Pieces In A Parlour Game

At some stage today I really going to have to get out of bed and get dressed. If only because my mother sent me a quilt the other day, and after two successful days of teaching the cat she's not allowed to sleep on it, she's now sleeping on it. Curled up like a snail. Why must cats fight so many of their battles with the power of CUTE? It's not FAIR.

But I seem unable to do anything of note, really. Although due to a sudden desire to actually watch Thor properly, I am now utterly in love with Loki Laufeyson and have recently also been reminded of how much I love trollin!Tony Stark. Because he be trollin'. Always with the trollin'. ...dammit. I'm not actually in any fit state to be forcing myself to write, but I adore smartasses, and Tony and Loki definitely qualify as smartasses. And after seeing the trailer for The Avengers I want to see this movie just to revel in the smartassery of their inevitable ham-to-ham combat.

But yeah. The little black dog of depression is doggedly dragging along at my heels, and making it very hard to write anything, which is a bit of a bugger because I'm in such a bleak place mentally that some fantastical escapism is really what I need right now. I just can't summon the energy to work the spells for myself, as it were. I did, however, notice that the voting for the Twitter-style love fic competition is up at last.

SpecFicNZ February Twitter Love Contest: the entries are there, and one of them is mine. If you have the time -- and they ARE only 140 characters long at most -- go have a read, and a vote. It's an interesting little concept, and I did enjoy seeing what others came up with too.

In the meantime, I suppose it's back to trying to work out how to get out of this bed. And no more quilty for kitty, dammit.

Brevity Is The Soul Of Discretion

I really haven't made any effort thus far to make any goals for this year, writing-wise, which really says a lot for the fact I am absolutely useless at that sort of thing. I've lost all self-confidence for starters, but I just need to...work through it, I suppose. To that end I sucked it up and entered the Twitter-length fiction contest I mentioned the other day, against my own better judgement. Ha. I also had an interesting little experiment, because an email had come through from the kindly folk who run NaNoWriMo about Pitchpalooza.

In essence, this is just about pitching your NaNoWriMo novel to these people and hopefully winning a prize. The trick is that you have to do it in two hundred words. As you've heard from me already, brevity is not my forte. At all. So I took one look at the email, laughed, and said YEAH RIGHT.

Half an hour later I was furiously editing an attempt at a query letter for Greywater I had been working on in December or something. I'd given up at around three hundred and fifty words. So, I got to distilling, and I found...it's such an interesting exercise, and I really ought to try doing it for a lot of other things I've written. I love to write, obviously, but I'm freeform and highly indulgent. I don't really edit very well. But the Twitter fic and this two hundred word pitch taught me to be more selective about my words, cutting away the chaff and going for the evocative rather than the merely elaborate. It also gave me hope, that I'll be able to edit this first draft of Greywater down from 167k to at least 150k, if not lower. Because that is my goal, this year. Getting that to a submissible state and then submitting the hell out of it.

For posterity, here is the synopsis. In the meantime, I am tired from a long walk and I need some sleep. As usual. I'll probably just go back to talking to Arjit about his obsession with wielding the sword of a pacifist in a war said pacifist never wanted. Or so we were led to believe. Hmm.

When Major Otho Calenta, on leave from active service, is summoned to the prison-city of Aran Nomese to convince a reclusive inmate to lead her once-lauded army into battle, he doesn’t know how he’s expected to achieve his goal. Not only is a she a centuries-old water elemental sorcerously imprisoned by the earth-god of his country, he knows already the bitter taste of crusades long since lost.

Raised from childhood to believe his duty is to take up his sword and protect the innocent, upon arrival at the broken-down palace of Greywater Otho feels obligated to attempt his mission. But between the peculiar machinations of the lupine Attorney-General of Lonan and his own troubled conscience, he sees little reason to incite a pacifist creature to murder. His reticence only grows when a prickly friendship mixes curiosity and craving between them.

Greywater is a novel set in a fantastical world where love and lust shadow a tale of loss and longing, where a soldier and a creature of ice and water meet on an unequal field to engage in the oldest battle: the one where you must learn to save yourself before you even dream of trying to save anyone else.

