My Writing – Page 8 – Aphotic Ink

Belated. But less belated.

I thought I’d get a little of this down.

Examples of made men–in the “simulacra of humans created by magic” sense–include the golem, Pygmalion’s sculpture, that strange bronze man that Medea helped Jason and the Argonauts defeat, and Frankenstein’s monster. I’ll also note the soldiers that sprung up from dragon’s teeth–they weren’t really a created individual, which is most of what I’m looking at, but they do come to mind.

Two functions seem to show up. First, there’s creatures created not to fulfill a duty but simply to be, because having them around was what their creator wanted. Out of this you get Frankenstein’s monster, Pygmalion’s sculpture, Snegurochka the Snow Maiden from Russian folklore, and actually pretty much any of dozen examples of “child created out of objects rather than born because the parents wanted a child so much”. This is not what I’m thinking about right now.

Second, there’s the made man that has a protective function. The golem is pretty much the most blatant example I can think of; persecuted minority + ghetto + desperate need for protector -> great hulking clay defender. The strange bronze man (can’t remember his name, but I’m sure one of my Asimov books mentions him as being the first example of a robot, which is actually a pretty fair description) was also, IIRC, protecting the land that he was found on, although the story there focuses on the protagonists who need to get around the protector. Hrm. Made men as having a tie to the land–made of clay, protecting a specific terrain? Need to reread that Greek myth. On a similar note, the soldiers sprung up when the dragon’s teeth were planted in the earth.

…actually, that last sentence probably addresses every single metaphor I want to play with, except the birds and the Fowler.

(I can’t actually promise that any of this has a point. It’s mostly just an expression of one aspect of the context I’m putting a particular story into, so I have it down in a concrete form. Once it’s in a concrete form, it’s easier to refer to, build on, and change if I need to.)

Hrm. Cannot think of birds having any association with made men. I know that in Russian fairy tales, sending the raven off to get the water of death (which made a dead body whole again) and the dove off to get the water of life (which made the dead body not dead) showed up occasionally, but I think that was strictly restoring a previously living human to life.

Alright. Moving away from myths/legends/folklore of made men and towards the scarecrow…

made by humans, yes;
protective device, yes;
associated with cultivation and so with earth and specific patches of land, yes;
wards off birds, yes.

Thinking of them, still, as made of what I can only call natural fibers, albeit cultivated ones. The idea of a jack-o’lantern-headed scarecrow, while quite possibly impractical, is also one I really like. So it stays. (I was influenced by Bradbury’s depiction of Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud at an early age… the image of someone leaving this plane of existence by blowing out their own candle flame and then having the smoke curl out of ears and eyes and nose and mouth is, to me, incredibly powerful.)

Need to look at the associations of fire; off the top of my head, there’s just standard transformative stuff, the duality of creation and destruction, nothing particularly special.

Apocalypse as revelation.

Pardon the etymology geekery, here. Apocalypse, broken down to its Greek roots, means revelation (from apo-, “from, away from; after”, and kalyptein, “to cover, conceal”.) So it’s a sudden shocking understanding, a tearing back of the shrouding curtain of ignorance; in Middle English it referred to a sudden vision or insight.

So. Going back to the post about the lack of end-of-the-world movies; half of the ones I listed came with a sudden revelation that cast the events of the movie itself in a different light, and of the two Dead movies, Day had a pretty shocking (within the genre) revelation right around the climax.

I suppose it’s easy to have everything go wrong. But it’s harder to have everything go wrong and have people not feel cheated. Paying attention and following a story and then having the protagonist fail and the things you cared about be undone regardless of your caring about them is annoying. But paying attention and following a story and then having all the little details you picked up and absorbed mean something new and different while the protagonist fails; that can work. It’s a different pay-off; rather than vicarious victory through the story, you get personal understanding of the story. At its best, it’s that brilliant “oh my god, that’s what was happening!” at the end of The Usual Suspects.

I wonder if it’s easier to do in speculative genres because the audience is more prepped to pay attention to details of the setting, so it’s easier to seed things for them to pick up. Or possibly in crime/mystery stories, because the genre invites people to try and figure it out; there’s the expectation of some kind of puzzle, even if it’s not necessarily a world-twisting puzzle.

I suppose the advantage of doing this in stories rather than movies is that people will generally feel like they’ve invested less in a story that suddenly twists to become something different, and are less likely to resent it if they don’t like the change.

Ashewoods

I’ve been rereading some of my old work; I thought this might be reather appropriate in October. I ought revist the Ashewoods, I think.

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The Ashewoods are an interesting case.

All the Houses are interesting cases, of course, and all have their claims to uniqueness. Perhaps it might be better to say that the Ashewoods are an unsettling case. Part of it is their Hearth; what is now called Barrowlux was once a necropolis filled with the entombed ranks of the dead, catacombs beneath a long-fallen city. Part of it is their lineage, and what they bred with down in the dark.

