It might be smart to be already working up the next novel. Don't want to fall into a year-long slump wandering around wondering what idea is really, truly best.
The next novel might be smart to be either return to my Late Bronze Age historical, or to plan whatever it is Athena Fox will get up to next (Roman Britain. Shakespeare will be quoted and slings will be used. Other than that I really don't know).
Of course I'm not smart so I'm starting to think about what the preliminary research stack looks like for "Badgers" -- the file name for my Transhumanist Urban Fantasy Mil-SF Love Triangle.
With horror stuff. And that's the first question to ask. How does that connect? It has to be more than borrowed names and cliches, like the "glue some gears on it" disparaging description of some Steampunk.
Thing is, I think some of the tropes of horror -- even specific ideas within the horror landscape, like the walking dead -- have something to say about both the underlying questions of a Military SF story, and of a Transhumanist world. Many forms of horror have a relation to the Uncanny Valley where something is almost but not quite human. "If it tries to look like human but isn't you reach for your dagger" -- says the English-speaking, bipedal beaver holding his cuppa and tea scone. C.S. Lewis was never one for consistency.
Between the Undead and the cryogenically frozen is not that big a gap. No gap at all exists between a werwolf and the creatures of Doctor Moreau. Really, moving into the space of being "not entirely human" is almost literally what transhumanism means.
Yeah, about that. The only thing I can say for certain at this point is that if there's anything resembling a Singularity, the POV characters are still on this side of it.
Anyhow. I think the best place to start is probably Jason Covalito's books. Which I have at least two already in my library. He talks about the intersection between classic horror and modern pseudo-history, and I'm sure there is something there to get me started.
+ + +
Meanwhile I still have to practice trumpet at work. It is all about the open horn right now; cleaning up my slotting and working on my tone. Not even worth learning any new tunes, or getting back to sight-reading. Just twenty to thirty minutes a day of playing intervals. Sigh.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
From a certain point of view
Got through the last rethink and back to writing the last act.
Was good timing to stop and think right then. There's stuff that's going to be moved to the third act and emphasized, so is nicer to be able to have it in the draft instead of trying to put it in later. The Dorians are back. It ain't a great archaeological mystery but it is the one I have so I'm not putting it to bed until the last scene.
I'm a little disheartened by how much editing I'm looking at now.
On the other hand I am starting to feel like I'm really getting a grip on what a novel looks like and how to build one. This is my third go-around so that's about right. The first I abandoned a few chapters from the end. It just didn't feel "enough." The second I think has the minimum elements. There is little character development but there is still some internalized conflict stuff that plays out properly. The world building is also simplistic but sufficient.
Oh, yes, and there were two epic-length fanfics in there. They helped a lot with scene-level and chapter-level work and were great experiences in juggling large ensemble casts.
What I'm dealing with now is the large-scale structural forms and how to hold them in your head and work with them and maintain flow and consistency across the length of a novel.
So third person might have been a better choice. I went first person largely because there are a lot of solo scenes and it makes it easier to keep an internal narrative voice going. Of course in my current round of re-writes I'm adding characters to as many of those solo sequences as I can because it just reads better.
There's two places third person would have really helped. There's a character who is a foil and goad through the first two thirds. He's the one that pushes my protagonist to change. Why he is doing so is unclear up until his last scene. And that's weak. He would be a stronger antagonist if he didn't appear magically and do things for incomprehensible reasons. And the best way to do this would be to have the ability to go inside his head once or twice, or at least look at the world from over his shoulder.
Changing first person is more awkward and less done than changing third person. In the ultimate case, third person omniscient dips into every head it wants to, moment by moment (and is rarely used in genre fiction these days).
The other thing is, well, it is tough to objectify a character from first person. Conan can stride into battle, sweat gleaming from his mighty thews, but he can't describe himself doing it (well, not without sounding like Den (as voiced by John Candy in 1981's Heavy Metal). As I discovered earlier, it is harder to look heroic from inside, especially for a character who doesn't think of herself as being that hero and from her perspective is faking it like mad.
And, yes, this is mirror territory, where you really shouldn't be writing in deep immersion but letting the character admire their long raven locks. In the first novel I actually finished, Shirato, I played around with starting with a shallow immersion and external description when the character had yet to break away as an independent person standing slightly outside of her own society. And I could certainly play that game here, with Penny being described from behind her eyes but even she views Athena Fox from outside her skin.
Of course you can always pick up a POV if you need that external shot. On my last fanfic I even created a one-scene walk-on just to be able to observe the Jack-Daniel-Lara dynamic from the outside for a few paragraphs.
