Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The title is an old feedback-request from Christine, which could apply to almost anything I’ve written. I agreed with her, of course: I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make people care about characters and worlds is filler, filler, filler. My fingers hurt just thinking about it. Brevity is the soul of my muse, unfortunately, which means the filler gets left to yours truly.

On the Lori trail again, I renewed my passport recently. I had to bring it into work to prove I was legal (to work, not to drink), and only then did I notice it had expired. (For those of you keeping track, yes I have been working for this company for six months already. Don’t tell the feds.) It was a questionable matter, as I assembled bits of the passport application to mail in, whether I would end up wearing the same clothes in my new picture as in the old one. I’m pretty sure I pulled that off with a license once, but not this time with the passport. I’ll give it another shot in 2012.

I didn’t know that my thrift-shop fashion sense, my mind-like-a-steel-sieve time sense and my Nazarite hairstyle were I-N things. There goes another bit of me, pegged, labelled and catalogued. What was that quote about psychology robbing us of of our individuality? Please Misunderstand Me…

Back to blogness: a few entries back (Kept Muse) I said something vague about the cohesion between Beginning and End. I’ve come up with an even fuzzier term for it: storiness. The essential storiness of a story isn’t much easier to pin down now that I have this highly technical term for it. Of course, in all matters my first thought is plot, but other things can hold a story together: theme, mood and style can all establish storiness in the shortest of stories. Longer stories need some plot, too, but plot is not enough to distinguish a story from a loose collection of notes. There has to be…more of everything.

The muse slept in this morning, after I’d planned some writing time for her. She did, however, flood me with ideas in the shower - she seems to like times and places where there are no pencils or keyboards around, probably because it means no immediate work for her. Lazy muse. I cornered her on the T, though, and made her add her new ideas to the opening scene of The Wrong Novel. She’s pulling in some stuff from The Wrong Prequel, both to set up later events and to justify the opening blood and gore. Maybe sleep is the secret to getting more out of her.

Lori, source of all blog content, blogged about curse words. I’m also a known fan of the English language, so I have to point out that curse and swear and cuss and execrate all mean pretty much the same thing, and do not refer, technically, to foul (a.k.a. vulgar) language or dirty words.

These two families of words split up cleanly: in the foul court, we have fine old words like the f word, which are undeserving of their current dishonor, as well as obviously dirty words like the sheeeee-it word, body parts like ass (which picks up subtones from its donkey sense), and other riff-raff like Micro$oft.

The world of true cursing, however, involves blasphemy, oaths, or wishes for damnation. Here we find damn, its brother darn and its cousins hell and heck, all invocations of deity from jeez to Kahless, and some mysterious old words like bloody (which is, to my knowledge, a particularly Christian oath abbreviated from God’s blood).

Darning them all to heck, in other words, is not vulgar but evil, yet it’s hard to curse when you don’t believe in cursing or the second commandment. So curse words degenerate into just so many more dirty words, but deep down you know bloody isn’t saying much to the listener - hence the preference for dirty dirty words rather than dusty swear words.

Following more Lori links, I found a good word in the pseudodictionary: truline, for that opening line that truly says it all. I wonder if I’ve coined any non-Romulan words I can submit.

Final scenes don’t multiply on me the way they seem to for Lori. My trouble is proliferation of opening scenes. I wrote another opener for The Wrong Novel yesterday, which brings me up to six or seven now.

The trouble with openings is that you usually can’t start at the chronological beginning - life and plot come on slowly, but a story has to dive right in there and catch the reader, plus state the full premise in the opening line. (Never read how-to-write books - that’s where you pick up crazy ideas like “the first line must summarize the entire story.”) So I wrote an opening where things really begin, that’s very interesting for me but much too boring for the reader, and I wrote an bloody beginning to grab the reader by the throat and shout “Read me!” In between there was a bit of negotiation, where I kept trying to move the opening closer to the chronological beginning - but I know I have to start in the middle with the blood and the guts (and, surprisingly, the tea service), then work backwards and forwards at the same time. Flashbacks are a pain in the neck, even when you have five spare openings’ worth of material to use for them.

