so I'm trying to figure out something about which way is down in a spaceship with no artificial gravity.

If it's sitting there in space spinning then out is down, yes? The spin makes a down.

If it's pushing with big engines then the engine is down, I think. Because it's shoving the floor up at you.

If it's spinning and pushing... does it break? I have no idea. But, does 'down' go diagonal? Depending on how much the engines are pushing.

Because then spaceship corridors being octagons makes logical sense and not just pretty sense.



You know the more I try and write actual SF the more I wish I hadn't given up on my science a level resits. I could have passed. Eventually. Probably.
... Is there a 'science for SF writers' course somewhere? Or a book...
I realise if I only want to write for Doctor Who then science is optional, but, I kind of miss that whole logic and reason thing where you can figure stuff out. It's all very well going 'reverse teh polarity!' and fixing everything, but it's like a whole set of puzzles you can't play with.

I vaguely wondered a thing, and lo and behold, LJ has the tools to find out:
below the cut, a big long poll about which TW, DW, and SJA writers you would like to meet.
If any.
There's also a box for saying you like conventions the way they are, and a different box for saying actually you want to meet directors / stunt men / those dudes from amputees in action who be background people sometimes. Or whoever.

I got all the writer names off Wiki. And I only made one ticky box each, so if you can't find your person under the show you're thinking of try one of the others (with other shows in brackets after their name). This is because there's more TW writers than there are ticky boxes allowed. I know writers have also written for shows that are not on the poll. But I didn't write that in the (brackets) because the poll is about DW, TW and SJA.
Old school DW writers aren't on there because it was a bloody long list and, er, I don't know how many we'd need ouija boards for.

This poll *does not*, NOT, mean I'm going to do anything with this information. I tried organising a convention before and nobody turned up. Including my mother. I'm not doing that again. Even if I do think I know what I did wrong (ie everything).

Ignore any questions you don't like.

( Read more... )

My head been feeling wrong again. Makes everything feel urgent. So, instead of actual sleep, I boot up the computer to share my thoughts on:

Original characters

In both fanfic and continuing TV series you have a set of characters that carry from episode to episode, the regulars, the canon characters, and you have characters that you the writer are sitting down to make up. And while you really love the canon characters, hence the wanting to write about them at all, you just meet this new person and suddenly they're the most interesting person in the 'verse. Slight problem: Interesting to the writer. Interesting to the reader? Trickier.

The biggest problem is forgetting who the story is about. Clue: Not the New Guy.
If it is about the new guy, you have written a spin off. It probably won't be as popular. Good luck with that.

To write original characters that work you've got to remember that even if you're talking about a person who looks, speaks, thinks, acts nothing like the established characters, they are secretly telling a story about the established characters. The new is there to illuminate the continuing. They highlight a facet, an aspect, a mood, a phase in the life of the canon characters. If done well enough they'll fit in with the theme, habits, conventions of storytelling of the source text so well they'll be popular with people looking for more out of those texts. They might even work so well they'll become the new regulars. But to do that they've got to generate stories about the central concerns of the show, and the regular characters.

So say we've got Lisa, or Beth, or Mary. Torchwood ( Read more... )

There's always characters that are tempting to write, corners of the 'verse you really want to fill in. The long lost secret brother or daughter or ex. People who logically exist. The number of stories I've read where one of those turns up? I lost count. The thing is though usually the camera is the wrong way around. Erm, that made sense in my head. Okay. What I mean: Usually when the newbie turns up the story shows how newbie reacts to existing characters. All we're likely to be interested in at first is how existing characters react to newbie. And then maybe the newbie can show us a side we haven't thought of, but if that's the whole story? Probably it leaves out what attracted us to the 'verse in the first place, what we're there for.

... see CoE.

It's all about the balance.