Yes, I certainly played with the idea of having Penny narrate in first person but describe the character she plays in third. But something I've realized as I'm closing in on the final chapters; Penny doesn't want to be this character. She wants to be this person. She doesn't want to be a a genre hero who has adventures, she wants to be the globe-trotting, confident, skilled academic who knows history deeply and can speak a dozen languages living and dead. For this novel, at least, it isn't appropriate for her to ever describe her own actions from outside.
There's an amusing discussion going on in a couple corners of the interwebs about how so many fantasy worlds (especially in games) are littered with the ruins of a past civilization and whether we should be calling them post-apocalyptic. (The other part of the argument is the banditry and the rule of the sword and the easy access to loot seems to imply a breakdown of society).
The view has some merit, I think, but only as in describing the settings of games as borderlands. Places that for whatever reason (past cataclysm or current war) are lawless and in flux and are in short the perfect habitat for the kind of character sometimes described as a "murder-hobo."
As for the ruins? You can certainly argue for there to have been a lost age, but I don't see it as singular. I see it more as deep history. Peoples have come and gone, and some of them had pretty crazy building programs.
Was good timing to stop and think right then. There's stuff that's going to be moved to the third act and emphasized, so is nicer to be able to have it in the draft instead of trying to put it in later. The Dorians are back. It ain't a great archaeological mystery but it is the one I have so I'm not putting it to bed until the last scene.
I'm a little disheartened by how much editing I'm looking at now.
On the other hand I am starting to feel like I'm really getting a grip on what a novel looks like and how to build one. This is my third go-around so that's about right. The first I abandoned a few chapters from the end. It just didn't feel "enough." The second I think has the minimum elements. There is little character development but there is still some internalized conflict stuff that plays out properly. The world building is also simplistic but sufficient.
Oh, yes, and there were two epic-length fanfics in there. They helped a lot with scene-level and chapter-level work and were great experiences in juggling large ensemble casts.
What I'm dealing with now is the large-scale structural forms and how to hold them in your head and work with them and maintain flow and consistency across the length of a novel.
So third person might have been a better choice. I went first person largely because there are a lot of solo scenes and it makes it easier to keep an internal narrative voice going. Of course in my current round of re-writes I'm adding characters to as many of those solo sequences as I can because it just reads better.
There's two places third person would have really helped. There's a character who is a foil and goad through the first two thirds. He's the one that pushes my protagonist to change. Why he is doing so is unclear up until his last scene. And that's weak. He would be a stronger antagonist if he didn't appear magically and do things for incomprehensible reasons. And the best way to do this would be to have the ability to go inside his head once or twice, or at least look at the world from over his shoulder.
Changing first person is more awkward and less done than changing third person. In the ultimate case, third person omniscient dips into every head it wants to, moment by moment (and is rarely used in genre fiction these days).
The other thing is, well, it is tough to objectify a character from first person. Conan can stride into battle, sweat gleaming from his mighty thews, but he can't describe himself doing it (well, not without sounding like Den (as voiced by John Candy in 1981's Heavy Metal). As I discovered earlier, it is harder to look heroic from inside, especially for a character who doesn't think of herself as being that hero and from her perspective is faking it like mad.
And, yes, this is mirror territory, where you really shouldn't be writing in deep immersion but letting the character admire their long raven locks. In the first novel I actually finished, Shirato, I played around with starting with a shallow immersion and external description when the character had yet to break away as an independent person standing slightly outside of her own society. And I could certainly play that game here, with Penny being described from behind her eyes but even she views Athena Fox from outside her skin.
Of course you can always pick up a POV if you need that external shot. On my last fanfic I even created a one-scene walk-on just to be able to observe the Jack-Daniel-Lara dynamic from the outside for a few paragraphs.
Yes, I certainly played with the idea of having Penny narrate in first person but describe the character she plays in third. But something I've realized as I'm closing in on the final chapters; Penny doesn't want to be this character. She wants to be this person. She doesn't want to be a a genre hero who has adventures, she wants to be the globe-trotting, confident, skilled academic who knows history deeply and can speak a dozen languages living and dead. For this novel, at least, it isn't appropriate for her to ever describe her own actions from outside.
There's an amusing discussion going on in a couple corners of the interwebs about how so many fantasy worlds (especially in games) are littered with the ruins of a past civilization and whether we should be calling them post-apocalyptic. (The other part of the argument is the banditry and the rule of the sword and the easy access to loot seems to imply a breakdown of society).
