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Category: On Writing

12/Jun/2012

Worldbuilding 0: Intro!

This might be a series, or it might be a one-off, but I put the (Intro) thing in the title because it would be nice if it was a series. I’m going to build a new world! That is definitely the best part of storytelling. First I’m going to do some analysis of two of the worlds I write in though, because I’m like that. The other worlds are either too small to make comments about, or (in the case of the Vailverse) secret!

Drabbleverse

A lot of the drabbles I write take place in the same universe – henceforth called the drabbleverse –, because it’s fun to have continuity and I wish I was Cordwainer Smith*. There are a few small things that separate this drabbleverse from ours, and they all grew forth pretty organically over the course of the year or so I’ve drabbld intensely.

The first thing of these is fate-days. On a fate-day, everything smells of iron, and you get one chance to change your life. Fate-days are allotted seemingly at random, and one can tell that one is coming up if the rate of coincidences one is encountering. Most people in the world knows this.

The second thing is the Immortal God of Death-Fate, who is channeled through the Machine of Death, which is basically two floating bowling balls with an EKG-line of electricity between them. It speaks directly to our hearts without going through our ears. It’s very cryptic and not very helpful, and follows the rules of other machines of death that exist**.

Another thing is that practically everything has been given agency again. This is not that very present but it is still noticeable in cases such as this one: http://kewangji.tumblr.com/post/12254790760/on-the-7th-of-may-2012-the-sun-found-its-goal, or this one:  http://kewangji.tumblr.com/post/24968807842/cosmos-channeled-eyes-toward-charles-who-started. I say ‘again’, because, see, far back in time, through the eyes of humans, everything was given agency – the moon wanted to arc across the sky and the rivers wanted to flow. But with the advent of determinism and stuff agency’s been sort of slowly retracted to something only humans and certain animals have, but even that’s been called into question. Obviously the sun can’t be waiting for  anything.

I like that these things exist in that world.

The Anyworld

The world with the variable, the vessel and the vermin. The variable travels the universe and deletes unwitting or sturnfleen races of  biologically or technically immortal idea machines. It does so in the vessel, also called the Anywhere Machine. Nobody remembers what the vermin is/are/was/were except that it’s bad for everything. The stories written in this universe are all titled “The Anywhere Machine [something something]”. Only story currently live is The Anywhere Machine, Appendix I – Futureful Skyful***, but believe me when I say that this setting is stuffed. And also dark. Many words have to be invented specifically for this world, like sturnfleen, and dymphnatics, and meaninglet.

~

So, what makes these worlds fun?

Probably contrast. The contrast of those worlds and the one I exist in right now (just passing through). Hopefully they are fun to read because of this – most everything that makes you want to read anything is contrast; any scene, any sentence needs conflict. And contrast is the confliction of metaphysical concepts. Next time I will think up a few details about this new world. I will leave this topic for a little while, though, and think up exciting subtitles for posts that start “Worldbuilding [x]:”.

Below you can find a list of failed ideas for what this world should be about.

  • Instead of babies, humans lay eggs.
  • Extraterrestrials have already invaded and brought us under their yokes: it turns out capitalism comes from space.
  • Genetic memory is totally a thing, and people’s heads are becoming too large with all that information in their skulls.
  • The walls of reality are but eggs and literally world-shattering things are waking up.
  • Monsters.

Actually, that last one is probably on the right track. Next Worldbuilding post will be about monsters.
~

* Cordwainer Smith has a Wikipedia article you should perhaps read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith

** if you haven’t yet read it, read it: http://machineofdeath.net

*** https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/the-anywhere-machine-appendix-i-futureful-skyful/

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11/May/2012

New Story! The Anywhere Machine Appendix I – Futureful Skyful

https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/the-anywhere-machine-appendix-i-futureful-skyful/

A new vignette appears. It appendices The Anywhere Machine, which I have not finished fixing up yet. Some of you may know that I wrote a novella called The Anywhere Machine for NaNoWriMo last year: I am still editing that thing. If you desperately want to find it, you can probably nose around my tumblr-site until you find it. I don’t recommend that, but the option exists. I am also planning on adding two or three more appendices.

I have 18 entries to the glossary, and I’ll add a few more before publishing it. It will from thereon update only in the shadows, fanfarelessly.

My time travel story has been temporarily put on hold – but don’t worry, it will be awesome once it decides to return.