Why I love the character Ethan Rayne isn't just the power and the trickster fun. He brings out new facets in existing characters. Possibly too new - if every episode is Halloween we get... Dollhouse? Huh. I haven't watched that yet though. But who Ethan is to Giles gives us a new perspective on Giles, because it puts him in a role none of the continuing characters has with him - he's an equal, who knows the work in progress years, pre tweed and without the books. Giles has other relationships, but he has no one else who can bring up the tension with who and what he used to be. So who else could be productively introduced? And who would be a comparison or a competition? Canon characters have Giles in the role of mentor on the whole. So if we wanted a story about Giles we could put him in the role of student, have an old teacher turn up, which might be what happened when the Watcher's Council were around evaluating him. Or we've got the semi parental role, "Wish I could play the father". So to make him the child role could be interesting, though I've always vaguely felt his parents were probably dead before the series started because he seemed to be flying without a net. If they're alive, how did we go 7 years with not the slightest reference to them? A story could live there. Or, of course, this being the Buffyverse, they could be dead and yet still part of the story. Then again, flip it another way, with Buffy he only plays the father. If a biological child of his turned up, what would be the difference in his role with them?

I think one set of problems turns up when a character strolls in to new relationships with every canon character. The previously unknown daughter turns up and dates one, is best enemies with another, academic rivals with a third, and best friends with another. Having one character that can realistically mirror, shadow, re-emphasise more than one character? Difficult. And a fail becomes a cascade fail, card house falling.

Ethan walks in to be a shadow Giles, and for the space of two episodes sets up in relation to Buffy because of that. ( Read more... )

To set someone up in relation to every other character also suffers from probable duplication. There already is a best friend. Shadow best friend turns up? Okay, play with that a while - but eventually they either have to redeem or be rejected. Or the main characters start looking really very stupid.

New characters are not about showing us the new character. New characters are about showing us those we already know in a new way. Keep that in mind and they won't Superstar your story.


... and I'm eyeing a Torchwood fanfic I couldn't get to work properly right now and telling me this quite strongly. Always oh so tempting.

Make someone who tells the theme again and makes it new and you've made a great story.

Make someone who does that and makes the regulars new and you've made a great story in that 'verse.

Which is just a teensy tricky.

I've been thinking about death, and how the only feedback I've got about my script was that nobody died so the stakes were low.
It seems to me that stories concentrate too much on death. SF stories in particular. It's all very well saying the Evil Empire is Evil because it kills people. But I think there's a pretty broad agreement among most humans that Killing Is Bad. (There's some groups who decide other groups don't count, and SF explores that a lot, and it is valuable, but still.) We don't really need to discuss the point much for the majority of cases. There's dark ones about revenge and justice and a few sick ones about if it's possible to literally be a waste of space but in general Killing Is Bad. We know that.

So more interesting and complicated stories would be discussing the really wide realms of Bad that can happen while everybody lives.

It's like Serenity: Once you get down to Reavers and corpses everyone can see Miranda went horribly wrong. And because it's so clear it can fit in a single movie. And because it's so clear we don't really need to discuss it again. If the question is if it's wrong to try and 'improve' on human nature then pushing it so far everybody dies isn't any kind of answer. The line to Wrong is waaaaaay before that.

I think drawing a high contrast world where Good is Good and Evil is Evil and you can tell because the Evil side does a bunch of killing is actually dangerous. People can get a hell of a long way into doing really bad stuff and still say they're not Evil because Evil is Those Other People Who Do Killing. Evil is always Those Other People. No helpful.

Need to hold up a mirror and get people to recognise what is in it.

Killing is bad, but so are so many other ways of grinding each other down or treating people as things.

I want to write about those. People dying is the end of those. And people dying is kind of a distraction when the point is different ways of living.

You know what's embarrassing?
I made up a nice diverse group of characters, where there's an actual majority of women and depends how you count it possible majority of people of color. I made up backgrounds and character sheets and made sure everyone had a skill set that would be useful sometimes and all that sort of thing. I wrote a couple of scripts... okay one script that was radically different between drafts, but they both introduced everyone and had a whole adventure going on. So far, so good.
Then I sat down and wrote out a bunch of plot bunnies and character arcs and what happens next in about 13 episodes.
... then I realised the characters driving the story? All white. And 2/3 male.
... how did I even do that?
... aside from mentally casting Adrian Paul and Burn Gorman and making them enemies with a lot of background in common and stranding them in a lifepod together and then deciding that was such a good idea I needed to write a whole story arc to make it happen.