The view has some merit, I think, but only as in describing the settings of games as borderlands. Places that for whatever reason (past cataclysm or current war) are lawless and in flux and are in short the perfect habitat for the kind of character sometimes described as a "murder-hobo."
As for the ruins? You can certainly argue for there to have been a lost age, but I don't see it as singular. I see it more as deep history. Peoples have come and gone, and some of them had pretty crazy building programs.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Well that was...
Had three goals for yesterday. Outline the next chapter. Practice trumpet. Take a call over some measurements for work.
Well, they didn't call. I didn't get the outline done. I did practice but whatever that was I did that suddenly opened up the upper range is eluding me. I'm more secure on the high C and above and my tone is much better on those notes but I miss the ease I caught that high G with.
There's no standard, by the way. It is the octave problem again; some people change octave at A, some at C. It is double C, but what is the B below it?
Well, brunch today is for wrestling with the novel. One of my various writing books says if you are stuck, it is probably a clue something is wrong. Well, I'm confronting right now that it more-or-less works as a stand-alone book but it isn't what I'd hoped to do with the character as a series character and it sort of violates the implicit promises of the premise.
Depending on the premise. If you blurb it as "Penny is in Athens on her first vacation and..." it works. If you say anything about, "...plays an archaeologist and globe-trotting adventurer..." than it is obvious that at some point the role and reality are going to get confused, and Adventure Archaeologist stuff is going to be happening.
Which it isn't. But maybe I can tweak it a little.
Well, they didn't call. I didn't get the outline done. I did practice but whatever that was I did that suddenly opened up the upper range is eluding me. I'm more secure on the high C and above and my tone is much better on those notes but I miss the ease I caught that high G with.
There's no standard, by the way. It is the octave problem again; some people change octave at A, some at C. It is double C, but what is the B below it?
Well, brunch today is for wrestling with the novel. One of my various writing books says if you are stuck, it is probably a clue something is wrong. Well, I'm confronting right now that it more-or-less works as a stand-alone book but it isn't what I'd hoped to do with the character as a series character and it sort of violates the implicit promises of the premise.
Depending on the premise. If you blurb it as "Penny is in Athens on her first vacation and..." it works. If you say anything about, "...plays an archaeologist and globe-trotting adventurer..." than it is obvious that at some point the role and reality are going to get confused, and Adventure Archaeologist stuff is going to be happening.
Which it isn't. But maybe I can tweak it a little.
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Gee!
I invented a "portable practice booth" and tried it out today.
It is a box built of baltic birch ply and lined with acoustic material. Works like a charm. I had no qualms about practicing trumpet during the day, even without the mute.
And something has changed. Either the comfort (of being able to blow as hard as I wanted but without a practice mute to block it) or something in my posture or just that I've been posting at Quora lately and thinking a lot about embouchure and trumpet technique, but I blew a high G.
Clean, and repeatable. I can even run up and down the scale from the C above the staff to the F (first time I did it, though, after three passes I nearly passed out myself). And, yes, I did tap the A once but I'm only counting clean notes here.
* * *
On the other hand...
I had to take a big break on the novel. I had charged ahead into the next chapters but I could sense it wasn't working quite right.
The problem is that this is an origin story. Now she's "origined." So now I have to figure out what kind of character she'll be for the rest of the book (and possible series).
And there's a lot of elements of the character that are there because they needed to be for the origin to work. So Penny is energetic, confident, an auto-didact, physically fit, widely read. Basically, she had to either have the skills to carry off "Athena Fox" in the real world, or be able to learn them over the course of an adventure.
Other things I discovered while I was writing; things that made a scene or moment work and seemed consistent with the character I was building. So she is musical, an experienced actor, and speaks a little bit of a couple of languages.
So there's a lot of directions I thought I would go that in practice didn't work. Some times I got them all the way to a trial scene and they didn't work. For instance, on paper I liked the idea of her thinking of Athena Fox as an alter-ego, as someone she transformed into. So she'd lack confidence in her own skills when in mufti but put on the hat and she'd be all competent. Well, that didn't work. Having her outside the heroism meant she couldn't enjoy it or take pride in it.
Subtler than that is her thinking of Athena Fox as a character, as a fictional thing she portrays. The trap here is that it made her way too genre-savvy to live with in a semi-realistic book. The world of this novel, unlike the Diskworld, does not run on Narrativium. And it also called too much attention to the tropes I was touching on. It is better to continue how I started; that Penny is actually going around traveling to exotic lands and speaking multiple languages and solving archaeological mysteries...she just doesn't quite realize it.