Speaking of openings, I really have been working on the Seven Saga. The first chapter (barring two spare beginnings) is kind of done. I got everything I wanted in there, spackled every plothole of Seven’s misspent youth, and added some Obscure Characters to boot. The only problem with my story is that it isn’t quite a story. It’s missing that essential cohesion that binds Beginning to End, if you know what I mean. The muse has been sleeping on the job, again. I wish she got busy when I’m too busy to pay her any mind, but the truth is she’s a lazy muse who insists on bubble baths and chocolate and three-hour background checks to coin one Romulan word and hours at the keyboard to contemplate her previous drafts, before she’ll write a word.

On the other fanfic front, the Buffy finale was good, at least in its Spike aspect. I can’t say I saw too much Willow continuity in Evil Willow, or felt that the two hours cohered any better than chapter one of the Seven Saga, but I’m into the whole soulless Spike issue so I found this little reverse redemption compensated (in my fic-weaving mind) for the Random Spike Characterization of the second half of the season. I was handling it a little differently in my still incomplete chip fic, but now I see the potential of reconnecting it to canon at the end that I couldn’t see before.

Still, I’m not sure I want to rejoin canon. If I could think of a way to marry off Spuffy, I’d do that instead, but Buffy, if not Spike, is too twenty-first century for a secret wedding. This is not a century for great love stories - which is, I suppose, a good deal of the reason I take refuge in the future.

I’m heading off to CraftBoston - I’ll be the one whom crowds are following like sheep - but first a few words on my recent Quest for Trek:

I tried to watch Insurrection last night, but the basketball game ran over and Channel 7 cancelled it. Channel 38 has likewise cancelled all Voyager reruns. There is no Trek in Boston, unless you’re of the opinion that Enterprise is Trek. I am not.

At least there’s fiction, right? In a moment of moral weakness, I got a pay-per-fic Trek book out of the library (one of the new Khan ones, if you must know) because it sounded marginally interesting. I slogged through a few pages, but the prose was too wooden to bear straight after a Walter Jon Williams book. You could see it as Shatner’s acting immortalized in print, or you could just walk away.

I wish I didn’t have to keep walking away.

There’s always fanfic, great, immortal, BNF fanfic, right? I could go fishing in the Trekiverse archives for winners of years past. (After just twenty months, my first three stories posted to ASC have been archived: Assimilation, One Line, Two Dimples and the filk Chakotay. It’s a sign that I’m almost two years old.) But to tell the truth (somebody’s got to), I still haven’t finished Talking Stick/Circle. And honestly, now, how many people do you know who’ve actually read Talking Stick/Circle? Sure, pick any fan off the street and she’ll have heard of Talking Stick/Circle; she’ll confess that she ought to read it one of these days. Lori, in order to do her zendom review of TS/C, had to go read the thing herself, more power to her. The point being, that a Big Name is just a name and is no guarantee that anyone’s reading your fic anymore a week after it was posted, never mind once it’s faded into legend.

In response to Lori’s blog on BNF’s

Trekdom is the oldest show fandom, dating back to the successful drive to keep the show on the air for a third season, and the unsuccessful one for a fourth. I don’t know that it’s IDIC that keeps Trek fans more polite than the newer, more rabid fandoms. I’d guess it was science fiction itself. In my experience, S’s have little patience for sci-fi of any sort, not even with Seven of Nine parading around in a catsuit, so the Trek population is heavily slanted towards the N’s, which cuts down on personality conflicts. Sometimes BNF is a matter of personality, too.

It’s dangerous, with non-Trekkers lurking nearby, to talk of BNF’s-by-merit. Let us say that all BNF’s deserve their big names, but that it is not always for fic that they’ve gotten them. Consider the idea that Big Fame can result merely from participation in fandom as a social activity, rather than from the stories themselves. It is, for people like myself, a very strange concept, but one which I’ve heard more than once and must take into account. I think Lori touches on this phenomenon when she talks of BNF’s by PR, of the effect of Big Names in author’s notes, and of Big Fans acting important and authorative, but she seems to believe it still has something to do with advertising your fic. I disagree - it’s not the fic that spreads by these means, but the Big Name itself.