I'm so embarrassed now.

I think the other thing that happened is I started out writing the white characters as the most messed up, therefore needing the most fixing, therefor with the most to do.

I think I gave all the characters lots of stuff to do, I just started following the pretty slash pairing around and, well, oops. And the central character was always meant to be Rosemary, and she starts out all clueless and thinking the world is all lalalala pretty shiny fine because it always has been for her, so she either has to be white or be living in a different set of prejudices.

It's still embarrassing. It's no good inventing kick arse characters and then making them somebody's girlfriend or the guy who drives the bus. I already knew that even. And yet I poke the plot arcs I've got so far and... *facepalm*

All the characters have their own sometimes conflicting motivations and their own goals and their own character arc. Some of them should even change the 'verse and stuff. I should follow some of those and make plot bunnies from them.

I set out to write a diverse team story and then ended up with 13 plot bunnies for a slash pairing. That's not very helpful. *headdesk*

... predictable and what I've mostly been reading since, like, ever, but not helpful.

Recently read C J Cherryh Rusalka, which had interesting rules for magic. Basically: It all works. Everything a magician does will work. Wish for something, want something enough, and it will happen.
But it will happen in its own time, in its own way, along lines of possibility you cannot track.

So the magician doesn't have absolute power. They can get one element of what they want - say make someone fall in a mud puddle - but the knock on consequences of that they cannot predict - he goes to get cleaned up at a really inconvenient moment.

But without the props, rituals, actions surrounding magic, all they have to do is want something enough. They can control the world, only if they can control their desires.

And without knowing the when of things, they set things in motion and have to live with the consequences. And know they did that.

Massive power, some control, absolute responsibility.



I didn't especially like the story, but the system of magic? Lots of interesting to play with. Highlights the 'be careful what you wish for' without any of the lawyering with words. Just hook up wanting to reality, but with only narrow control of results.


There's a whole section in Orson Scott Card's How to write science fiction and fantasy about the rules of magic. Like the rules of space travel, they shape the world. And there's ways of writing where you just be all handwavey about the whole thing, where you travel at the speed of the plot and pull of magic as and when convenient, but that gets kind of tired. You can call it concentrating on character or whatever, but what it does is make nothing make sense, including character reactions, because there's no predictable connections, no cause and effect. Boring. If instead you remember use of magic is a new technology, a new natural law, or to be precise a new-to-the-reader natural law that has shaped the world of the story since it began... like nuts and bolts SF you can follow through on the consequences of an idea. So say magic is powered by blood, or say you trade lifetime for results, say you can only give of yourself, or only of others... what does that do? Does it skew the world so it's easier or harder to be good people? What kind of choices does it allow? What does it highlight?

And then of course everything plays on a theme level, says something about choices, power, people, what it means to be human. So whatever rules of magic you set up you've got the people who get the good stuff, get story rewards, get the story calling them the good people, and you look back on the choices they made and see what the story seems to approve of. Can get complicated.


There's a line in one of the theory books I been reading that says SF stories are a cost-benefit calculation on science, on rationality and logic and technology and efficiency and industry and all the rest. All stories are a cost-benefit calculation on whatever their central issue is. What does it cost, who does it benefit, and do you really want to be saying that?

... I want to ask that of a lot of writers really. Do they really want to be saying that? And do they really want to live in the world that statement would shape?

And that's magic. Words to world, direct. And making you think about it.

Rather unexpectedly, I have finished the first draft of my script.
Unexpected because I thought I had a bunch more pages to do and some plot, but I reached a certain line and realised everything after that was 'and then it all worked out exactly as they planned, until the bit that sets up the next story', and really, I can leave that out entirely or put it in the next story. The final choice moment has just been written.

:-D

It sucks, of course. It's a first draft. And I think my final argument has more pages in it than the rest of the script. And it wanders off in directions I don't need. And there's a few things that get explained at least five times each, and really, I can trim those a bit. And there's entire pages where I don't know what I was trying to do but I clearly didn't do it because nothing happens. I can pull those out. Or make something happen. But I have a lot of pages.