The crossing point, the big moment of the previous chapter, is her realizing she can actually be Athena Fox. But here's the trick. She doesn't want to be a character. She wants to be the person. She doesn't want to have genre tropes happen, she wants to travel and explore and solve mysteries.
Of course I've got the Act III crux coming up. And that is where the "dark side" of the character shows up, and I confront head-on the idea of genre awareness.
But I still need to construct what she is like now.
* * *
Played through to the Minutemen Faction ending in Fallout 4. If you do it right, this is the one with the fewest betrayals. (If you try to complete with the Railroad Faction, you need to follow the Institute thread past the point of becoming an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel. And both Institute and Brotherhood involve massacring all the other factions.)
It isn't a game without problems. I think it comes down to gamification. There are many things that have to be in there to give a long and rich playing experience, and they can clash with some of the core story.
One of the strongest for me is that most of the encounters, including the majority of all of the Faction threads, are forced to assume you are a starting player; a wanderer, a wastelander, just out of the vault. If you let the Railroad give you a default code-name it is "Wanderer." When you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel even fairly far into their thread they call you "Wastelander" and (as do all of the factions) speak of you as if you are a loner with no connections, no identity, no society you belong to.
Thing of it is, you can already be General of the Minutemen and have personal control over most of the settlements on the map. Which means the other factions should be treating with you diplomatically; as one of the most powerful political figures they've encountered. Okay, the Brotherhood gets a pass on this since they are assholes anyhow. And the Institute, too, couldn't care less for Surface titles. But the idea still stands.
(The other thing that gets me about meeting a faction late-game is the dialog simply can't take into account your history. There are some clever bits, like Preston noticing you already have power armor, but by late game you are basically a Person of Mass Destruction. Heck, they even warn you about the difficulties of the Shining Sea, when you've already explored the entire thing, been to the place they want you to find, and can shrug off a couple of rads without even bothering to wear protective gear.)
Heck, even your own settlers will sometimes wonder who you are and make snide remarks about wastelanders.
But here's a bit that I found really kind of off-putting. And that's dialog checks. Why do these work so much better in Mass Effect?
Well, it might be Mass Effect has better writing. Not the fault of the writers, but more the pacing of the game means plot points need to be bigger and move faster in Fallout 4. So Elder Maxxon can do a 180 with just one line of dialog.
I think it is largely the gamification. In Mass Effect, the special dialog options (Persuade or Intimidate) are available if you have a high enough point value. Otherwise they are grayed out (which is somewhat annoying; you are given the words you could say to resolve the situation but you are prevented from saying them). In Fallout 4, they are a die roll. The higher your skill (Charisma), the better chance of making the roll.
But because this is a roll, the game awards it with a "ding" sound. So the way it all comes together is thus; you are presented with a dialog option in color-coded letters (meaning it is going to be tough to make it work). If you made it, there's the "ta dah!" sound effect and the person you are talking to suddenly agrees with you and changes their mind. It feels...artificial.
Okay, maybe there's another reason. Mass Effect the sound design is much more satisfying even for the Interrupts, which are sort of a hyped-up, QuickTime Event version. And there's no annoying effect for regular dialog options. But also...you are playing Shepard. Shepard-Commander, who talked the Salarians into reversing the Krogan Genophage, who saved the Rachni race from extinction, who talked back to the Council, who was able to get a dozen fractious races to work together to defeat the Reapers. Shepard who brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth. Shep isn't just some random vault-dweller who is trying to be persuasive. It is who she IS.
It is a box built of baltic birch ply and lined with acoustic material. Works like a charm. I had no qualms about practicing trumpet during the day, even without the mute.
And something has changed. Either the comfort (of being able to blow as hard as I wanted but without a practice mute to block it) or something in my posture or just that I've been posting at Quora lately and thinking a lot about embouchure and trumpet technique, but I blew a high G.
Clean, and repeatable. I can even run up and down the scale from the C above the staff to the F (first time I did it, though, after three passes I nearly passed out myself). And, yes, I did tap the A once but I'm only counting clean notes here.
* * *
On the other hand...
I had to take a big break on the novel. I had charged ahead into the next chapters but I could sense it wasn't working quite right.
The problem is that this is an origin story. Now she's "origined." So now I have to figure out what kind of character she'll be for the rest of the book (and possible series).
And there's a lot of elements of the character that are there because they needed to be for the origin to work. So Penny is energetic, confident, an auto-didact, physically fit, widely read. Basically, she had to either have the skills to carry off "Athena Fox" in the real world, or be able to learn them over the course of an adventure.
