Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I discovered a flaw in my clever scheme for handling the move-induced renumbering of my blog entries. Due to the oddity of MovableType search templates, my search results were formatted with pad=”1″, while my other blog templates don’t use padding. The upshot was that the search result links were broken.

The best solution for this sort of thing is to use individual entry archiving. I didn’t use them back at Freeshell because of their limit on the number of files per account. That’s no longer a problem here, so I’ve added individual archives with user-friendly file names, based on Anders Jacobsen’s instructions. Check out the permalink to see one in action.

This change will break yet more links, but I have a clever scheme to fix them…

The most striking piece of advice in Ayn Rand’s The Art of Fiction wasn’t the news about the muse - although I’d never formulated it quite that way to myself, the previous entry does more or less reflect my relations with the elusive muse. Plot is another matter altogether. Though (or perhaps because) I share Ayn Rand’s belief in the central importance of plot, I’ve lost many a bright and promising story to the blight of sudden plot failure. Now I know why:

So far, I’ve had as little success thinking of the climax ahead of time as I’ve had trying to wade out of the mire of an unplanned plot, yet I still feel that this piece of advice is the secret to finishing my pile of abandoned stories. I must pester the muse with my plot problems until she comes up with a suitable climax.

Seema posted an interesting quotation from The Life of Pi. Here’s the crux of the quote:

Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you’ve mapped out for them is grand, simple and gripping. You’ve done your research, gathering the facts — historical, social, climatic, culinary — that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension. The descriptions burst with colour, contrast and telling detail. Really, your story can only be great. But it all adds up to nothing. In spite of the obvious, shining promise of it, there comes a moment when you realize that the whisper that has been perstering you all along from the back of your mind is speaking the flat, awful truth: it won’t work. An element is missing, that spark that brings to life a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right. Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it.

My contention is that the above situation is impossible. If you have the right theme, plot, dialogue, description, characters, and style, then you have a story. Nothing is missing. Writing isn’t magic.

If, on the other hand, your story doesn’t gell, then you have to conclude that one of the parts has gone astray - say, the plot doesn’t fit the theme or the dialogue doesn’t fit the characters. In particular, a story that’s emotionally dead must have either dull characters, an uninspiring theme, or leaden prose.

I’ll combat the depressing quote above with an inspirational Ayn Rand quote from The Art of Fiction. I was pleasantly surprised by her views on the muse: she believes in it and that it is the subconscious, but she also claims that the muse can be influenced, primed, and eventually forced to produce that elusive spark. Here is how to do it:

I’m still dreaming. You can see the new, 64-bit, faster-than-a-speeding-PC PowerMacs at Apple, but new G5 PowerBooks have yet to be announced. I can’t buy a PowerMac - I’m just not the boxy type - so this could be a long wait for me unless my old G3 dies of shame.

[An aside to Veronica…] Never, ever let mom talk me into doing that again. It was a nightmare of kitsch and cattle, and I don’t mean the milk-producing kind.

Rumors are flying fast and furious about WWDC 2003, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference next week. Rumormongers expect announcements of new PowerMacs and possibly PowerBooks based on the long-awaited 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip from IBM.

New hardware looks like a sure thing - a German shop is already advertising it. (See the Mac in brown wrapping on the right side.) 3cmug is hosting a countdown timer until Steve Job’s keynote address at WWDC Monday afternoon at 1pm (Boston time). You can catch the keynote at the Apple Store at the Cambridgeside Galleria, though not at the new store in Chestnut Hill.

You won’t see me there, unfortunately - I have a day job. I may run down there afterwards if they really have PPC970 PowerBooks in. I think the guy from As the Apple Turns will be there updating by wireless. I’ll be away this weekend, so if all goes well, my next entry will be Monday night from a new PowerBook.

A girl can dream…

Well, the post ID’s have been laundered and the blog has moved again. (Previous moves were from Blogspot to Freeshell and then from Blogger to MovableType.) Look up at the location bar and you’ll see that you were transported to the new host without even knowing it. Blog-related links should work, but almost all non-blog links are currently broken - check the main page on Freeshell if you need something that isn’t here yet.

I’m trying to move the blog over to the new host without doing anything fancy involving moving the databases around. Just doing an export and an import in MovableType is likely to break your permalinks, especially if you’ve deleted entries, imported in non-chronological order, or run more than one blog out of the same MT database. This misnumbering problem has been amply moaned over in the MT forums. However, one post suggested a way to keep your entry ID’s the same by hacking both the old and new MT implementations.

