Blood of an Eidokko

Bit by bit I'm realizing my current infatuation with history is not new. And I realize I've even dabbled with an archaeological/anthropological mystery before. The setting, however, was the fictional warped-mirror-of-contemporary-Japan setting of my unpublished novel Shirato.



A slight scene-setting is necessary. In Shirato, several multi-planet civilizations are involved in inter-planetary trade; the protagonist is a young machinist-trainee on a sort of "Shop truck" serving in the merchant marine of Tojima. As is slowly revealed through the story, in a time in the past roughly comparable to the 1940s of our timeline Tojima developed interstellar travel and made contact with the world of Kojima, which in short order developed their own trading empire, which is in the current day in increasingly violent conflict with Tojima.

Except the interaction of these two civilizations is more complex. In a history so ancient it is largely shrouded in myth, Kojima had been first to explore the "Gates" left by a long-vanished alien predecessor species. They had walked there, carrying swords, and they had brought much of their language and culture to Tojima. The parallels here to the uncomfortable history between China and Japan (and throw in Korea and Okinawa into the mix) are quite intentional.

So in current mythology, the Koyamajin were ancient conquerers of Tojima, thrown off by legendary heroes. The Tojimajin were the rapacious traders of a later age who used their higher technology to impose the equivalents of Commander Perry, the Opium Wars, etc. And with both sides gearing up to current-day war all of these myths, legends, and highly-colored histories are being trotted out by the propaganda machines.

Protagonist Mie Nakamura's people are from small northern-latitude fishing villages remote from the capitol of Tojima; not quite Okinawa or Kuril Islands but definitely considered rural, backwoods, out of the mainstream of Tojima culture. They are in character New England whaling town; hardy, quiet, a strong sense of local identity and solidarity. In the main story, she becomes reluctant wielder of the heritage of Tojima's legendary heroes and must work her way through the net of social obligations and expectations to find a way of diffusing the seemingly inevitable war. Her island heritage; an inability to shirk hard work or the harder path, is in her mind key to her ability to do so.



In any case. The splinter story takes place in these islands, with an archaeological team investigating what legends describe as potentially one of the "gates" that shut down two thousand years ago at the peak of the overthrow of the Kojima (and, in the main story, are in the process of coming awake again).

The official stance is that the old samurai class, the carefully-cultured bloodlines that are strongly represented in the current-day political and economic elite, are original Tojima stock. Places like the Edo island chain, closer to the origin of the Kojima invasion, were more strongly bred into by the invaders. This isn't Soviet Science, and it doesn't reach the crassness levels of, say, America in the 18th and 19th century (or for that matter, some of the discourse today!) but it is something that is being thought and hinted at and dog whistled out in the current inflammatory war fever.

So there is a lot of pride involved, with the elite working hard to support their conceits of being the best and truest and the islanders being not just the unwashed masses and not just hicks, but practically inbred (well, outbred, but the emotional association is similar).

Except for the skeletons. Our archaeological team, led by a prominent and very politically connected man from the top university (the equivalent of Todai, the Tokyo university all the elite go to), has an agenda to support the mainstream view. A young troubled grad student on the team, our narrative POV character (who is not so coincidentally falling for a local girl) is less certain.

So here they are in the cold, rain-swept, rocky rugged northern tip of human habitation, put up with graciousness and New England-style hospitality by the hard-scrabble locals, digging into ancient monuments while politics heats up back home and interstellar war looms overhead.

And of course the anthropological evidence -- the forensics, in fact, of bones found in a sealed portion of the cavern -- is that the capitol has it pretty much backwards. The phenotype seen most clearly in the face of the young local woman injured during the stormy climax of the story is that of the indigenous people. The tall, lean-faced barons of industry and secretaries of war are the remnants of the ancient invasion.

Well, only sort of. Human genetics doesn't work that way. But if you are going to try to make a political point based on a misapplication of that science, you've got no reason to cry when the evidence you want to trump turns out to say something different than what you wanted it to say.




A pretty much unpublishable story, if for no other reason than that it depends too much on the novel for background. Without seeing the war unfold, and the complicated history slowly uncovered as it is in the novel, the pressures that become murderous passions at that lonely archaeological dig are hard to connect to emotionally.

It does, however, demonstrate that I've been trying to tell that archaeological story for quite some time now. Maybe some day I'll figure out a form in which it works.