But the actual point is:

I have finished a first draft of my original made it all up myself script.
Party!

... I shall go get breakfast at Morrisons. And possibly buy donuts. Big party spender I...


Next I just need to type it up and start finding people to read it and say which bits in particular suck. Or rock. But I expect rather more of the one than the other.

I am a writer, so I read a lot of stuff about writing, by writers. And one of the lines people use that makes me wonder if my world is inside out of theirs is the one about 'serve the story not the reader'.
( Read more... )

A story is something you do with an audience. Or sometimes to it.

There's writers, and there's audience. A writer who ignores the audience is only serving themselves. To say 'serve the story' puts making the point of the story ahead of the impact it makes on people, especially on those on the pointy end.

Your writing, my writing, every communicating act, pushes a particular agenda, value set, choice. So do that - consciously, aware of what and who you're pushing, and how hard.


Be aware that if the reader thinks the great punch you packed in just landed on their face they're not going to be mightily receptive to whatever the idea you meant to send was.
And next time they see you writing they're just going to duck.
Aim carefully.


(Personally I prefer shooting compassion in their face. You get the warm glow of moral superiority and stuff. And it works better.)

In fanfic we take the clues and run with them, weave them together, fill them out, explore them thoroughly.
Some shows I watch it seems like they take the clues already given and go 'psych!', throw them out, and give you a new set. Repeatedly. For years.
Things that are awesome plot hooks when we get hold of them are just... ignored in source texts.
Sometimes it's like they want to make OCs that look like who they're already working with.
Some series seem to dislike their nature as episodic fiction. They seem to want to be a series of stand alones with the same actors. Continuity is treated as a bad word.
But that means everything is beginnings, because you throw in a new thing, and another new thing, and another, and never follow through.
Seems like some shows only get to ends when they've decided to get rid of someone, and never really follow through on middles. And often those ends are a self contained story to the point you're not sure it's about the same people.
I think some of the advice about original and TV series that a viewer can jump on and catch up with and not pinning down too much backstory but letting it evolve through the writing can and has been taken too far. You can't let continuity block all your possibilities, but you can't just keep throwing new stuff at the board and hoping it sticks.

The most successful long running TV and radio shows are soaps, depending on continuity that goes back, in some cases, generations.

Do we get that in F&SF? Character development and evolving threads?

... less than I'd like.

Am reading a comment thread where someone said
There's a lot of denial of both context and consequence in the -punk genres.
( Read more... )
And all these differents would have to contrast with an old old prison colony, which would be pretty much like Earth here and now. And then you ask, who's doing it right?

By this point in the story I'll have probably talked myself out of believing any of them are.

I've been having fun worldbuilding for my space dystopia. I've thought up a bunch of stuff about government and neighbours and how to keep the citizens in line. I can think of tons of reasons for our small band of rebels to stand up and decide to change things.
The basic trouble is, I can't seem to think of proper ways they could succeed in making improvements.
I've apparently got a head full of stories where you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.
... I think I knew that ...

The problem is now I've thought up this world, which has a very Blakes 7 ending in store if I even bother running through it, I can't really think why I'd want to watch these stories.

So I sat down to figure out what I want to watch:

Disability stories. ( Read more... )

Women stories. ( Read more... )

Children stories. Not for children, with children being made. ( Read more... )

Multigenerational stories. ( Read more... )

Teamwork! With a range of characters that covers the range of actual humans! And saves the world a lot!

Also there should be people of lots of skins and cultures and beliefs. I remember to want that later than the other stuff though. And would be less good at it.

But that's my list of stuff I want.
Power inequalities to deal with through teamwork, and thoroughly diverse teams.
Also sex. Just as balanced part of story.

And then making homes that work. It's not much use stopping the monster if all you get out of it is stopping the monster again next week. Stopping the important monsters means being better able to build something worth having, live lives.

*rereads*

... so, just a modest little list of wants there.

