Teleidoscope

Sat, Feb 23, 2008

Twilight Rising

Posted at 9:48 pm MST to Creative Work

I have uploaded my unsold novel Twilight Rising and made it available from the Astral Trading website, all 17 chapters and 8 appendices.

It is intended for mature readers. I have posted warnings but the files are currently not locked.

This novel was originally written using Sprint, an editor sold by Borland in the 80s. The files were later imported into Ami Pro for OS/2. More recently, the Ami versions of the files were imported into KWord.

To generate the website, the KWord files were exported as XHTML, and the files have received some minimal tweaking, but the HTML source remains ugly and primitive. There may be some garbling due to the multiple generations of translation. Please let me know if you find any.

Note: the only substantial difference between the posted file versions and the version that was submitted to various publishers (unsuccessfully) is that the English translations have been removed from the poems at the chapter heads. 17 poem translations out of 100 is way more than fair use. Alternative translations of the various poems can be found here for those who are interested.

I also colored the maps.

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Wed, Feb 20, 2008

Ashihara

Posted at 5:06 pm MST to Creative Work

I woke up at 2AM knowing that the sequel to Twilight Rising is 'about becoming human'.

Don't ask me what that means yet.

But I'm pretty sure the Prince doesn't get viewpoint in this one, which seems fair since he achieved apotheosis in volume 1. I suspect that the main viewpoint characters are Chancellor Tajima, the Dragon Princess, and one of the Bugs.

I really need to figure out actual names for some of the Bugs. 'Robert the Devil', 'William the Bastard' and 'Hrolf Gangr' are handy placeholders, but not really appropriate references in context. But first I need to figure out more about how the Bug culture(s?) works. I need to find my notes about the biker Bugs, if they still exist someplace. I think I had begun to figure out castes and naming, and how things worked in the old world.

And if/when I rewrite the Kurowa stories as an actual novel with less ... ahem ... repetition, it needs Bugs in it early on, because it is historically later in what feels like the same world. Writing two worlds with the same magic system would just get confusing.
The sensible guard in that initial search party could be a Bug. And some of Hiro's retainers need to be Bugs.

I need to figure out the post-Twilight relations between Bugs and Mages, too. Are the magical 'group-marriages' segregated by species? If so, is that part of what needs to change to fix the energetic structure of the world?

It will be interesting to see if I can write something other than the Broken Land's King plot, now that is has been 15 to 20 years since I worked on Twilight Rising and the Kurowa stories.

By the time I get Twilight Rising reformatted for the website, I should be back in that world's head-space enough to start to see where I'm going.

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Tue, Feb 12, 2008

Fanfiction

Posted at 11:59 pm MST to Creative Work

I've become addicted to Shadow Unit a new complex of online entertainment that includes, among other things, the ongoing LiveJournals of several fictional characters. It describes itself as fan-fiction for a TV show that does not exist.

I have also been exploring the LiveJournals and blogs of some of Shadow Unit's creators: Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, and Sarah Monette.

I have been especially engrossed in Elizabeth Bear's LiveJournal, where she writes extensivle and articulately about writing and life with impressive candor and humor. It's making me think about my own occasional forays into fiction writing, and what I want to do in the way of writing going forward.

My mind has been full of stories as long as I remember, with characters and worlds and plot fragments tangling together. Both the worlds and the casts go through major phases: for about a year, now, Tosun Bekdeli and his mule Rakkas and their associates have lived in my head. Before that it was the world of Cherani and its inhabitants, and before that there were others of varying degrees of originality.

Some of my stories have made it out of my head and onto paper over the years. I had one twopager published in a company newsletter in 1989 or 1990, and I had several stories published in StarTrek fanzines in the 70s and in an anime APA in the late 80s or early 90s. I have also completed one original novel, which was rejected for professional publication because it was basically too weird for the room.

I should note that although my stories were published in fan outlets, I have only ever written one short vignette that can be described as fanfiction. I am obsessive-compulsive about world-building details and find it impossible to write other people's worlds. So my stories that were published in the StarTrek fanzines were original fiction not involving any Star Trek settings or characters. My APA stories were inspired by anime and manga and Japanese culture and folklore, but the specific characters, settings and histories were all original.

I am trying to figure out why the stories were able to come out of my head at a few times during my life and not at others. There seem to be three factors that I can identify.

I do not seem to actually output fiction when I am producing a lot of code at work.

I do not seem to output anything without at least a nominal audience -- like the fanzines or APA group, or the hypothetical audience of the unsold novel.

And I seem to produce fiction when I am interacting frequently with other writers and artists.

In the late 70s my best friend was a writer and artist who was also publishing original work in SF and Star Trek fanzines and APAs. I still have a binder full of an improvisational collaboration we tried to write (basically, some of her characters encountering some of mine, out in space) typing pages and mailing them back and forth. But she suddenly stopped communicating with me in 1981 -- I have never quite understood why.

I wonder sometimes whether I was expected to seek her out and beg for her attention. But I was in no shape to do that.

I was busy programming for a few years after that, and taking various odd classes and getting involved with feminist Paganism, and meeting Nanette, and having at least one bout of serious depression.

In the late 80s at a MileHiCon, I met Patricia Munson-Siter. I had known of her for years: she was active as a writer, artist organizer in a number of different fandoms, including the ones where I lurked on the fringes. She got me addicted to anime and manga the first time around, and invited me to join one of her APAs. We collaborated on our APA subs for a couple of cycles, then split off into separate ones.