That wouldn’t work for me because only this MT on Freeshell is hackable. So what I did was hack CMS.pm as directed, but instead of making a new field called POSTID, I added anchor links to each entry for the old ID. You can export exactly as directed and then query-replace to insert the anchor links, which is more or less what I did.

That still leaves one problem - old entry id’s could conflict with new ones, so that on the same page one anchor linked to the old #209 and one to the new #209. You’d probably get the first one on the page no matter which one you were after.

The solution is simple. I was padding my permalinks (so that #209 came up as #000209), so all my hacked-in anchors are of the #000209 format. By removing the pad=”1″ from my templates, I’ll make my new permalinks look like #209. The link for 000209 will never conflict with 209, since I haven’t yet made it to 100,000 entries.

I do realize that this entry won’t make much sense unless you’ve had the same problem. If you have the problem and still don’t understand, feel free to email me. My address is around here somewhere.

The July/August Analog was a double issue, and therefore doubly disappointing. “A Professor at Harvard” by David Brin was cute and would be worth reading at the bookstore. My favorite story was “Still Coming Ashore” by Michael F. Flynn, a lovely piece of scientific speculation with an adventure story and a weird moral twist at the end. “Agent” by Shirley Kennet was also notable.

Several unnoteworthy stories were of the “I can describe Antarctica/the prairie/the desert/light gliders/etc.” type with a less-than-successful plot tacked on. Writing what you know is highly overrated, if you ask me. A couple of stories were part of series (as opposed to serials), and I never care for those.

Only one story was an actual disappointment, in that the idea had more potential than the author brought out: “Not a Drop to Drink” by Grey Rollins was supposed to be about the survival of the fittest on a dry colony world, but it was marred by the unbelievably backwards, fanatical religious settlers. I don’t mean backwards as a synonym for fanatical; rather, the colonists had just enough technology to do the genetic engineering to which the religious fanatics objected, but not enough to desalinate seawater, find a better planet, engineer the plants instead, tow some comet ice in from space, or a thousand other solutions that space travellers ought to be capable of.

I don’t object to making thinly-disguised Evangelicals the antagonists of your story, but I do object to doing it badly. You can’t hang your entire story on a prejudice you’re just assuming the audience shares with you - you need to motivate your villains as well as your heroes. This is where A Million Open Doors by John Barnes lost me as well.

The best part of the novel was the very beginning, where the society of Nou Occitan was depicted. Frustrated in love, Our Hero leaves that lovely and warm medieval planet for the icy land of Caledony. The title promised a million open doors and the blurbs promised me an extensive tour of at least two cultures, but the winter planet was a disappointment. While the society of Nou Occitan gelled (at least until the author started picking it apart in later chapters), Caledony never came together as a coherent way of life.

Needless to say, Caledony’s is a religious society. Their faith is supposed to be some hash of economics, logic, and Puritanism, but it never once comes together as a religion. The religion is a black box like Asaro’s quis but it’s made worse by the fact that all orthodox believers in the novel are unmotivated bad guys. All the Caledons we get to know personally are rebels, revolutionaries, liberal economic preachers, and others who have seen the error of their religious ways.

The moral of the story is that all million human cultures are going to have to give up what makes them unique (that is, bad) and join back into the growing hegemony on the other side of all those doors. Minor virtues such as the Nou Occitan “style and grace” may happen to be preserved, or not. There was a coming-of-age story in here somewhere for Our Hero, but in the end coming of age for scattered mankind means becoming cosmopolitan. This might pass in mainstream literature, where cosmopolitan has an identifiable meaning (say, liberal New Yorker, Eurotrash, conservative Washington D.C. politico, anyone who lives in Brussels, etc.), but in science fiction this theme is problematic. There is no default culture of the future. Putting yours in there, largely by omission (the hegemony and its political troubles are described in the vaguest of terms), is a cop-out.

That’s not to say that A Million Open Doors wasn’t a good story - it was. It just wasn’t the story advertised on the cover.

For the purposes of this meme, a story’s theme is an abstract idea about which any story might have been written and which happens to come through in this particular story’s plot. A theme doesn’t have to be emotional (”the sorrows of star-crossed love”); it could be concrete (”life among the Borg”). You should be able to say how the plot reflects the theme, but the plot itself should not show up in the theme.