The Good Shepard

I'm not excited about the new Star Wars movie. In fact, not even interested enough to challenge the weather and see it in a theater; I can wait for the DVD. But I've noticed an interesting split in impressions of it. Specifically, that many commenters at various of the blogs I follow have enthusiastically adopted it as "their" Star Wars movie -- because it offers a female character they can identify with.

Oddly enough, this character is one of the reasons I was disinclined to race out to see the movie. Or, rather, what I thought I was seeing in the advertising; another of those colorless and interchangeable faux action girls (to use the TVTropes term) that serve as the thin pretense of diversity for so many mass media products. Apparently this character is better than that, though; even much better. Even if this hard-bitten fighter is clearly (from the images I've seen) touching up her make-up between lightsabre duels.

Which is one of those odd details I've included in my own fanfic. My Lara Croft is careful to explain at one juncture just how much work and how many little jars "from the best Parisian suppliers" goes into maintaining that fresh-faced All Natural look.

And, yeah. The concept of identification. Having a female Jedi who doesn't serve as eye candy or hostage de jour or other peripheral role to the default male (white, straight) heroes. Why some game characters never speak, why others can be tailored in appearance, race, gender. Or species, depending on the game; apparently the choice of avatar is rather more complex than simply having one that looks just like you.

My Shep (Mass Effect) was female, and non-white. And when I remember that, I realize that most of my writing has also taken a distaff POV. First character I ever wrote extensively with was Laura Wilkinson. Who actually started as a secondary character in someone else's story, but even fourteen-year-old me couldn't stomach a blatant damsel in distress scenario and ended up recasting the whole thing from her point of view. And of course giving her a whole lot more agency.

My first attempt at a novel starred Kimberly Velaquez (who was a conscious stereotype, the hard-bitten female PI that was appearing with some frequency in detective fiction in I think the 1980's). The second was built around Mie Nakamura (who owed her origin to anime but quickly grew into the only appropriate character to tell a story of trying to do the right thing against increasing social pressure, both external and strongly internalized). And my current cross-over pic started with the intentions of giving Stargate SG1 equal billing but they have been largely overshadowed by the forthright personality of late classic era (aka Tomb Raider: Underworld) Lara Croft.

And, yeah, my attempt to write a new novel around a sound man for the "Elves with Guitars" (also a thing that was going around at least a couple decades ago...Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks probably the Ur-work here) may be foundering on my inability to properly mesh with a male protagonist. Now that's food for thought. (Adding to the problem, I originally cast Brendan Marshall to be as Standard Model Hollywood Hero as possible, aka the "normal guy" who is more average than any real human being is capable of. The more I try to go more interesting with his character, though, the more I can't seem to figure out just where I'm going with it all).

Somewhat like this essay.

How do you fix fic?

I've complained quite a bit about how Tomb Raider 2013 starts with some interesting ideas but ends up foundering on the crass and rote machinery of contemporary AAA games. I am not sure how you would "fix" the game, given as many of the potential ideas it introduces are of a sort that no-one has yet figured out how to turn into a proper game mechanic. And if you removed the cover-shooter combat fest, the remaining game would be too short.

You could, however, re-tell the story in a form that does allow better use of the archaeological problem-solving, and survivalism that goes beyond simply hitting a few quick-time events (let's put it this way...starting a fire to survive her first night is given in a cutscene. Period. There isn't even a QTE to react to. Your involvement as player in this basic act of survival is quite nill.)

So given that, what would change?

POV

I've been musing a little on POV in fiction. An important note; Orson Scott-Card has an excellent book called "Characters and Viewpoint" that covers this subject in more depth than I possibly can.

I did writing all backwards, of course. Wrote short stories. Wrote a novel. Shopped the novel. Then sat down and spent another ten years writing fanfic and, well, actually learning something.

Smashing Words

Weird.

I've been feeling like I'm getting dumber by the year. It's a common feeling. The more you know, the more you notice all the gaps in your knowledge. The more you know, the more you realize how much more there is to know.

And I seem totally unable to keep from adding new fields I try to -- well, "master" is the wrong word. Maybe "Be semi-competent at." I've really been pushing on the props-making this past few years, which has meant learning machining practically from scratch, plus picking up a lot of smaller skills in laser cutting, vacuum forming, 3d printing, PCB layout, etc. Before that, tons of sound/recording stuff and a big hunk of programming. Before that (more or less as I started to get heavily into FOH mixing and theatrical sound design) music theory and arrangement.