Twit Fic

I've always had an issue with self-confidence. I'm not going to go into a sobstory about how it started because to be frank I have no bloody clue, but it's relevant here for one reason -- I'm thinking of entering another competition. And it's a competition that scares me silly.

I belong to a local (i.e. a New Zealand-based) speculative writer's group called SpecFicNZ, and I tend to feel like a fraud when I have anything to do with it. After all, it has plenty of members who, like, actually publish things. Whereas I just fluff around with my characters, never get anything done, and generally make my carbon footprint on the world the size of a yeti's while making no relevant contribution to anything. So, I have an issue right there; I'm generally scared to death of speaking to anyone who has anything to do with the group because I suffer from what they poetically name "Imposter Syndrome." I'm just waiting for the polite email that says "You're not a writer. Go away and play with your broken little toys elsewhere."

The next issue comes from the fact that the competition in question was announced yesterday and...it's a Twitter contest. Or at least, it's themed that way, in that said stories are romantic speculative ditties written with 140 characters or less. I'm the kind of moron who struggles to meet word limits when it comes to short stories of six thousand words. So...uh. Yeah. This ain't gonna work.

And yet I am trying. At first I took one look at it and said OH GOD THIS IS DREAMING YOU CAN'T DO THIS. And yet, the last couple of days I've been reading various tumblrs that take from Texts From Last Night. In particular there are three that amused me greatly; they take from the movie Alexander, the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena and the television series Doctor Who and by combining a screencap with a text quote from the original website we get gems like these (click the link for the full tumblr experience):

From http://utena-tfln.tumblr.com

From textsfromthetardis.tumblr.com

From textsfrommacedonia.tumblr.com

It also helps that thanks to some talented people at In The Rose Garden I also became aware of a site called A Softer World some time ago; they were remixing text from the strips with screencaps from Utena, resulting in things like this particular beauty:

I feel terrible because I can't remember who remixed it. But all of these taught me something -- you can tell a story in very, very few words. It's not a skill I've ever mastered; the most success I've had recently was with The Journey of the Magi (almost four thousand words exactly) and Tea For Two (just under six thousand); both are pushing the limit of their associated publication/competition rules, but they got did what they were supposed to. So go figure; this means I've actually logged onto my Twitter account for the first time in years and am using it to compose little one-forty character stories and seeing how it goes. We can only enter the competition once, so I have to come up with something before Valentine's Day. Hilariously, writing a one-forty character drabble will likely take me ten times as long as it would to write fourteen hundred actual words of a novel or a short story.

I am fascinated by the act of it, though. And while I know those above illustrations work partly because of their illustrations, the fact that you can take the text away and put it somewhere else says a lot for the strength of the story inherent in the words themselves. I'm supposed to be a wordsmith, hack though I inevitably truly am. So, I shall hack away on the Twitter and see where it takes me.

Goals, Tries and Having Something To Score

 

At the start of the year I’m sure I made some sort of goal post in this blog, but I really have the memory of a goldfish. I’m not sure that it matters, anyway, but I was thinking that I should sit down and work out what I need to achieve over the next few months. I turn thirty in February, and aside from having a fit about where I want to spend my birthday – I’m leaning towards Peru, although I was having thoughts of camping in South Africa – I want to be seriously dedicated to my writing to a point I can see it as a viable part of my career. I don’t think I have the necessary talent or ability or pure dumb luck to make a living off writing, but I’d like to be able to go back to being a pharmacist but kick back my hours a bit. Four days a week instead of five, or something. But I’ll get to that part in a minute.

I am the queen of unfinished novels. But I do have two that are finished. I’m not really up for submitting either to an agent, however. The first, an urban fantasy romance, has a very solid and interesting first half and completely turns to lumpy scorched custard by the second chapter of the second half. Bollocks. I can rewrite it, and I know that at some point I will. I just don’t think it’s where I want to start my publishing career. The other novel was intended as a children’s book, then a young adult novella, and now…it’s still about thirteen year old kids, but it’s a kid’s book the way Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is a kid’s series. Kids could read it, sure. I know I’d have read it. But then I was reading bodice rippers and Stephen King at the age of ten, so I don’t think I’m the best judge of reading material suited to age, here. So, I’ve set that aside for the meantime even though I am on and off working on its direct sequel.