I’m assuming most fanfic writers are like me - that they don’t start writing with a theme in mind, and perhaps never stop to think about what the theme of their story was. I usually start with some kind of interesting sci-fi situation, not even a full plot, and write the beginning before I know how things will turn out. This approach has generated several incomplete Voyager stories, and far more corpses of original stories. It had to go.

Now I’ve repented of my unstructured ways and in the future I plan to think about both a detailed plot and a theme before plunging head-first into a story. The first two tales to which I’m applying this new method are The Wrong Novel and (my rewrite of) Colony. I haven’t quite figured out what the theme is of Colony, though I have decided that the necessary subplot will involve Starfleet. Previously I had vague ideas about using the Borg, who we all know are the last refuge of hack Trek writers everywhere (but especially at Paramount).

Being stumped for the theme of Colony, I started thinking about some of my other stories and assigning them themes. This sport (which I originally thought to name “Let’s Play English Class”) can be applied to other people’s stories, too, but I’ll stick to a few of my more popular stories for the moment. I list the theme first, with a bit of how the plot brings it out. It’s all made up off the top of my head, just like I used to do in English class.

The Dance (Tunkai): “the quest for an ideal”

At first the crew believe they’re taking up a hobby for Seven’s sake, but Seven is incapable of treating anything that lightly (the ideal). Likewise, Chakotay’s anthropological interest in Tunkai becomes more than just a hobby (the quest), and turns him into the local authority on the matter. Tom gets involved because he does not want to lose B’Elanna to the ideal; he has no personal stake in the quest until he stumbles (pardon the pun) across another ideal which he finds equally threatening. At that point he resolves to undermine Tunkai, with mixed success.

At a couple of other turning points in the story, one early on and one at the climax, someone says “This is not our version of Tunkai.” These statements concern allegiance to the ideal, something which Seven and Chakotay are concerned to maintain, Tom to undermine, and the Captain to conceal because she has an overriding ideal in Starfleet protocol. The ideal is achieved for one hour at the climax, but because of its new nature (and Starfleet protocol) it cannot be reproduced. The conflict between Tom and the ideal is thus resolved.

The Museum: “the conflict between duty and mercy”

I was surprised when the idea of mercy came out in resolution, because there are very few cases in the series where mercy wins. In “Choose Life,” Chakotay talks Janeway out of her clear duty not to reproduce (making this the only light story in the series, and the least popular), but in “Mirror, Mirror,” Chakotay is as frustratingly duty-bound not to get involved with Janeway as she has been with him in the real timeline. “Home Front” and “Logic Dictates” are narrow escapes from the implacable human machinery (duty) of Section 31; in “Once More Unto the Breach,” Tuvok doesn’t escape it. “To Perish in that Howling Infinite,” “Ambassador,” “Mushroom Soup,” and “Your Wish is My Command” show Seven and various Maquis acting as they might have had they been more dutiful drones or terrorists, respectively.

“The Museum” is a series with a unifying subplot. The wild, dark, or in some cases (say, “Endgame”) ludicrous events of the timelines affect the “real” crew, so that Janeway feels them drifting apart from her. In most cases they feel simple survivor’s guilt because real life is already better (more merciful) than the alternatives seen, but Janeway and especially Tuvok, the only two serious advocates of duty, are influenced by their milder selves in the direction of mercy.

The Lamne’rau: “the offspring of scientific hubris”

I mean hubris in the sense of reckless passion rather than excessive pride (though Magnus has some of the latter, too). The Hansens are too curious for their own good, and their unhealthy interests are reflected in their daughter. They are carelessly ignorant of the true danger posed by the Collective, but the reader is not; this contrast, rather than the actual events of the story, makes for most of the chilling effect (or so people tell me). This story began as a simple fanfix of some bad stardates in Seven’s childhood, but the final result can be summed up by a line of hers from one of my filks: “He who seeks out the Borg the Borg find.”

The following is an excerpt from “The Age of Envy” by Ayn Rand, an
essay she published in both “The Objectivist” and The
Anti-Industrial Revolution. I stumbled across it when surfing
for information about her posthumous how-to-write book, The Age of
Fiction. I include it here because the topic occasionally comes
up, and people toss around the allegation of envy without, I suspect,
considering just how nasty a vice it is. (Rand had a real talent for
exposing evil, as seen, for instance, in her href="http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.html">HUAC
testimony.) Note that envy is often mistermed jealousy, though the
latter word is more properly associated with love (no matter how
warped a love) rather than malice.