And before that was writing.



They say you need to write one million words before the decent ones start to flow. I wrote probably two dozen short-stories in the 10K range before I dared send one out. About another dozen that I did dare send out. And two novels...well, 1.9 novels. The first I stopped a few chapters short of the end of the first draft. Somehow, it wasn't working for me. The next struggled through first draft, second draft, third draft, and I dared send it out, too.

Which kind of burned me out on writing. Both the hard push I did to finish it, but even more, having the novel travel out to publishers over the next three years and thus being unable to let go of it.

I was unable to write for some time. Finally crawled back in with fanfic. Fan fiction exercises the same muscles, but it is like gym climbing to the great outdoors; it feels safer, like less is at stake. (Hey...it's a good analogy when I think about it. Fanfic gets you more feedback and less scratches. You aren't risking getting those oh-so-polite rejection slips in the mail, but you are getting the easy accolades of the other guys and gals hanging around the gym.)

But I did send out a few short stories anyhow. Still no publication, but two of the editors gave me personal replies, at least. That's something.

And over a few years the fanfic hit a pretty respectable word count itself. My AU Sailor Moon opus hit 100,000 words (and it hasn't even finished the first season of the TV show!) And my Tomb Raider/Stargate cross-over, with the monster 8K chapter I just crunched out, has now hit 60,000.

Which brings me up somewhere around 800,000. Which with the error bars is, I think, close enough.



When you've done a lot of work of any kind, but especially creative work, it is tough coming back to older work. I don't actually know which is harder; to look back and go, "Man, I can't believe I actually showed this to anyone," or "God, I had some talent then! Where did it all go?"

I do know for sure that my reaction coming back to basically any code I've ever written is "I can't figure out how the hell this thing does what it does!"

The thing that I've been saying for decades is that writing is tough because you have to juggle so many elements at the same time, and a novel is basically impossible because there's no way one human mind can hold everything in it at the same time.

The novel becomes impossible to dissect, difficult to even perform surgery on, because there are bits and pieces in every scene that lead all over the place connecting and tangling with other bits and pieces. In every single scene there are plots being discovered and character arcs progressing and descriptions being developed and progress being made and explanations being given to the reader and taking one scene out makes bricks fall in a dozen different places -- many of them unexpected.

Except.

Today I opened the file of that first half-way decent novel and I found I could run my finger down all the anatomy. I could hold the thing in my head, at least well enough. All that practice since, that half-a-million words or so spilled since I tried to publish it, seems to have actually done something.



Yeah, sure, I've forgotten a lot. I'm rusty, too. And worse, I've fallen into habits of expression that are not good and that do not fit the patterns and cadence of that old novel. I use the dash way too often these days. I tend to place things in threes more often than not -- with or without the Oxford Comma.

And not that there aren't problems with the novel. There's a fat-shaming bit that needs to use a different tool for what it is trying to accomplish, and a bit of business in Chapter 16 that totally has to go. And there's a persistent odor of what TVtropes calls "Fangirl Japanese," even though I came by it semi-honestly via Jo Clayton (who made very good use of fragments of various imaginary languages woven into her text with nothing but context to guide the reader in understanding them.)

But right now, as I look at it, I feel I could straighten up the big structural problems (in the early chapters) in less work than it would take to write the next chapter in my current fanfic.



Because right now, that 1,000+ click-thru I hit at fanfiction dot net is sounding really damned good: even at 50% royalties on a cheap Kindle book. And published in ebook is no longer the kiss of death (if I was still worried about that).

And there's good stuff in it. Sure, it only tells the tale. It doesn't do what a really good book does; it doesn't add that extra something that the rest of the tale is simply foundation for. But it does the basics and does them, I think, well. There's poetry in some of the descriptions, bathos here and there, the cultural settings feel real with tantalizing tidbits. The situation is silly but not utterly implausible, and the characters are thin but generally likable.

I've felt for a while it was worth getting on line even if I never made a penny from it. I feel strongly enough that it isn't a waste of time to read. I've just held off because there are bits that bother me too much to let go without editing, and I couldn't face the editing. But now I think I can.

Besides. I almost feel like I could write another novel now. Almost.