This leaves me with four options for my first punt on an agent, none of which are fully complete. The first is Greywater, and this really is the best option save for the fact it’s straight-up fantasy. I think I’m going to have to go waaaaay outside the New Zealand channels here, though I am aware thanks to SpecFicNZ that I’m by no means alone here. It just depends on how hard I want to hit. I’m fairly certain I can get somewhere with this, but we’ll see. The current manuscript is at 112k and is maybe twenty or thirty thousand words off a first draft, after which I can tidy.

The other three options are more complicated. People In Looking-Glass Houses is easily the most marketable idea I’ve got – it’s also an urban fantasy romance – but while I wrote a good deal of it back in 2002/2003, the characters have changed a lot to suit the canon of the world it edges up against, and I’ve decided most of what was written ought to be scrapped or reappropriated. Writing it would take a lot of time over the next few months. I may have that time, but I’m not sure. I will write this story at some point, I’m just not sure how soon is now, or something to that effect. Ha.

Hibernaculum is a tricky one. I love these characters, and I love their story – two of the centrals are my first true OTP, and the novel is nearly finished. Maybe twenty thousand words out, too; I drag my heels with it because it’s a complex ending and I’m a moron. But not only is it also fantasy, it involves one of the other central characters getting into a very complicated relationship with another man and therefore might be hard to market. I’m not sure on that front; it would depend on the publisher. And I suppose I oughtn’t to care considering a) I won a competition last month with a short story with clear elements of homoeroticism and b) my first print publication was with a light erotica story, het or no, and…er. Yeah.

My other novel-in-progress is never going to be a publisher’s choice, mind you. But how much I want to finish it! ^_~ The Juniper Bones is my baby. And of everything I write and share, it’s the one that’s generated the most interest. But not only is it ungodly long in its current form, it just involves so many difficult things that I suspect a publisher would rather just shove me off into Charybdis with that barge pole rather than use it as a debut novel. Ha. Yet every time I open one of the associated files or look at some of the commissions I’ve had done, I end in hysterics. I love those characters, and I love that story. So hard. And I want to share it in its fullness with people, and not just because Morgan will one day give me that partial lobotomy she’s been promising if I don’t.

On the short story front, I want to keep poking away at various markets. Wily Writers has a call for submission for a young adult post-apocalyptic short story that I have a solid idea for; its due date is the end of October, so I can swing it. Yesterday I also ran across this blog fest that sounds fascinating, and I’m fairly certain I will be signing up later today because the fact the first submission sits so well with the dates of my trip to Egypt next week…it seems a sign, to me. So we’ll run with it. Besides, I’ve really got to get back to networking and sharing with other writers. One thing I regret about leaving New Zealand is the loss of my writing groups, and I’ve been really slack about spending time on the wonderful and wondrous CompuServe Readers and Writers forum. So, writing and reading stories for a joint Blog Fest universe sounds like a hell of a way to meet new writers…

Speaking of blogs, I have a few links that I got from CompuServe the other day, relevant to our interests. They’re about writing a query and then a synopsis, and even though I am not at that stage yet they’re actually very useful links for someone like me. Because I have problems with focus and structure. But I was so happy to see that Greywater fit very well into the basic synopsis template, and after writing a test query for the novel I feel that writing a synopsis in that format actually might help me a lot with finishing the novel. So, we’ll see? I would do it today, but I want to go to the Museum of London, and I have no idea how much longer I’ll be in town…

Which brings me to my next thought – I have an opportunity. It occurred to me last Friday as I was sitting in St. James Park that I could go back to Western Australia and just…write. I’m not Australian – GOD, I’m not Australian! – but my father is on a project near Perth and my parents live in a lovely seaview apartment with three bedrooms, one of which doubles as an office. I’ve been to see them twice there over the last year, and it’s a lovely place (which I’m not saying just because Margaret River has the best goddamned nougat IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, nuh-uh). I remember thinking the second time in particular how nice it would be, to marry an engineer and live a life where I could get up at six in the morning, have breakfast, do Zumba, go for a walk for an hour around the mangroves then return home for a day of writing. It struck me at the park that I could actually do this, if only for three or four weeks. I floated the idea to my mother, asking if I could stay in order to write if I contributed to the bills, and she green-lighted it. So…I’m not sure. I came to the UK with the intent of living and working here for a bit, but it’s not really as I’d thought it would be. I do love London; I had no real feelings towards the city the first time I saw it in 2006, but it’s grown on me. I’m just not sure I want to live here – or in the UK – after all. It feels like a step back, to the life that I both loved and hated four years ago. And I want to move forward as a writer, not go back to the world pharmacy. I can do my job, and do it well, but I need something more than that to keep me going. I have to be honest with myself about that, otherwise it's just not fair to any of us.