There's also moments in stories that I like. The one where someone stands up and everyone notices they're brilliant. The one where someone stands up and declares someone else brilliant or beautiful or loved. The one where someone realises they've found something worth fighting for, and the rallying cry moment where they tell everyone else exactly why. The time when the monster thinks it has a room full of tasty snacks and they all take up arms and kick arse together. The times when knowledge keeps going, where the student steps up and becomes a teacher, where the students will keep going even if the teacher is stopped. You can't stop the signal. The last minute save, where someone is ready to make the sacrifice but they've got a team to save them. I'm not so fond of the non-save, though that always has to be a possibility; the idea of the noble sacrifice seems to get in the way of the idea that some jobs need doing every day a little. But I do like the big kabooms, or the moment where the villain thinks their tower is unassailable but finds it crumbling around their ears. Boom! But... only after giving them a chance. Making friends to go fight the next thing is the best way. Got to build a team cause there's always another bad out there.

If I worldbuild something bleak, even if I can't see any out at the end of it, I can still hit a lot of the moments along the way. And for that I'd keep watching. Then the story is about how you can't get out of the game, but you can grab moments along the way.
think I knew that too.

so far today: woke up early, read a bunch of stuff, went to lunch/breakfast, bought donuts which were quite disappointing yet seem to have been eaten already anyway, read some more. Have been stalled on the same two pages for ages. On the plus side, have an awesome scene for the season end cliffhanger of my entirely imaginary TV series. It works as a The End but it also works as a WTF how do they get out of that. And I can backtrack from wanting that scene to some of the ways the technology works. ( Read more... ) On the minus side to get anybody to care about all that I have to write a proper story so you know who everyone is.

And before that I must do my Renaissance assignment.

If I'd done this two years ago it would be a 20% group project and my exam grade would be good enough my grade wouldn't matter as long as I turned up. As it is it's a 50% individual project and while I have more wiggle room than usual I do need to actually pay attention and have thoughts and stuff. Which is proving to be a problem.

Have done a ton of reading. Haven't a clue how to turn that into a project. I'll either figure it out by Thursday or find when I can talk to the teacher about it.

Hamlet is interesting though. And I've read a bunch about it. Actually I've now reached that point where the more I read the more it feels like re-reading, because I seem to have covered the major theories and had most of these thoughts in other books. Is good. I'm not calling myself an expert but instead of being all... me with a full box of donuts... I'm more like me with vegetables and pasta and stuff. Which is part of why I ground to a halt. Harder to pay attention once you know most of it, even if you know you don't know all of it.

Freud is nuts and Lacan is no help at all. And some English essays seem to be exercises in using the most possible words to say the least stuff and make sure none of it makes any sense anyway. And if you argue long enough you can make everything mean its opposite but you'll look really stupid.

Studying. Fun.

Space: It's Really Big.
So how does anyone get anywhere?
( Read more... )

I think I've decided on my technologies from knowing what I want my characters to do.
This is far more fun than the other way around, but given that my usual definition of science fiction is that it explores the effects of technology on people it feels somehow kind of dishonest.
Hmmm...

So this morning, because I Did Not Want to get out of bed, I was lying back plotting the pilot episode to my series that is clearly not Blakes 7 except for where it is. I was very organised about it. In my head I got a piece of paper, wrote 1-60 down the margins, divided it up into teaser and tag, three act structure, central turn around point, and wobbly block of 'inciting incident goes here'. I mentally arranged my small stack of writing books, which is probably about as productive as the way I usually use them, since by this point they're pretty much for moral support. And then I decided what the teaser should be. Start with something exciting. Start with a chase!

... and then I got entirely stuck, because I suddently realised that the status and indeed existence of dogs would be one of the major defining points of my futuristic multiplanet dystopia, and while I'd been thinking of them as all clean and technological, I couldn't imagine a proper chase without dogs barking.

... *facepalm*

But, really, thinking about it, when humans leave the planet, do they take dogs with them? If dogs, what about cats, or horses, or canaries? We have a perfect excuse to never work with animals again! We have weight limits, and limited life support! We could have a future where humans are the only life that humans ever worry about!
... and wouldn't that be hugely different.