Pat and I started writing novels at the same time. I finished mine, but I don't know wether she finished hers. After her husband left the AirForce, they moved to New Jersey and lived with his parents for a while, and she dropped out of touch with fandom. (It seems that she is still an organizer: I googled her a while back and found she was an officer in her local chapter of the DAR).

I stayed active in the APA for a few cycles after Pat dropped out, then got busy with the job that gave me 3 years of what I refer to as clinical indignation. And the fiction writing faded out, even though my head remained as full of stories as ever.

I seem to be like one of those fruit trees that will not bear unless another different tree is nearby. I don't need physical proximity: during the years we were friends I lived in Boulder and Pat lived in South Dakota, and it wasn't until I moved to the same town that my other friend abandoned me. My writing buddies were always penpals.

Nanette is a wonderful friend, but she isn't a writer or artist at the activity level I seem to need in a writing buddy. (And it isn't sensible or fair to lean on her for everything in my live outside of work.)

These days, with email and blogs and other online resources available, having a writing buddy would be a lot cheaper (no wonder the Post Office is going broke, and there seem to be fewer Kinko's competitors around).

I think if I ever want to write fiction again I need to become less of a lurker in fandom and more of a participant again. This blog has at least gotten me back into the habit of writing stuff that isn't work related, but I don't think it is giving me the audience or feedback I need to output the stories.

I also think I'm going to put my novel up on the website, probably a chapter at a time. This may not happen immediately. The novel is intended for a mature audience, so I may need to put it behind some kind of block, so people need to claim to be over 18 to read it.

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Sat, Mar 17, 2007

Techlands Format Update

Posted at 8:54 pm MDT to Creative Work

Shawn said he got stuck on one of the Techlands pages and couldn't find his way to the other pages, so I have adjusted the format to include a link back to the TechLands homepage at the top of each page as well as at the bottom.

I hope to have the new chapter done in a week or so.

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Sat, Feb 24, 2007

Kaze no Uta (Wind Song)

Posted at 7:09 pm MST to Creative Work

Winds howl down the heights:
Snow vanishes, ice bonds fade,
Frozen sleepers wake.
Chinook frees imprisoned lands,
Shaping mud back to the world.

[The classic Japanese poetic form is the tanka: 5 7 5 7 7, not the shorter haiku that was more recently derived from it.]

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Mon, Feb 05, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering III

Posted at 10:35 pm MST to Creative Work

The next Techlands scene has been uploaded to the website at At the Gathering III.

Please post any comments or questions about the story as comments on this blog post.

I have also added a picture to the Techlands homepage, more or less in honor of Rakkas, although he is not exactly a horse.

This is an alabaster Zuni Horse fetish with turquoise eyes. The artist is Hubert Pincion, who is unusual in using only hand tools in carving his fetishes.

This photo is a little out of focus: the original statue is only about 3 inches tall, and it's hard to photograph something that small with my camera. I plan to experiment with different camera settings and eventually replace this with a better picture.

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Sun, Jan 14, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering II

Posted at 4:07 pm MST to Creative Work

The next Techlands scene has been uploaded to the website at At the Gathering II.

Please post any comments or questions about the story as comments on this blog post.

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Fri, Jan 05, 2007

Techlands: ISEC

Posted at 10:22 pm MST to Creative Work

A new item about the Independent Security and Engineering Company has been posted to the Techlands area.

I was tempted to title it "ISEC: Geeks with Guns", but that would not fit the tone of the article, which seems to be excerpted from someone's intel or news analysis.

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Mon, Jan 01, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering I

Posted at 11:35 pm MST to Creative Work

The next Techlands installment has been uploaded to the website at At the Gathering I.

Notes:

1. Rakkas' keywords are Turkish infinitive verbs and singular nouns. This should probably be fixed in a future draft.
2. The phrase "ominous hum" (or in the original, "omminous hummm") is a reference to "Schlock Mercenary", a webcomic about SF mercenaries by Howard Tayler.

Please post any comments or questions about the story as comments on this blog post.

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Sun, Dec 24, 2006

Techlands: The Storm

Posted at 10:54 pm MST to Creative Work

The second Techlands installment, The Storm is up.

I would like to note that the first few paragraphs of this segment were written December 14, well before the blizzard hit Denver.

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Sun, Nov 26, 2006

Techlands

Posted at 1:38 pm MST to Creative Work

As threatened previously, I seem to be in the mood to write fiction again. I use the Astral Trading Company website as a gateway for any fiction I put online, and the stories with related settings will be accessible through the Techlands contents page.

The first installment, Perspective is a sort of prologue explaining a bit about the environment that provides the settings and props for the stories.

Please note that this piece is meant as fiction, not prediction. I extrapolated current trends in semi-plausible directions that would give me lots of neat material to play with, not always in directions I think are likely. (Honest predictions would probably involve nastier climate changes in Europe and nastier political situations everywhere.)

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Fri, Oct 13, 2006

"Wilde Jagd"

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Creative Work

A March that Isn't

3/4 time
Phrygian or Phrygian Dominant mode
(The asterisks indicate drums only, or silence)

The high summons calls
Wind-driven souls
To the old contract.
Answering,
We yell! * *

Across the wild hills
With fire and steel,
Breaking mortals' peace,
Untiring,
We ride! * *

As sparks trail the torch
Of the Lord's will,
Through moon-dappled woods,
Unfading,
We rush! * *

With War's grinning face
To mock the foe,
Through terror and blood
Together,
Kinsmen, We Hunt!

7/31/2006
Inspired by GirlGenius by Phil and Kaja Foglio, folklore, and the wild geese

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