So, that’s my decision. It’s a bloody difficult one. I keep reminding myself that not every writer gets this sort of opportunity, and considering I have no real ties to anywhere, I should take it. And once I’ve had that sabbatical, I can return to New Zealand (maybe via Cambodia, ha) and move back to Wellington. There, I can get a full-time pharmacist position with my finished novel(s) tucked safely under my arm. Maybe then I can go back to the nine-to-five knowing I have a way of altering my own destiny, so to speak.

I’m scared as hell. I suppose that’s the way the cookie crumbles. But when I was looking something up about The Juniper Bones the other day I found a little file I’d made last year during NaNoWriMo in which I’d kept some of the feedback I’d received from the fantastic individuals at the CompuServe forum, and things like this just brought and still bring tears to my eyes:

When I read your writing, it makes me want more. I don't want to stop. And then I get to the end, and my brain is like a little puppy, all kind of like, where's the rest? What comes next? Huh? Huh? You have an absolutely stunning talent, you know. Your characters are beautifully put together, your story is compelling and mysterious- there's no question at all I'll be buying this off the shelf at a bookstore within a couple of years, and I'll just have to twitch impatiently and hang out for snippets until then.

I need to remind myself that I can write, and that I must write, if only for my own sanity. My sister keeps watching Dragon’s Den, and last night they were talking about how pitches need passion, because no company is going to succeed unless the person wants it enough to spend so much time with it. I could say the same of my writing. I love doing it. I want to do it. I just need to believe. And I was giddy yesterday to finally have run across a review of Red Velvet and Absinthe that mentioned me by name; while I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback about the collection as a whole, I’ve been craving something personal whether good or bad. And this…yes.

Tea For Two is a heart wrenching story that had this reader on the verge of tears. The poignancy of this love story and the loss that the two main characters suffer is so tenderly written, making the whole scenario come alive before your very eyes. Congratulations Ms. Buckingham for a truly tremendous and well thought out short story.

I can do this. I can, I can! So…here we go. Although as I said, it’s half-nine in the morning here in ol’ London Town and I might go out. I need to make the most of the city while I’m here, because I suspect I may have to leave her soon. We’ll see.

Plot? What Plot?

I tend to have reasonable amounts of trouble navigating around places unknown. London, being full of strange streets and stranger people, can therefore prove something of a challenge. I’m fairly infamous (in my own mind, at least) for being completely capable of losing the British Museum. No, honestly; I get off at Tottenham Court Road and I just can’t find it. Bearing in mind it’s a very large building, even when armed with a map I tend to be pretty stuffed. I just acquired a GPS-enabled smartphone the other day, which you think would help, but for someone who spends as much time as I do messing around on the internet I can’t operate Android to save my own life (or find a museum, for the less melodramatic).

Still, the other day when I decided to go to the museum as I had no place else to go (seriously, when it closed at eight-thirty that night I sat on the steps and cried), I thought maybe I’d try my luck from Holborn as I was on the Piccadilly line anyhow and really couldn’t be arsed moving my ass to Central. Lo and behold, I found it. No issues. And after eventually discovering the Enlightenment galleries just as it was closing for the evening, I stumbled back the next morning to investigate some more. When I left that time, I didn’t return to Holborn station, I decided to go towards Tottenham. I actually found Leicester Square instead, but that’s just how much of a retard I really am. What’s more relevant to this entry is that I found along the way a store called Forbidden Planet.