Other things I discovered while I was writing; things that made a scene or moment work and seemed consistent with the character I was building. So she is musical, an experienced actor, and speaks a little bit of a couple of languages.
So there's a lot of directions I thought I would go that in practice didn't work. Some times I got them all the way to a trial scene and they didn't work. For instance, on paper I liked the idea of her thinking of Athena Fox as an alter-ego, as someone she transformed into. So she'd lack confidence in her own skills when in mufti but put on the hat and she'd be all competent. Well, that didn't work. Having her outside the heroism meant she couldn't enjoy it or take pride in it.
Subtler than that is her thinking of Athena Fox as a character, as a fictional thing she portrays. The trap here is that it made her way too genre-savvy to live with in a semi-realistic book. The world of this novel, unlike the Diskworld, does not run on Narrativium. And it also called too much attention to the tropes I was touching on. It is better to continue how I started; that Penny is actually going around traveling to exotic lands and speaking multiple languages and solving archaeological mysteries...she just doesn't quite realize it.
The crossing point, the big moment of the previous chapter, is her realizing she can actually be Athena Fox. But here's the trick. She doesn't want to be a character. She wants to be the person. She doesn't want to have genre tropes happen, she wants to travel and explore and solve mysteries.
Of course I've got the Act III crux coming up. And that is where the "dark side" of the character shows up, and I confront head-on the idea of genre awareness.
But I still need to construct what she is like now.
* * *
Played through to the Minutemen Faction ending in Fallout 4. If you do it right, this is the one with the fewest betrayals. (If you try to complete with the Railroad Faction, you need to follow the Institute thread past the point of becoming an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel. And both Institute and Brotherhood involve massacring all the other factions.)
It isn't a game without problems. I think it comes down to gamification. There are many things that have to be in there to give a long and rich playing experience, and they can clash with some of the core story.
One of the strongest for me is that most of the encounters, including the majority of all of the Faction threads, are forced to assume you are a starting player; a wanderer, a wastelander, just out of the vault. If you let the Railroad give you a default code-name it is "Wanderer." When you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel even fairly far into their thread they call you "Wastelander" and (as do all of the factions) speak of you as if you are a loner with no connections, no identity, no society you belong to.
Thing of it is, you can already be General of the Minutemen and have personal control over most of the settlements on the map. Which means the other factions should be treating with you diplomatically; as one of the most powerful political figures they've encountered. Okay, the Brotherhood gets a pass on this since they are assholes anyhow. And the Institute, too, couldn't care less for Surface titles. But the idea still stands.
(The other thing that gets me about meeting a faction late-game is the dialog simply can't take into account your history. There are some clever bits, like Preston noticing you already have power armor, but by late game you are basically a Person of Mass Destruction. Heck, they even warn you about the difficulties of the Shining Sea, when you've already explored the entire thing, been to the place they want you to find, and can shrug off a couple of rads without even bothering to wear protective gear.)
Heck, even your own settlers will sometimes wonder who you are and make snide remarks about wastelanders.
But here's a bit that I found really kind of off-putting. And that's dialog checks. Why do these work so much better in Mass Effect?
Well, it might be Mass Effect has better writing. Not the fault of the writers, but more the pacing of the game means plot points need to be bigger and move faster in Fallout 4. So Elder Maxxon can do a 180 with just one line of dialog.
I think it is largely the gamification. In Mass Effect, the special dialog options (Persuade or Intimidate) are available if you have a high enough point value. Otherwise they are grayed out (which is somewhat annoying; you are given the words you could say to resolve the situation but you are prevented from saying them). In Fallout 4, they are a die roll. The higher your skill (Charisma), the better chance of making the roll.
But because this is a roll, the game awards it with a "ding" sound. So the way it all comes together is thus; you are presented with a dialog option in color-coded letters (meaning it is going to be tough to make it work). If you made it, there's the "ta dah!" sound effect and the person you are talking to suddenly agrees with you and changes their mind. It feels...artificial.
Okay, maybe there's another reason. Mass Effect the sound design is much more satisfying even for the Interrupts, which are sort of a hyped-up, QuickTime Event version. And there's no annoying effect for regular dialog options. But also...you are playing Shepard. Shepard-Commander, who talked the Salarians into reversing the Krogan Genophage, who saved the Rachni race from extinction, who talked back to the Council, who was able to get a dozen fractious races to work together to defeat the Reapers. Shepard who brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth. Shep isn't just some random vault-dweller who is trying to be persuasive. It is who she IS.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Music not dead
Just don't have any time, between writing and recovering and a crazy project at work.