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1/May/2012

On Gender-Neutral Pronouns and Other Neologisms

I just figured something out. Gosh, I like the feeling of figuring things out. Goshdarn.

(This is a shortish post. I’ll be writing the first edition of the accompanying page sometime later this week or next week.)

Background: Most every time I present someone with a story where I use gender-neutral pronouns, they say that might distract from the story at hand. I mean, unless they are already as much for such pronouns as I am. The ones I prefer to use are ze and hir (English; pronounced ‘zee’ and something somewhere between her and here, like you started saying ‘his’ but switched the s to an r at the last second) and hen and henom (Swedish; you don’t need the pronunciation). I’ve seen it happen with friends’ stories too. This bothers me because they’re a pretty natural part of my vocabulary.

Solution: Just use more neologisms. Not quite James Joycing it up, but somewhere in that direction.

Just make it part of the story. I would like for language to be all cool with the use of gender-neutral (personal; third-person) pronouns that aren’t they, but obviously it is not. I could mope at individuals for not being as accepting or down with the feminism or [adjective] as I am, or I could just use more neologisms. I love making up words. This is so not a problem. If they think it still distracts (and hey, it still might) that is still their problem.

I will attempt to make a list of all the new words I will henceforth use in my writing. It will be good. It will have the word ‘pinnaturn’ in it, and it will be alphabetical. [EDIT: the glossary is now live: https://zombiesintelligently.com/glossary/]

Also: I totally won ScriptFrenzy with my super secret unbloggable script. Yay me!

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8/Apr/2012

On Trigger Warnings and the Fiction I Write (Notes on The Refrigerator of a Man Who’s about to Kill Himself)

(I wonder if there’s some old Latin term for tl;dr.)

This post concerns this vignette, in a clear but indirect way: https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/the-refrigerator-of-a-man-whos-about-to-kill-himself/

This post will be about the kinds of things I write and how I strive to write things that aren’t shock-full of upsetting imagery and ideas. Even this paragraph will contain upsetting imagery. It … will probably also be rather scattered. If you don’t know what a trigger is, when speaking of Words on the Internet, the basic explanation is: something that triggers a bad, involuntary response in people’s brains. So when I talk about … cutting off people’s tongues with rusty scissors, this might catch someone off-guard. Someone who had that happen to them, or who was threatened with that, or someone who just has a vivid imagination.

Right.

The stuff I write is often upsetting. I write a disturbing amount of stories about ponderments of ending oneself. In my fiction there is violence, rape, murder, emotional abuse, and various other horrible things. They’re just there to be horrible. In my romance there is death, in my science fiction there are dialogue lines like “do what you want with her”. My fantasy is mostly just long quests leading to suicide.

There are some bad things inside my skullbone. I try to write the horrible stuff out of my head, and that’s what happens. One day, I would like to write a story where no-one dies or gets traumatized – I hear those stories are actually possible to write. Like my head could be filled with only petty things and nice feelings and therefore bad things don’t happen to the fictional people I create. Maybe they narrowly avoid the apocalypse and save everybody in the end. Maybe someone breaks their heart and that’s that. Maybe the betrayal alters the outcome of a war fought five lightyears away, in space, with robots.

I know death is common in fiction. That’s okay. We’re used to death in our books and so. Sometimes I do feel the horrible things fit, too. I would like to not write them with so much frequency. If you go to the archive of my drabble blog (link at the bottom of this post), you can see how many more posts nowadays start with ‘Trigger Warning‘. And this is with me not allowing myself to post all of them, for fear of scaring away readers, or falling into a rut. It takes a lot more effort to write something intriguing or emotive that doesn’t involve … you know … awfulness.

It would be nice to post a month without using any of the words noose, blood, or bullet. I feel, probably  wrongly, that my old work was a lot more evocative than my new work. Somehow, I’ve lost the spark. Now the death has reached my eyeballs and I can only see bad things. I feel like I’m resorting to cheap tricks when I write something horrible, because it gets responses more easily than something more subtle.

I think I might be alright with writing horrible things that don’t really happen to people. Things that you can’t relate to very easily. I would like to submit my readers to new horribleness instead of making them relive the past’s horribleness. Aren’t I noble?

(You find a button that lets you remove all the things you regret from your life and you push it. You go about your life knowing that you pushed that button, and that it didn’t do a thing. A part of you dies.)