I have trouble with geek-oriented stores. For instance, there were three late-teen boys in there I wanted to punch in the mouth for being total pretentious pseudo-emo posers. Seriously, the nonsense they spouted as they criticised various drawing guides…god. I hate these stores, mostly because while I enjoy anime and manga I have very little patience with comic books and graphic novels, or tabletop games, or trading cards of any kind. I’m not even a true-blue speculative fiction fan in some respects, although I made a beeline for the title with “Eldritch Abomination” in it, I can tell you. Of course that’s hilariously ironic as I write spec fic, but I think it’s just I like stuff beyond the pale. I just want to read something that takes me out of the ordinary world; the subculture itself is not really strong enough to do the same job.

Still, I went into this store principally because I wanted to see their manga. I had myself a good wee read of Hellsing, and then was amused to discover some of the Code Geass manga. Which is where this entry really begins; yesterday I was all about setting, today it’s the characters.

 

I have a very odd relationship with Code Geass. It’s a fairly recent Japanese anime series; I first started watching it in 2009 and finished it…earlier this year? I can’t actually remember. I got into it after watching another series called Death Note, which is a series I’d generally recommend to most people. Not so much with Code Geass, though, and that’s the curious thing.

 

Like I said, Death Note is an interesting series for all I absolutely despised the lead character by the end of it. Light Yagami’s not meant to be sympathetic, not exactly, but it’s still pretty remarkable to get to the end of the show and hate a character so much. …although it wasn’t that I hated Light, I suppose. I think I just hated what he’d become and why. Characters can and should change over the course of a story, but Light just took a path I could not follow. I had empathy for him in the beginning. By the end, I just…didn’t. But the characters kept me watching the show the whole way through, particularly as Light and L, the initial antagonist/protagonist duo, have a fascinating relationship. I was told to watch Code Geass as the two male leads there, Lelouch Lamperouge and Suzaku Kururugi, also had a similar dynamic; two young men who could and should have been the best of friends, but were driven apart by the vagrancies of fate and belief. (For a Western equivalent, we’re probably looking at the equivalents of Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr.)

Interestingly enough, while it was quite a ways into the series before I really took a dislike to Light, it was within the first two episodes that I took an immediate and deep dislike to Lelouch. Who is the main character. I just…really. What ended up keeping me watching was Suzaku, and then Suzaku and Euphemia had the most ridiculously cute relationship that made me flail my hands with glee every time they spoke. Totally my OTP of the series, yes.

But as the series went on…Lelouch started to grow on me. He’s an extremely complicated character, and I have a real weakness for that. It helped that while Lelouch was painted as being the darker half of the friendship, as time went on you began to see that Suzaku was not as light-hearted as he appeared, and in the end I was just broken. By all of it. But I have to emphasise that it was the characters that did it to me. To this day I really cannot explain what the fuck happened in that damn show. I just didn’t follow the plot at all. And while I suspect some of that was your basic garden variety idiocy on my part, I also believe that the series really didn’t focus much on the story. Which didn’t matter, as I was just in love with the characters anyway.

And I’ve noticed that as a weakness in my own writing. It’s probably not that surprising, in that I build stories based on characters. Generally the plot can just go hang. Which is probably why I so rarely finish anything, at least with the longer things; short stories are a bit easier for me to shape into a finished product as I can clearly define the ending and the beginning when I create the document file, and having a word count usually keeps me in line. Novels, however…well. Put it this way. I wrote a short story back in 2005 called Stockholm Syndrome, and now in 2011 the characters have attempted to give me a novel. It’s currently in three pieces; the first two thirds have completed first drafts at wordcounts of 81,090 and 122,424 respectively, and the at least half-completed third part is already at about 82k. And that’s happened simply because the plot…well. What plot?

 

I have a deep dislike of the novel Twilight, mostly because I couldn’t read it. I really couldn’t. Largely I believe it's due to the way it is written; the language and the phrasing reads to me as clumsy and ill-chosen, and as someone who’s fairly lyrical in her own writing I just couldn’t deal with it. But I also read a description of the novel that said most of that first book was just Bella and Edward staring at one another until the plot suddenly drove into the front room forty pages from the end, stumbling from the car drunk with a paper bag and a bottle of cheap whiskey shrieking “SORRY I’M LATE NOW THE PARTY CAN START WHOOP WHOOP!” and I thought “Oh my God, that’s it exactly!” Nothing happened until very, very late in that book. Which just made it so painful to me, because the characters meant nothing to me and so even when the plot finally did deign to put in an appearance it was too late for me to give a damn. Which is why I don’t like cricket…er, Twilight, I mean. Ha.