Took the Shetland Gue into the shop, sanded it down, re-stained, gave it a glossier coat of polyurethane. I'm still lousy at staining and finishing but it didn't come out so bad. Looks like tuning the strings to A and C is the key (ahem) to playing the Game of Thrones theme, but it is still a bad stretch to that top note. Need practice time before I try to record.
Balked at bidding on a horn I wish I had gone for. Soprano trombone, but not one of those ultra-cheap ones: a used Jupiter in mint condition with mpc and case. Closed at about the same price as those Chinese jobs. I have this crazy dream now of three Bb instruments -- so the slotting is nominally the same (err, except the French Horn starts at the second octave so actually no) -- and all are portable and I can pitch shift them electronically to seat them. But...I adjust pretty quickly to different ranges in the woodwinds and when you shrink the dimensions like that the sonic qualities really do start to collapse as well. The piccolo French Horn basically sounds like a flugelhorn. A really out-of-tune flugelhorn.
Really, a better use of my money would be to start the rent-to-own on a used student-level trumpet. (My local store only has an Eastman at the moment, which doesn't exactly inspire me.)
Changed pegs so my lute-back ukulele is now hanging by my desk for those "practice for a few minutes while a file downloads" moments. So I'm getting a bit more time on it.
Went to the shop last night. I needed to look at the paperwork for the crazy project because dimensions are going out Monday but anyhow. The main chance I get these days to blow into an open horn, and thus really listen to my tone. Well, tone was not what I worked on. My slotting is still not firm, especially when making larger jumps. Practicing scales (actually, scale) is cheating; you can work your lip bit by bit and not have to make a dead leap to the next note.
Apparently French Horns are so bad with this even an orchestral player on a professional-level horn will miss their opening. And unlike the Perlman quote, it is really hard to correct that before anyone else hears.
Oh, and I can hit the E above the staff once or twice in a practice session. Working on stabilizing the C above the staff before I really go crazy up there.
Took the Shetland Gue into the shop, sanded it down, re-stained, gave it a glossier coat of polyurethane. I'm still lousy at staining and finishing but it didn't come out so bad. Looks like tuning the strings to A and C is the key (ahem) to playing the Game of Thrones theme, but it is still a bad stretch to that top note. Need practice time before I try to record.
Balked at bidding on a horn I wish I had gone for. Soprano trombone, but not one of those ultra-cheap ones: a used Jupiter in mint condition with mpc and case. Closed at about the same price as those Chinese jobs. I have this crazy dream now of three Bb instruments -- so the slotting is nominally the same (err, except the French Horn starts at the second octave so actually no) -- and all are portable and I can pitch shift them electronically to seat them. But...I adjust pretty quickly to different ranges in the woodwinds and when you shrink the dimensions like that the sonic qualities really do start to collapse as well. The piccolo French Horn basically sounds like a flugelhorn. A really out-of-tune flugelhorn.
Really, a better use of my money would be to start the rent-to-own on a used student-level trumpet. (My local store only has an Eastman at the moment, which doesn't exactly inspire me.)
Changed pegs so my lute-back ukulele is now hanging by my desk for those "practice for a few minutes while a file downloads" moments. So I'm getting a bit more time on it.
Went to the shop last night. I needed to look at the paperwork for the crazy project because dimensions are going out Monday but anyhow. The main chance I get these days to blow into an open horn, and thus really listen to my tone. Well, tone was not what I worked on. My slotting is still not firm, especially when making larger jumps. Practicing scales (actually, scale) is cheating; you can work your lip bit by bit and not have to make a dead leap to the next note.
Apparently French Horns are so bad with this even an orchestral player on a professional-level horn will miss their opening. And unlike the Perlman quote, it is really hard to correct that before anyone else hears.
Oh, and I can hit the E above the staff once or twice in a practice session. Working on stabilizing the C above the staff before I really go crazy up there.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
The Teumussian Imperative
I had a train of thought that ended with deciding I really do need a new title.
So far all I've found is things that I don't want to do. Referencing one of the names of the protagonist is easy to imagine; "Birth of Athena," "Athena's Choice," "Athena's War," etc. Or "Penny Bright," "A Penny Saved," etc. "Fox," too...but all I can think of is "Fox and Hounds." The only connection of the Fox to Greek myth is a fairly obscure myth about a giant fox that eats babies.