~

http://kewangji.tumblr.com/archive

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5/Apr/2012

Time Travel with Politics, and Notes on Lebensdauer

I added another story to the Choice Vignettes!

https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/lebensdauer/

Before I begin, I want to note that while the author might dead, I can still have opinions. And, generally, I would know more than you about these opinions. I also might have used these opinions while writing the thing.

The title is inspired by the old German propaganda phrase Lebensraum. It means habitat, or ‘living room’. Space in which to live. Basically the Nazis used it to explain why they needed so much of other countries’ land, and starve so many of the lower classes. (If you starve enough people, you enter a surplus! It’s like winning arguments by exploiting dictionaries, but with people’s lives.)

Dauer means duration, which seemed the most appropriate thing coupled with room. Time might be better coupled with space, but Lebenszeit doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t know German, so possibly I’ve made a horrible mistake here.

Anyway, time travel with politics.

Hitler has a time travel exemption act, which means that if you’re writing time travel, you have to clarify why exactly your characters don’t go back in time to kill Hitler. Adolf Hitler, that is, if that was not clear. Unless your story actually centers around murdering Hitler (see: Lebensdauer) writers often feel they have to at least nod in that direction.

Now, it could be that you’ve got a time travel authority that keeps track of all the time travel – presumably by existing in a time-time, which is something I will define if you really want me to – and this authority has a moral obligation to protect history. Or to protect the natural order of things. Maybe time travel always leads to a Niven loop that annihilates itself, and this is how progress disappears – maybe that’s how Hitler came to in the first place: the universe propelling science into the direction of war, and not time, machines. Or maybe, I don’t know, Hitler actually runs the time travel authority and we need to preserve his past.

(Tangent: how creepy would it be if I referred to him as Adolf the whole time?)

Maybe someone demonstrates the butterfly effect. Maybe you’ve got some actual chronomics in there, and you can’t go back in time very far. Maybe the time machine is unreliable and prone to depression and only goes to nice stretches of time because it knows how it gets – it just refuses to land in a war or near bad people. Maybe you need a Weimar-era German passport to meet Hitler and gosh, you just don’t know any good enough forgers. Hell, maybe the people who travel in time are all evil, rich tourists, and dinosaur fetishists. The list goes on.

I once wrote a story in which nazism was actually needed to travel through time – it was simply a function of a certain neural pattern only achievable by nazism. naturally, the Pope (Ratzinger, I mean) showed up at the scientists’ doorstep and wanted to learn about it. He said he was reaching out to the science community, and then he disappeared from time and killed the most famous Jew of all: Jesus Christ.

Maybe the person with the power gets really nervous about meeting famous people and– no that’s enough, stop it. Just stop.

Anyway – once you’ve dealt with why they don’t fix the 40’s, you now don’t have to spend more time dwelling on the ramifications of time travel: clearly you’ve considered it. But if you actually have unlimited time travel, shouldn’t you be morally obligated to fix things? Having unlimited time travel at your disposal would be a heavy burden, if you stopped to think about it. Kind of like having omniscience, but less reliable.

I don’t think time travel exists. I think people who write time travel into stories should be more creative about it. I feel kind of bad for writing about it, adding another Hitler story to the pile, even though I was clever. I also feel bad for having the urge to write the infinite list of why we will not kill Hitler – and to remedy this I need to write something more clever, is all.

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2/Apr/2012

Script Frenzy: Notes on Pages 2-3

Hmm.

Well. What happens here then? I literally haven’t the faintest clue right now. Okay, now I have the faintest clue: let’s meet their boss. They talk to the boss and the boss says… what? The boss has no point in this story. Away with them!

So what would this pair of oddball policepeople do once they’ve been to the crime scene? Paperwork. Donuts. Conspiracy theories. Interviewing suspects. Consulting the machine of death. Talking to the coroner. Putting up ads in the local newspaper. Talking to psychics.

I want them to consult the machine, but not just yet. Maybe if we switch to other characters?

It is difficult to carry plot through dialogue.

Also, Brook should totally be a workaholic. Wait, no she shouldn’t. BAM, framestory. Or maybe she should, and she’s trying not to be, but that’s not how you set up framestories. Screw it. It’ll become apparent after a few lines of this thing anyway.