But I did have to turn around and take a look at my own writing. While I sincerely hope I have a better style and manner of expression, plot just isn’t my strong point. I’m a character author; most of my little voices turn up in my head fully formed and just…do what they like. Because of the way they play off each other I do eventually get a story out of them, but I waste a lot of words and effort getting to that point. I mean, my first real completed novel suffers from this; while the first half is actually rather readable, the second half was written without much of an idea of the actual plot, and suffers dreadfully for it. I still haven’t got around to rewriting the damn thing, it depresses me that much. (Sorry, Andy and Julia; Andy, your half is fine. Julia, I hate you. I hate you and your melodrama so hard.) And this is because the first half was written for NaNoWriMo in 2003 and I knew just what I wanted to do. I had to plan it in order to succeed in that timeframe. The second half was written over a year and lacked direction and drive and it just…yeah. Fell very, very flat.

The Juniper Bones, the incomplete novel I mentioned first, is going to weigh in at over three hundred thousand words by the time I finish the first draft. Not that I have any idea when I’m going to manage to finish it; the damn plot I ended up with is so convoluted that I just can’t keep it straight half the time. With that said I will have to strip so much out of it once I do have it sorted, because really? In the early days I was just playing with the characters. And my god, they’re a delight to do that with…but so much of their interactions are irrelevant to the plot I ended up with that I just need to cut it out. And it makes me sad, because like I said…I write for the characters I meet. But I don’t want my own novels to be like Twilight or Code Geass…Twilight is just hollow all over to me, and the only reason I go back to Code Geass is because the creators of the franchise seem to have realised that the plot is irrelevant. There are that many different variations on the theme that really, it’s just the characters people come back for.

But I want a story in there, too. It’s just finding it that’s the problem, most days.

Incidentally, I realise some of you probably realise that my blog’s title is shortened to PWP, though obviously I wasn’t talking about that. Which isn’t to say I haven’t tried to write some of that myself, but again I can’t do it. The damn characters just take off on me and start talking and…yeah. Although with that said, when Irene kept me out of New York City late last month I ended up in Vancouver, and I have to wonder if they’d have been so happy to give me my cheerful little entry visa stamp if they’d realised I was going to de-stress over the situation by spending that five hours in their lovely airport writing smut. Ha. (I’m not very good at writing smut, like I said; I get distracted by more important things. THIS TIME I DID NOT. Maybe I should try writing longhand in public every time I need a sex scene in a book. Huh. Talk about exhibitionism…)

But on an ending note, The Juniper Bones needs editing, yes…but I am always going to be writing idiotic short stories for these characters because I do adore them. With that said, we’ll close with the beginning of a Halloween tale I wrote for my spec fic group back in Invercargill. It seems appropriate, considering it was done because I was having one of my little fits over Twilight. Again. ^_~

“Do you know any vampires?”

He freezes in the act of picking up the little blue car. “What?”

“Vampires,” she repeats, and he knows he’s screwed because the impatience in her tone is growing exponentially. “I want to know if you know any vampires.”

Setting the little plastic piece back in the box, he doesn’t bother to hide his grimace. “I thought you wanted to play The Game of Life.”

“Fuck Milton Bradley.”

“I think they’re dead. I’m not into that.”

Of course that idea doesn’t particularly bother Morgan; she instead stares thoughtfully off into space as if contemplating the mechanics of it all. It’s rather to his relief when she says curiously: “Are they real?”

“What, Milton and Bradley?” Eliot stares at the game box for a minute, and then shrugs. “Well, if they’re not, some fucker’s making a mint off Cluedo and it’s not me.”

“Don’t be a dickshit,” she says, sharp enough to make him glad she hadn’t tried to shove the gameboard somewhere painful as an incentive. “I meant vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. Elves, fairies, Eskimos, gargoyles, dragons, whatever. Are any of them real?”