It is hard to explain the main reason I don't like this. It has to do with how the protagonist relates to these names. She doesn't think of herself as a Penny or a Fox or an Athena. The latter is a character she plays, the former is a name she was saddled with (in her words, it was better than "Penelope.")
I'm also generally against artsy titles that quote too obviously from mythology or the classics. Any kind of "Wine-dark Sea" title is a non-starter. I might make an exception for Shakespeare, except by the time you leave behind the ones everyone has used ("By any other name," "Slings and arrows," etc. etc.) you are on lines so obscure only another die-hard will even recognize they are from the Bard.
(The other difficulty in quoting from, say, Homer, or even Octavian, is that these are all translations. Outside of a few extremely popular and probably apocryphal "Veni, vidi, vici" stuff you are left with, again, having to explain that you are quoting from someone.)
I'm also against having too much of a pun. Besides the fact that I'm going quirky, not comic, the obvious-pun titles I've encountered are most usually short hand for murder mysteries. Generally of the "cozy" type, even if they do take place in more exotic locales than the Vicar's Tea Party.
Really, I keep coming back to artifact-centric titles because nothing says more clearly that this is archaeological in intent. Not historical fiction, not action, not science fiction, not a romance, but specifically a story in which a two-fisted intellectual has an adventure while solving a puzzle centered around history, culture, and language.
So maybe the best bet is to revisit the available artifact words but surround one of them with stronger action verbs. "Quest" or "Hunt" or "Adventure" or something.
So far all I've found is things that I don't want to do. Referencing one of the names of the protagonist is easy to imagine; "Birth of Athena," "Athena's Choice," "Athena's War," etc. Or "Penny Bright," "A Penny Saved," etc. "Fox," too...but all I can think of is "Fox and Hounds." The only connection of the Fox to Greek myth is a fairly obscure myth about a giant fox that eats babies.
It is hard to explain the main reason I don't like this. It has to do with how the protagonist relates to these names. She doesn't think of herself as a Penny or a Fox or an Athena. The latter is a character she plays, the former is a name she was saddled with (in her words, it was better than "Penelope.")
I'm also generally against artsy titles that quote too obviously from mythology or the classics. Any kind of "Wine-dark Sea" title is a non-starter. I might make an exception for Shakespeare, except by the time you leave behind the ones everyone has used ("By any other name," "Slings and arrows," etc. etc.) you are on lines so obscure only another die-hard will even recognize they are from the Bard.
(The other difficulty in quoting from, say, Homer, or even Octavian, is that these are all translations. Outside of a few extremely popular and probably apocryphal "Veni, vidi, vici" stuff you are left with, again, having to explain that you are quoting from someone.)
I'm also against having too much of a pun. Besides the fact that I'm going quirky, not comic, the obvious-pun titles I've encountered are most usually short hand for murder mysteries. Generally of the "cozy" type, even if they do take place in more exotic locales than the Vicar's Tea Party.
Really, I keep coming back to artifact-centric titles because nothing says more clearly that this is archaeological in intent. Not historical fiction, not action, not science fiction, not a romance, but specifically a story in which a two-fisted intellectual has an adventure while solving a puzzle centered around history, culture, and language.
So maybe the best bet is to revisit the available artifact words but surround one of them with stronger action verbs. "Quest" or "Hunt" or "Adventure" or something.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Violent Consequences
This is the problem I'm having with heroism. With action, with escapades, with all the violence and crazy doings that are all across genre fiction and are what make it fun to read.
Because in the real world, the stuff has consequences. Sure, anyone can chose to drive a car really, really fast down a crowded highway. And crash and get arrested and their car impounded and...
It is exciting because it is out of the ordinary. And it is out of the ordinary because it generally doesn't turn out so well and most people are smart enough not to try it in the first place. The two are flip sides of the same coin. Driving real fast on a closed-circuit track by a trained stunt driver just isn't the same thing. It is precisely the violation of norms that makes it, well, "heroic." (For certain definitions of the word!)
This ties a bit into genre tropes (but isn't dependent on them). Many of the things that occur over and over in an action movie are things that go badly in the real world. In the movies the bad guys shoot a cop to show they are serious. In the real world, every cop for six states around agrees that it is, indeed, serious.
And this isn't just a scaling problem. Sure, things are over-the-top in an adventure. But heroes are over-the-top within the world of the adventure movie as well. The characters might be barnstormers and they are frequently shown as flying in ridiculous dangerous ways that few dared in the real world. Well, our protagonist does something even MORE ridiculous and dangerous. Because he's the hero. Because it is practically part of the definition of being in a thrilling action scene that what is taking place has gone outside the norms.