So there's Dystopia 1, techno version, where they have lots of cameras and TV screens and computers everywhere and little robot arms to do fiddly jobs and humans are just on the verge of being surplus to requirements, but then they'd have nothing to do but rebel so there's somehow precisely as much work as people. A chase sequence would involve silence. Silent black clad security forces with gas masks on, and silent security cameras scattered around like your actual bugs are now, and perhaps silent flying drones that make a whirrrrr sound only when they're too close to dodge properly. If there's things with wheels they'd make gravel sounds on the crunchy ground, maybe on a raised road right behind the rebels as they crouch unseen. To get around all that they'd have to be very, very precise, slow and stealthy. The opening sequence would all be silence and heavy breathing.

But then there's Dystopia 2, the one with dogs, and I think this would be the genegineered version. They didn't bring alive dogs with them, they brought the pattern to make them. The same guard dogs are used at every guard station, cloned again. Animals are all designed for particular tasks, just like humans are. They don't have the robot arms unless absolutely necessary, because they have humans made in the exact same spirit, to do those tasks. And now the chase is *noisy*. Dogs barking, running, urgent. To get away from dogs they'd do the blood pumping sort of things, traditional hunter hunted stuff. Would there be cameras? Maybe, but there'd be more concentration on who is watching them. It wouldn't be cold AI directing them towards movement, it would be rooms full of humans who were used to having fairly boring days and using the cameras to look down people's tops. To get around them you'd have to be unexpected or plausible, by turns. Sloppy would still work, as long as you mixed it with a bit of inspiration. And there'd be a lot more value to making friends. The computer doesn't care if you bring biscuits, though it might note a pattern if you do the same thing every day. Alive things doing the same job are going to care if you're nice people.

And the skillset of the crew, and the shape of the eventual revolution, would depend very greatly on what they're opposing. If technology is king then Avon understands how everything really works. If technology just extends the senses of a whole lot of people then Avon understands rather less of it.

Both dystopias have heavily controlled humans who decide they don't like it. But in the first it's because they're being made to do useless work, the technology could leave them at total leisure but they're not allowed to use it that way. In the second it's because they don't have the technology, they are it. That's a fairly important distinction.

And it all comes down to how does this teaser chase sequence work.

Do they have dogs?

I think the dogs version is quite interesting.

And really, I can't imagine a proper dramatic chase without dogs.

I was in the bath thinking about how I'd write a B7 clone
as you do.

Started thinking about names, words, meanings. Connotations are particularly tricky in F&SF. It's the invented words problem - old words accumulate connotations, assocative meanings, like onion layers. New words have to try and pull some together or sit there looking kind of naked and skinny. New words mean nothing until they mean something in relation to existing words. ( Read more... )

So, set out to have a bath, end up designing an interstellar civlization. One that entirely coincidentally duplicates ways people get categorised here and now. Mostly so I can poke them to pieces.

I was thinking of the White Wolf world books, with the different clans and paths. There's a section on how they're different, and a section on how they see all the other clans, and then a section on how each clan sees them. Diversified vampires real well. Could do the same for other systems. The irritation of having a preset personality to go with a skill set could be part of what people are rebelling against.


I should probably eat and go sleep and stuff.

... I kind of want to keep writing. ( Read more... )

Now I have all those numbers for Torchwood I can figure out a bunch of things that I wasn't specifically counting.
( Read more... )
I think I'll put the writer names on to see if there's a pattern. If the lowest episodes are all one person I will send them a card with Don't Forget Women. They will probably be puzzled.

I decided I needed to write something for David Tennant.
My first thought was to write a house full of crazy people.
... this says a lot about me and possibly some about DT... which was that series with the crazy?

This house would be perfectly ordinary to people who didn't know how to look at it, but secretly be full of Goblins. Or possibly mice that happened to appear when they'd been watching Labyrinth. But you never know.

It would be about the great starcrossed love between DT's character, who needs to wash a lot especially if people touch him, and a character who is Totally Not Me cause she's prettier who is an Artist and gets glue and paint and stuff all over the house. ( Read more... )
It's kind of like a romantic comedy with two attempted suicides and compulsive washing.

In my head it's the Funniest Thing Ever.

... my head, it is strange place to visit...

Is Doctor Who bringing young people into SF?
Short answer: yes
( Read more... )