~

And that’s when I lost interest in this script, my dear friends. Not to worry, not to worry: I will simply think of something else. Maybe a comic book script works better for the sort of things I have in mind. This particular script just didn’t have any soul. No main conflict. I figured out a way to make the frame story nice – by having it be a first date, which would end with a kiss for poor Brook, or something – but that just turned ridiculous. Part of the problem may be a complete lack, on my end, of ability to introduce scenes with only sounds. The friendly note of ‘SOUND: DRIPPING‘ would probably have evoked sewers rather than … the nondescript room I was imagining.

At least I wrote the greatest thing I ever have written:

BROOK:

Give me one of those air fresheners.

(sniffs it deeply)

Do you always carry these things around?

VINCENTE:

I don’t believe in deodorant. Usually it’s just one, but you know. Special circumstances.

Oh yeah.

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1/Apr/2012

Notes on the First Page of My Script

I thought I’d post the notes I’m making to myself as I’m writing this thing. Perhaps someone will find it entertaining. Well. That’s enough ado.

~

Needs more cowbell. Also more hinting at what the devil will happen later in the thing. Currently only one ‘hook’, which is far too little to be reliable. Can’t tenter anyone with that shit.

Well okay. What can the hook be? What the fuck actually happened there? The way it is in my head right now is someone stored up lots of blood in a freezer until it was time to set the Plan in motion. But if the blood was refrigerated, then the smell thing is not right, because the stench would be there before the blood had all thawed. Wunderbaums, wunderbaums everywhere.

Okay, so, disregarding the idea of air fresheners, perhaps most of the blood is actually still frozen; they just didn’t notice. Which begs the question how did they not see the blood floes?, and begging the question is a fallacy. So, no.

Well, this is problematic. I have no idea what actually happened. I like the idea of someone faking this so they can escape something. But no, this is all wrong. I seem to have set up something impossible. Crud. What do I do now?

[ten minute pause to think]

Okay, I fixed it. Wunderbaumen it is. “I don’t believe in deodorant,” says Vincent.

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1/Apr/2012

Notes on Mors Ontologica, and Greetings

[Trigger Warnings: suicide]

https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/mors-ontologica/

I wrote this thing a while ago. You should read it before you read the rest of this post. I guess I should have talked to you about it before; I told you yesterday I should tell you about it when I’m stable. Well, hah, I’m not. I posted it anyway, and I’m writing this. I am rebellious against myself like that, like cells that mitose and evolve to become the nemeses of each other. And I am writing it out here instead.

I told someone about it once and she mostly just stared at me. “Yes, you’re being scary. Maybe a little bit,” she said when I asked about it. I must have rambled for up to eight minutes, and she was all silent. Parts of the story come from that conversation, though translated and made to fit. Bernard is obviously me, or what I feel like. He doesn’t live in the real world though; his death is one he can’t go back from, though if I died I think I could go back. Never did die though, and I hope I will never attempt.

We – the one I told and I – had fucked two weeks prior and now I was breaking down, and I’m sorry about that, and it probably meant more to me than it did to her. It meant friendship to me, not any partnerness or anything. I loved, and love, her as a friend, and she is the only person who is beautiful. She said she saw it as friendship and I trust her on that, but I break like the walls of a dam and it was bad, wasn’t it. I am so sorry.

She seems to like me still. She seemed happy to have lunch with me, and the time before that, she mumbled something like ‘same goes for you’ when I told her I love her. I don’t know how it works. But that is not what this is about. I break like a dam and fuck I can’t stop crying.

I wrote it the 8th of October. That was ten days before a cataclysm. (Talking about the bad events as cataclysms makes it sound like my life is important.) Probably I could smell the iron in the air and that’s why I wrote it. That is what I get like when I’m suicidal. Physical suicide is so anathema to me that identity death is the only other option left. The title comes from the end of A Scanner Darkly, which resonates with me like a tuning fork.

So.

Sometimes I want to die. And that is what happens. And I get away. Did you know that 75% of those who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge report regretting it in mid-air? I think the person who told me that might have bullshitted, but that is the effect of me trying to die like that. Bouncing back with broken bones. But you can’t survive howevermany falls. And I have disappeared from myself now.

Repetition is my biggest tell. I repeat myself when I’m not okay. I have repeated myself two and a half thousand times this sentence alone. I’m absorbed by the something else. Sometimes I convulse and then I’m okay again.

Being not okay is not the same thing as wanting to die. I am just not okay now. I want to be alive.

Did I explain things here? I hope so.

~

Oh, and to all you … other people. Hi. This is my blog now. Things will happen here. Bookmark it.

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