For a short moment he considers taking a running leap out the nearest window. The fact that they’re two storeys up isn’t what stops him. It’s more that he knows from past experience that Morgan will likely as not winch herself out the window two seconds later to gleefully assess the damage. And then make it worse. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because you’re real.”

“The last I checked, yeah.” He eyes her empty hands. He doesn’t trust empty. Also past experience. “And if I say “please don’t stab me with a fork to see if that’s true,” will you please not stab me with a fork to see if that’s true?”

She holds up her supposedly empty hands in a gesture of mock-surrender. “I can’t always control the fork.”

(Incidentally, the thing that will always amaze me the most about Code Geass is that it actually made me like a Coldplay song. I'm horrified, yes. If you're curious, the video is here, although it's one very, very massive spoiler for the whole show. And it's gorgeous. DAMMIT.)

Have Travel, Will World

I have to admit I'm cheating a little here -- this week in New Zealand SpecFicNZ is running a Blogging Week -- it begins the 19th of September. It's currently half-seven at night on a Sunday and I have Top Gear on the telly in the background because, well, I'm in the UK. And thanks to that wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff, it's only the 18th here. And I really don't care, I just want to get this party started!

So, where shall we begin? I’m a New Zealander, and I write speculative fiction. I may even be good at it, as this year I have at last begun to have some success with the thing. But there’s a little thing we Kiwis like to call “the tyranny of distance,” particularly in my case as I come from a tiny little city right at the bottom of the South Island. I live in the middle of nowhere in a country with a very small market and somewhat limited resources for the budding author. I’m hoping to finish the draft of a novel in the next couple of months (not my first, but it’s going to be the first one I want to attempt to send through the publishing roulette), but even once that mountain is climbed I have a hell of a lot further to hike.

With that said, New Zealand’s geographical isolation isn’t really the topic of this post. But I am talking about something a lot of New Zealanders are very fond of doing: travelling. The Big OE is almost a mandatory rite of passage, in that going overseas is something most of us will do at some point. And it’s likely because we’re so far away from everything, and come from such a young country. Heck, let’s hit up youtube for some vids.

I have trouble watching this video whenever I’m away from home. It just makes me cry. Hilariously it’s always the tui birdsong that sets me off, because when I’m at my parents’ house the tui wake me up in the morning and I often feel the urge to bawl them out for doing so. Ha.

And my little baby country in song. Daw. But travelling, to me, is so important because it expands my horizons and gives me ideas. I’ve been making up other worlds since I was tiny; the first one I clearly remember involved rainbow bridges across lava and worlds inside suns (in retrospect, it wasn’t just Tom Hiddleston that made me drool all the way through Thor; I really just wanted me a Bifrost!). I evolved a bit beyond this, but I realised a few years back that my worlds were so westernised. Hardly unexpected, considering that I am Pākehā through and through; I’m a European New Zealander of mixed English and Scottish descent and am fairly certain that I have no Māori in me. So, even then, I miss out on a bit of culture; my understanding of Māori culture is just what we’re taught in school, and I got more of that in Wellington than Invercargill. But it does make for a slightly boring “speculative” world, for all that there are obviously fantastical elements to it.

Travelling is my way of looking for inspiration. I’ve not been to a lot of different countries thus far, and most of them have been in western Europe – but some have really stuck out in my mind, those being Mexico, Turkey and Japan. In some ways, I think it’s because all three were countries where I actually stuck out as being foreign; in places like France and Germany, my usual gormless head-in-the-clouds expression mingled with a determination to not look lost even when I totally am meant that on several occasions I was mistaken for a local and asked for directions. (And no, I don’t speak German or French fluently, but I know enough to pick up that much at least!) So, in these other places…I looked out of place. And I revelled in what was different.

The world I am working on at the moment involves four major distinctions, though it goes deeper than that. I work in three distinct time periods in these stories – corresponding to about 1850, 1900 and 1990 to the present in our terms – but I’ve had to go back a bit further into their history to deal with the changing of the gods. And as I went into the mortal lives of the four cardinal elementals while wandering around various airports the last few weeks, it occurred to me that even though there were four lands that had always roughly corresponded to Greek, Russian, Middle Eastern and Indian cultures, not one place was exclusively any one of these things. Not that any one of these things was distinct unto itself anyway.