Heck, there's often a brief scene after the giant shootout which left an entire warehouse district littered with bodies that the Good Cop says, "They had it coming. Now get the hell out of here before I have to arrest you." So it is even recognized within the genre that the norms have been violated and the expected consequences have been magically evaded.
So what I've put my protagonist through already could easily, probably should have, resulted in news coverage, legal actions, fines, arrests, publicity, and yeah an awful lot of time sitting around uncomfortable rooms talking to unhappy authorities. Yet, on the scale of a rip-roaring adventure, she's barely passed the threshold of "my worst travel story."
Yeah, minor stuff ends up being a huge inconvenience. I personally know more than one person who has been stuck in a country for over a week with the wrong paperwork, talking to the American Embassy every day and just hoping to get it all cleared up somehow. Heck with continuing on to the adventure, they considered themselves lucky just to get back home.
So how can you in a story have your hero do something heroic then get back on the boat? I just don't know.
(Again, this isn't about "yes, there are dangerous occupations and dangerous places in the real world." This is specifically about exceeding ordinary circumstances. This isn't "I was in World War 2 and I got shot at," this is, "I was at the Louvre and I got shot at." And La Gioconda save the writer if what is wanted is, "I was in a running gun battle down the halls of the Louvre.")
(In an upcoming chapter, on my current novel, what I think I am being forced to reach for is an admission that heroes are given a get-out-of-jail-free card. That my protagonist has implicitly been promoted from "tourist who is now going to spend the rest of her vacation in a police station" to "larger-than-life hero with friends-on-the-force who can get them out of the consequences of their actions." It works within the larger themes so, sigh, okay.)
Because in the real world, the stuff has consequences. Sure, anyone can chose to drive a car really, really fast down a crowded highway. And crash and get arrested and their car impounded and...
It is exciting because it is out of the ordinary. And it is out of the ordinary because it generally doesn't turn out so well and most people are smart enough not to try it in the first place. The two are flip sides of the same coin. Driving real fast on a closed-circuit track by a trained stunt driver just isn't the same thing. It is precisely the violation of norms that makes it, well, "heroic." (For certain definitions of the word!)
This ties a bit into genre tropes (but isn't dependent on them). Many of the things that occur over and over in an action movie are things that go badly in the real world. In the movies the bad guys shoot a cop to show they are serious. In the real world, every cop for six states around agrees that it is, indeed, serious.
And this isn't just a scaling problem. Sure, things are over-the-top in an adventure. But heroes are over-the-top within the world of the adventure movie as well. The characters might be barnstormers and they are frequently shown as flying in ridiculous dangerous ways that few dared in the real world. Well, our protagonist does something even MORE ridiculous and dangerous. Because he's the hero. Because it is practically part of the definition of being in a thrilling action scene that what is taking place has gone outside the norms.
Heck, there's often a brief scene after the giant shootout which left an entire warehouse district littered with bodies that the Good Cop says, "They had it coming. Now get the hell out of here before I have to arrest you." So it is even recognized within the genre that the norms have been violated and the expected consequences have been magically evaded.
So what I've put my protagonist through already could easily, probably should have, resulted in news coverage, legal actions, fines, arrests, publicity, and yeah an awful lot of time sitting around uncomfortable rooms talking to unhappy authorities. Yet, on the scale of a rip-roaring adventure, she's barely passed the threshold of "my worst travel story."
Yeah, minor stuff ends up being a huge inconvenience. I personally know more than one person who has been stuck in a country for over a week with the wrong paperwork, talking to the American Embassy every day and just hoping to get it all cleared up somehow. Heck with continuing on to the adventure, they considered themselves lucky just to get back home.
So how can you in a story have your hero do something heroic then get back on the boat? I just don't know.
(Again, this isn't about "yes, there are dangerous occupations and dangerous places in the real world." This is specifically about exceeding ordinary circumstances. This isn't "I was in World War 2 and I got shot at," this is, "I was at the Louvre and I got shot at." And La Gioconda save the writer if what is wanted is, "I was in a running gun battle down the halls of the Louvre.")
(In an upcoming chapter, on my current novel, what I think I am being forced to reach for is an admission that heroes are given a get-out-of-jail-free card. That my protagonist has implicitly been promoted from "tourist who is now going to spend the rest of her vacation in a police station" to "larger-than-life hero with friends-on-the-force who can get them out of the consequences of their actions." It works within the larger themes so, sigh, okay.)
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