The Ashewoods are part ghoul.

According to their history, when the Darkness fell, a few survivors sought shelter deep in the catacombs. Over the years, the descendants of those survivors adapted to their environment. As the city above Barrowlux was razed, the survivors moved deeper, scavenging for survival. Presumably the incursions from Neverborn above led to the first uneasy alliances between human and ghoul; the details remain unrecorded. Over the years, the deeper parts of the catacombs were turned into a refuge, secured as best as possible by the traps and the great doors left above.

Barrowlux sits at the far northeastern edge of the House’s lands, and is the farthest city of any note–beyond it, there are a few scattered hamlets, and the sparsely-mapped stretch of the wilderness. Buildings are being constructed aboveground–low, square, and wide-roofed, walls plastered smooth with mud or daub when stone is beyond the means or the reach of the builder. With the disappearance of the Darkness, the eating of the dead among the Ashewoods has become largely ceremonial, though it still deeply marks their culture. Their physics are a particularly striking example–nowhere else is the study of medicine so deeply entwined with the study of cooking (on the theory that really, it’s all a matter of caring for and preparing the body).

Ashewoods tend towards the wiry and pale, with dark hair, strong jawlines, and a good sense of smell. Brown eyes are most common, although green or red are occasionally seen. Occasionally the jawline will be prominent enough to be described as a muzzle, and the brown of the eyes light enough to be more reasonably described as “ochre” or “yellow”. They are generally soft-spoken, reserved (although visitors to Barrowlux report a more relaxed attitude towards guests), and quite cautious in matters of physical security.

Splendid isolation/I don’t need no-one

So, John and I are driving around, and between the GPS in the cars and our phones, it’s a very well-informed trip. And it came up in casual discussion that many many horror movie plots have been rendered unworkable by the existence of these things–GPS systems and cellphones.

This is pretty obvious stuff; it ties back to the truism about horror movies being, in many ways, about isolation. Being able to dial 911 and start hiking out with a map that shows you your heading and the distance to the highway makes things a lot more manageable. (Or, you know, the amusing values of being able to Google something like “chainsaw sabotage”… But I digress.)

We went back to it later, a bit. If you eliminate the tactical elements of isolation, then what you’re left with is two options. There’s social isolation (“they won’t believe me” or “they didn’t believe me”)[1] which has a long and storied history, including those godawful fifties movies about the aliens landing and the teenagers being the only ones to see them. Or else there’s self-imposed isolation, where the protagonists don’t want to call for help; what that sprang to mind was them being in a haunted house where they had no right to be[2], but Session 9 is also a beautiful example. The guy needs the job, there’s no way to leave and get it done, and he can’t afford to take the time to call for help. Alright, yes, there is definitely an element of social isolation there; that’s fine. One kind doesn’t need to do all the work.

So I am discussing this with John, and he points out that splitting up becomes a lot less frightening, a lot more manageable, if you have something like Google Latitude in place. You know where people are, you can track them. And I nod in agreement, and then he smiles and points out that it isn’t true.

“You don’t know where I am. You know where my phone is.”

I do confess I shuddered. (A lovely moment over lunch, to be sure.)

Because that takes it out of isolation and into uncertainty, which is the other great foundation of horror. The world crumbling out from under you, slowly or suddenly. In some ways it ties to isolation–not having anything you can be sure of to reach out to–but it’s a basically different development. It’s the horror of “The calls are coming from inside the house!“, which relies not on there being no-one to help but on the space that you were sure was safe being taken away.

So that’s something else to look to, I guess. Not sure how much good it’d be for movies, which don’t necessarily have a lot of time to establish certainty, but definitely something to keep in mind for written work.

(ObDisclaimer: no, not all horror movies rely on isolation. Scream, f’r ex, handles the advent of the ubiquitous cellphone quite well.)

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[1] See also: all the travel horror that involves being surrounded by those terrible strange Other People (usually brown).[3]
[2] Or this 90s movie about four suburban guys out for a night on the town who accidentally see a murder and don’t want to call for help because they hit someone with their car… I will try and look up the title later.
[3] …echoes of HP Lovecraft, actually…

Tagging

Been trying to write tags for Excolo on the phone. The fact that Swype changes “Excolo” to “Wiki” makes posting in the OOC a bit awkward.

Had a bit of a shock when I went to edit this post and remembered the draft was stored *locally* in my phone, not on the Dashboard I can get to by Internet.

I wrote a post about Glass having… I suppose that at seven months it’s not a miscarriage, but the phrase “having a stillbirth” sounds *entirely* wrong. It went over pretty well, I think; reaction posts that show you’ve hit the note you were aiming for are always satisfying. (Earned a !caution tag, which I was hoping for but which I honestly wasn’t sure it merited.) Next up I need to write something bouncy and cheerful, and then a couple of comfortable and mildly curious tags.