A place like Istanbul really makes you feel history. I mean, I got that sense of age the first time I arrived in London in 2006, but then Istanbul…you can feel the different worlds there, the shadows of Constantinople and Byzantium still visible just beneath the surface, whenever the light changes. I had a similar thing in Mexico, when I went to Teotihuacan; I stood on the Avenue of the Dead and was absolutely floored by the fact I was standing on an archaeological site of such an age that the Aztecs had had to make up what they thought everything meant.

Japan also made me think. One of my father’s workmates once described it to me as “a giant theme park,” and frankly? I can’t argue with that. It really is. But Japan’s deep-seated syncretic habits are fascinating to me, as a writer of a world with so many people and cultures that were shoehorned into four provinces by some rather disinterested Elder Gods. Japan is a world unto itself, even when other worlds intrude upon it, and it’s a fascinating thing to see in practice.

It’s not just a matter of travel, mind you; I tend to find that various museums can provide fuel for fire. For instance, a brief wander around the Natural History Museum in London the other day (seeing as Irene kept me out of New York’s version) made me realise I really need to think more about the animals in various parts of the world. (At least Pelagos is easy; as my Atlantis-analogue, it’s just filled with whales and other aquatic delights, ha!) And wandering the Vault made me think of Janerin and the earth-god and worship of stone and gem and mineral, and…yeah. New Zealand simply doesn’t have museums like this. I miss them the most when I don’t have easy access to them, and not just because I can’t walk through Trafalgar Square without feeling the desperate urge to run into the National Gallery to pay homage yet again to my favourite painting.

I’m sure I look like an idiot every time I look at her. Honestly, I stand and stare and can’t move. Sometimes I think it must be the most wonderful thing as an author of fantastical worlds, to see your characters and places brought to life as a movie, but then I’d just embarrass myself. I really do suffer from something like Stendhal Syndrome; the first time I saw a Titian at the Louvre I burst into tears, and the other day when I walked into the back garden of Hampton Court Palace I started crying. For no reason. I’m sure I freaked these kind fellows right out:

OH BOLLOCKS, HISTORY IS COMING TO LIFE!

 

Speaking of British museums, I really do have to mention the British Museum itself. Partly it’s because I am hoping to go to Egypt next week even though their collection makes me feel that I’ve been already, but when I was in Antalya last week I went to their archaeological museum. We’d been making bad jokes since Istanbul about how the British Museum has a lot of things it oughtn’t, but at this Turkish museum I was treated to this delightfully snarky description of the archaeological site at Xanthos:

 

I say this with some irony; I rather suspect what I saw as sarcasm is something more to do with the stylistics of the translation. I mean, I saw a sign beneath a statue in Antalya that was just the simplest thing in English. I can’t remember what the statue was, mind you. It wasn’t Ataturk, surprisingly enough, but let’s just have a picture of Ataturk being epic anyway. Because Janerin would approve.

I have to point out, though, that I took a picture of what the snarky sign was talking about. And I now rather see why they would be so very snarky about it being in Britain. O_o

But yeah. I was actually very shocked to realise how deeply entwined Greek and Turkish history is, and I say that as a girl who became an Alexander the Great fangirl early last year (…which is partially a lie anyway, I’m actually a Hephaestion fangirl…). But then, the first time I walked into Westminster I was deeply embarrassed because I was surrounded by the dead of so much British history and I didn’t know any of them. So…travelling has opened my eyes in a lot of ways, both to worlds as they were, and as they are now. And both of those things are what is improving my world-building.

So, with that said…much as I need to sit down and write, I rather suspect I’ll be off again to a fresh continent in the next couple of weeks. My Egyptian-obsessed nine year old self is ridiculously excited, but then my rainbow-lava-obsessed five year old self is whispering that I need to get back to the writing. I’m fortunate enough to be able to satisfy them both. I do so love being a Kiwi; we have our travails, but we have our travels, too. So much for the burden of flightlessness. ^_~ There are many worlds out there...in our minds, but right at our doorstep, too.