Of course, all BNF’s write, or have at some point written, fanfic. It’s a rite of passage, but it’s not necessarily the source of their fame. Like a presidential candidate who was, technically, in the armed forces for the last relevant war but spent his tour of duty behind a desk somewhere or reporting for a military newspaper, the BNF’s actual fic may be merely nominal. Or she may still be cranking out the fic, but in a forum which will never be critical thereof. (One cannot overestimate the importance of quantity in fandom.) Thus, someone who has produced quality stories at a steady rate for years can be thrown over by voracious fans for a newbie with the energy to flood the market with average fic. To see a BNF-by-fic lose, say, a fanfic contest to a BNF-by-potlatch can be a disheartening thing to those who still think fandom ought to be all about the fic.

Archivists, blogs and rec sites aren’t common in Trekdom, so the idea that fame can derive from something that isn’t even there comes hard to geeky old-school fans who grew up on TOS, such as yours truly. One sees more of fame by social factors in the pairing lists, but I think that in order to find persona trumping oeuvre on a large scale, you’d have to look to other fandoms. If you’d rather not see that sort of thing, it’s best to stick to Trek. There are far stranger things in out there in fandom than our little sock puppets.

I promised several entries ago to discuss the line between muse and man, and it’s high time to whip out Origins and get to it. So, with malice toward none; with charity for all; more on the muse:

Some moderns write without benefit of muse. For example, I’ve never felt that the muse was involved in writing non-fiction, not even when a column of mine all comes together in an unexpected way. Perhaps it is the lifetime of use that blinds me to the muse in such situations, but, there being no general talk of a muse for non-fiction, I’ll assume not. So writing without the muse is possible.

Once upon a time, some muses wrote without the man. To Plato, for example, complete possession by the muse was the sine qua non of artistic merit:

… all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed … there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him.

(All quotes are taken from Jaynes’ book, including the ellipses.) Art in this context means artifice - that is, craft or talent as opposed to inspiration or the muse. Jaynes claims that the muse’s possessiveness in Plato’s day was her last hurrah, yet he goes on to give more recent examples of the muse in action. Milton took dictation from his Celestial Patroness, and even Shelley risked the wrath of fellow poets with blanket statements like the following:

A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness … and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

Ellipsis again thanks to Jaynes, but I’ve found the original on-line: A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The quote above starts at section 284, but the whole thing looks so interesting that I’ll put off any more muse musing until I’ve read it through.

I stumbled across this quote while doing research on newsgroups for an article. While it’s not appropriate for the article, it seems quite timely for the blog.

I was supposed to get something else done tonight, but the muse (whose taste is far from the best in certain areas) started thinking about this filk on the T and wouldn’t let go until I typed it up for her. I hope that since I indulged her tonight, she’ll write something useful for me tomorrow.

Filk:      It’s My Blog
Original:  It’s My Turn (Diana Ross)

I can’t cover up opinions
In the name of blog
Or keep my peace
In jetc that was easy

And if thinking for myself
Is what I’m guilty of
Go on and disagree
I’ll still be me

It’s my blog
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This blog’s just for me

Because it’s my blog
With no apologies
I won’t tone down the truth
I’ll never try to please

For here it’s my blog
Yes I do have all the answers
Before I blogged, I took my share of stances
Ain’t no use of mailing lists
Where everyone’s the same

No, it’s not disdain
For I don’t know you from Adam
And I’ll tell you so
Here in my Dear Sir or Madam

It’s my blog
With no room for replies
I’ve never seen my fic
Through someone else’s eyes

And here it’s my blog
To try and have my say
And if the muse is blocked
At least I’ve blogged today

It’s my blog
Yes, it’s my blog
Ain’t no use of mailing lists
Where everyone’s the same

No, it’s not disdain
For I don’t know you from Adam
And I’ll tell you so
Here in my Dear Sir or Madam

It’s my blog
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This blog’s just for me

Because it’s my blog
To rant and say “my eye!”
I sure do like to see
That Lori’s stopping by

Because it’s my blog
It’s my blog

It’s my blog
For fanfic and for “fun”
Trying to work out
The thoughts of number one

Yes here it’s my blog
To reach and touch the muse
No one’s gonna say
That I was not amused

It’s my blog
Yes, it’s my blog
It’s my blog
It’s my blog
It’s my blog

Ok, here you go, an actual scientific theory of the muse, taken from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

According to Jaynes, there are two halves to the human mind, the conscious half, and what I’ll call the non-conscious half. (Subconscious and unconscious are used, and we don’t want any of their unfortunate connotations confusing us, anyway.) In general, you think of yourself as the conscious half, because it is logically impossible to be conscious of any of your non-conscious processes.