I think collaborative writing (and I do think it merits being called that) can actually really help you switch gears, especially when you’re working on more than one scene at once. On the other hand, it can really leave you high and dry when it comes to practicing plotting. Genuinely not knowing exactly what the other person is going to do, and trusting them to give you something to react to, doesn’t exactly give you a lot of practice in Getting An Idea.

And I honestly twitch when I hear people talking about their characters as if they were real people. I understand that it can be a perfectly useful shorthand for “I have constructed an idea of a personality that, while I haven’t exactly sat down and analyzed it to death, is resiliant enough that I have a (sometimes unconcsious) idea of what the character in question will naturally tend to do.” And that’s fine.

But the “I totally didn’t want to do this, $CHARACTER just screamed at me until I typed it, and hey maybe they will do my housework later if you bribe them” lines? I… would call that not so fine. I really would. There’s a level of responsibility for conscious action that I get a bit uncomfortable over when I see it being eschewed.

Ugh. That sentence needs editing. Very badly. I may come back to this later.

Living up to deadlines.

It’s odd, I don’t usually think of deadlines as something to live up to.

I also don’t usually think of the day as being over at midnight, but that seems like a possibly specious distinction to work with at the moment, so I’m here again, composing on my phone. I’ve set it to vibrate, which is slightly less annoying than clicking for Sudoku, but I am finding it a bit buzzy for typing.

It’s occurring to me that I have a lot of electronic wafers–little slices of screen and plastic and buttons that exist as ways to get to something else that isn’t exactly tangible. My Kobo. My laptop. This phone.

I say, sometimes, that I love living in the future. Usually I say it when John tells me something new and wonderful about technology or medicine or astronomy. But I think the first time I really noticed was several years ago…

I was watching the realtime map for the London Underground, and some of the stations lit up (means there was a service interruption). I was curious and clicked for details, and it said there’d been an incident on the tracks with a passenger. The timestamp was seven minutes old.

Someone got onto the Tube tracks in London and I found out about it in seven minutes. I can’t walk a mile in seven minutes, and…how far away is London? How many people do I know who’ve never even seen it? And I’m getting news from there in less time than it takes to drink a coffee, unless you really chug it.

(Full disclosure; I am a slow coffee drinker.)

((Fuller disclosure; I had a morbid streak when I was younger, and my second thought upon seeing the map information was “I wonder how far he splashed.” Which is ridiculous, really, I don’t even know that anyone was hurt rather than just being a Gap-hopping twit, but… Oh, the lurid imaginations of youth.))

I think the second time the shrinking of intervening distances really hit me was several years later, when a friend in the UK had forgotten his wallet at work and didn’t have groceries in the house and I ordered him a pizza. Because Internet. You can do a lot with the Internet.

Have noticed a possible downside to composing on the phone; small screen means it’s harder to glance back up at what I said earlier, and easier to ramble very far afield. Will mind that in future. Of course, it’s also easier to not get bogged down in going back and editing yourself, which is something I’ve been hoping to work on for a bit.

Right. Been writing for half an hour, and want to get up early tomorrow. Think I will call it a night.

I could be anywhere, and still be here.

Writing this from my new phone. Very different feeling from typing on a keyboard; I’m not sure how well I could write fiction on this. Maybe it’ll be different once I get more used to it and the motions become more of a reflex. I’ve never heard of anyone saying that they couldn’t write if they had to type, after all, and I guess this is similar.

Missed the bus this morning–it came a minute early–and John gave me a lift to the Transitway. Confess I was grinning like an idiot over being able to text him from the bus. Currently still playing around; I think the biggest difference between this and a typewriter is the inability to touch-type.

More later. Probably need to decide if those 200 words a day can be in separate posts.

Marking time.

Light of my life appears to have gotten my Kobo working, which is wonderful. My favourite short story on it came off Smashwords, and I was getting really frustrated with not having it handy.

(Oh, there’s a word count on this! Handy.)

Taking advice on practicing time management; seeing if I can get down 200 words a day, reliably, until the end of October.

Other concerns ATM: very much behind on Excolo roundup, not enough sleep, top-to-bottom housecleaning due by Thursday night, work screw-up, general failure to write.

Writing a story with a friend, and between our schedules it’s bogging down. Need to talk to her to find out how she feels about my writing pieces of it alone, or stories that use the set-up we’ve created. I can see her disliking the idea, although I don’t think it’s likely. I cannot see being comfortable with just going ahead with it without asking her.

Also for consideration: am I using this as an excuse to procrastinate?

I have a handful of ideas for Iolace, and two stories. Unsurprisingly enough, neither of them is written yet.

Trying to coordinate my various journals, accounts, feeds, and any other ways that I track what people are doing online. I like having them, but having them all over the place is not useful. Not entirely sure how or if this will fit in with that; I’m hoping that if I organize everything else, this will naturally settle into its own niche.