, but still proud to be a part of it (and probably more proud to be making a good living wage, at least by their standards).

That...seems like a mess. If you cast the net that large, draw a Venn Diagram with a pair of dividers the size of the Rio Grande, then you can fit the boxes around it. Even if it is hard to define whether this is a World or an Idea or what.

But...when I look at The Tiki Stars, I don't have something that both underlies the world-building and underlie the plot in the same way. And maybe that is key. Maybe Aloy showed the way.