You may be aware that something mysterious is going on over there on the right side (usually) of your brain, from other clues, and the truth is, consciousness really doesn’t take up that much of your mental time. Most thinking and processing goes on non-consciously. Jaynes gives some nice examples:

I’ve had this experience myself in mathematics, which is, perhaps, why I recognize it so readily when writing fiction. (My muse is fondest of the Bed and the Bath, though she’s been known to act up on public transportation as well.) Jaynes explains how a certain amount of preparation goes into the process - setting up or contemplating the problem, then putting it aside, after which (one hopes) comes the flash of insight, and finally, the logical justification.

So, without getting into the more debated areas of Jaynes’ theory, we can establish certain facts about the muse. Because the muse is a non-conscious process, it cannot be controlled by the conscious mind, that is, by the writer herself. The muse’s process of creation can be neither “fun” nor painful, because the conscious writer, the only party involved who can feel amusement or pain, is involved in the act of creation purely as a spectator.

Of course, the muse can cause the writer no end of frustration when absent, and when present, can give the writer a feeling of transcendence. The point here is that any conscious writing, whether fun or sweat-and-blood painful, is not from the muse. The muse is, by definion, a non-conscious process. Just as you cannot have fun or feel pain while you are sound asleep, you cannot have fun or feel pain while the muse is producing. As Lori has noted, she may leave you quite a mess to clean up, but editing is not a muse process - it’s the logical justification at the end.

Another point to note about the muse so far is that what she writes is not necessarily better than what some other, conscious writer writes. She is, of course, generally accepted to be smarter than her own writer - she has the best bits of your brain in her non-conscious hands, so of course she’s going to show you up big-time.

Matters are a bit more complicated than this; it can be hard to separate the muse from the man. To do so, we’ll need more theory from Julian Jaynes. Join us next time on Mutual of Jemima’s Wild Fandom…

I had the unusual experience of receiving two feedbacks in two days. Even more unusual, they were both wrong. Do you ever get the wrong feedback? Yes, both people had read something by me, but it wasn’t quite what I’d written - not unlike the unintentional muse war, I suppose.

One person complained that If Ayn Rand Wrote ST:VOY was an absurd misrepresentation of Rand’s views. (That this was a complaint, rather than praise, became clear later in the missive.) Now, whether you think Rand would eliminate the Borg as an evil menace to the galaxy probably depends on whether you think Janeway ought to have done so. This is a familiar question of fanon, usually seen in after-the-fact regrets on Janeway’s part that she let the big one get away. At least, I think it is - it’s certainly a point I’ve hit on more than once, even reusing my favorite line, “The Borg are not a genus.”

So, we can assume this reader was unfamiliar with the Voyager fanon, promise him a fuller disclaimer for parody, and leave it at that. Well, there’s still the question of whether negative feedback goes in my fanmail folder or not. I don’t think I’ve gotten any before. I think I’ll take the ASC Awards approach - any old feedback in a storm.

The second piece of feedback, however, represents a more serious and more frequent misunderstanding. This isn’t the first time Yesterday, When I was Borg has been praised as a parody. I doubt this is an issue of misunderstanding filk itself - filk is not parody [except for legal, disclaimer purposes], and none of my other filks, if they get feedback at all, get feedback praising them qua parody. No, this one is also an issue of the Borg and fanon. “Yesterday” is a tragic filk about Seven’s separation from the Collective. It’s not whiny, as Seven’s number in “Filk of La Mancha” has been accused of being. “Yesterday” deals, in a remote, filky way, with the question of whether it was moral to remove Seven from the Collective - a question Chakotay also half-asked in Scorpion or the Gift.

Few stories deal with the moral issues of Collectivization, but I still consider it a legitimate question of fanon and therefore assume that the people who see parody in my tragedies are just not up on fanon. I think it’s about time I posted Thrive to ASC, just to see if I get similar reactions over the Borg bits. Meg’s Refugee Camp Voyager novel is a good place to see Borg issues and is a great read all around.