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So, at 4:30 this morning, Code Fairy (that's Muse's geekier sister) comes to me and says, "You know that triangle problem you've got? You know, the one where you can't solve the 'stories have plots, plots have scenes, but stories also have a timeline, and scenes exist within the timeline, but the question is, if the writers wants to put more than one scene at a timepoint, how do you organize that?" I opened one eye, looked at the clock, and sighed. "Yeah?" "The big problem is with moving scenes around. An insertion between two existing scenes with sequential IDs would mean a big hit on the server. First, is that solved? I mean, go look for a solution out on the net. Rails has one, it's called acts as list. If not, why don't you make the timeline a list and just store it in the story object as a python object? Django does that automagically. Make the API for story solid for the management of plots and scenes and you're good to go: security, authenication, and object management all in one API. Just make sure you're not Winnebagoing it." She was wrong about that this morning, I realized: the idea of storing it as a field of the Story object rather than a foreign key, but I'm not sure yet how to do it right. I'll figure it out. "Secondly," she went on, "You don't have to let users put two scenes at the same timepoint. Really. I don't recommend it. Not as a first pass." "And third, remember that company that turned you down? Remember your Ben Franklin project? What if..." And then she tossed me an image, godsdammit. A smart, funny, silly idea. "I don't know anything about Canvas or animation," I protested. "I only know a little about the Facebook API." She said solemnly, "Maybe it's time you learned." And then she went poof. It took me a long time to get back to sleep. Tags: geek, muse
Current Mood:  annoyed
Current Music: SweetS, Lolita
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Having been laid off has been something of a curious mix for me. My day so far has evolved into something like this: Get up around 6:30. Get the kids out the door by 8. From 8:30 am to 10:00 am I do the serious job searching: I answer emails, look up job listing, contact recruiters, send out resumes and deal. I take a break from 10:00 to about 10:30, and then work more on the job search until noon. Omaha and I usually break for lunch together. In the afternoon, I do another 90 minutes of work, this time on my portfolio projects, and then another break, then another 90 minutes.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much time for writing. Even without the commute, because I’m home I have to deal with the kids when they leave and get back: packing lunches, getting dressed, and then homework and extracurricular activities.
But I did find time to write this evening, and did about a thousand words. It’s a centaur/centaur scene between two of my green-furred foxtaurs, one of whom has revealed a terrible secret (”We’re not the same species anymore”), and the other of whom is about to reveal, not so much a secret as a terrible cultural defect.
If only I didn’t hear Shatner’s voice every time the male lead opened his mouth. But it’s nice to be writing again.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.Tags: muse, writing
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Dear Muse:
Yes, I understand that the change we made to chapter 2 of A Pleasing Shape complety changes the tenor of the story and that heavy lifting is required. On the other hand, that is no reason to make the current ending so boring. Even if it’s not the ending we’re going to use, it’s still supposed to be competent. I know you feel it would be a waste to keep working after 23,000 words, but still, you could at least try to give me an ending with all three of them content with each other.
On the other hand, thank you so much for the new Yowler story Silent Night With Daggered Books. I’m sure we’ll be able to work it into the schedule somewhere.
I’m sorry, but I felt it necessary to throw away Soul Searcher. The original is lost on an Amiga floppy somewhere, and I was never going to be able to re-write in and recapture that.
And I agree that Wishing Well: Epilogue is nicely finished.
p.s. Your suggestion for Under the Big Gun is interesting, but getting into Leysa’s head right now would be particularly difficult. Didn’t you say you wanted to look at what it would take to make Honest Impulses a retailable novel?
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.Tags: muse, writing
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I had this idea: A traditional Dyson sphere, what most of us singularity-as-a-setting writers now call matrioshka spheres (poor Dyson, to be remembered for the bad SFnal version), where lots and lots of little solar-powered polises live in huge cloud-like orbits around the sun. Gazillions of human analogues live in these things and 99.99% of them don’t do much more than play World of Warcraft and their equivalents. Every once in a while one of these polises suddenly needs a lot more CPU power, maybe because its population is going after a boss-level, or there’s a huge gathering thar requires a lot of environmental rendering. Whatever the case, the polises would like to have a mechanism for borrowing computrons from neighboring polises to do the rendering. Distance and orbital times make calculations difficult, but eventually promises of future returns on borrowed processing time become commodities traded just like the more predictable “hard” commodities of out-system manfacturing resources.
All of this is very boring, so specialized quasi-conscious AIs are tasked with figuring it all out. The post-human overseers who leave their entertainment realms to manage theses systems are rock stars, wealthy in some way, empowered perhaps to make decisions and dole out favors. The AIs, meanwhile, are looking through the optimization space to make sure the polis they’re programmed to oversee has the best possible deals, maximizing speedups and minimizing slowdowns.
The day comes when someone is called upon to make good on a contract, and fails to deliver. Big. An adventure goes south, pixellated and trashed. And while the adventurers in the game are disappointed, the overseeing AI overreacts and pulls its contracts in, refusing to deal until its neighbors, some of whom are coming into a functional transactional range and others are moving out as orbits proceed, until they demonstrate significantly greater transparency.
Everything goes sour in the time it takes light to traverse the solar system twice as people realize that the promises the AIs have been making have no basis in real deliverables, and the promised adventures aren’t going to happen and, worse, the promised entertainments to be delivered out-system to the manfacturing base that provides maintenance and parts for this bread-and-circuses civilization aren’t going to happen, and the manfacturers either shut down or go slow-and-local. The intra-Mars orbit civilization starts to slow down as more and more resources are dedicated to preservation, and a great depression settles onto Sol.
And then the aliens invade, I suppose. Or something.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.Tags: muse, writing
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I finally decided to get off my ass and start writing again. I’m not happy when I’m not writing, but often I lack the kind of input that I need to push me toward writing. Television and movies doesn’t do it: only reading really inspires me to write a lot. Fortunately, I had two perfect stimuli: I finally fixed my Palm T|X, replacing the broken screen with a working one, and I get an ebook edition of Saturn’s Children, by Charlie Stross. I’ve had the hardcover on my shelf for months, but like Iron Sunrise it remained unread until I could carry around a copy around in my pocket. (I strongly suspect that the same will be true of Iain Banks’ Matter, another book I managed to acquire even before it was out in the US and have had on my nightstand since then, unread.)
When trying to cold-start Muse, it helps to find something I have that’s half-finished, with which I’m neither happy or unhappy. Something for which it’s time either to push it, or kill it. A Pleasing Shape came to me; it’s a love story between a man, his girlfriend, and his robot. It’s a little weak, mostly because I don’t have much grip on Darzi’s motivations. He doesn’t want to get rid of Peren and Jouet, but he certainly didn’t invite them into his life. He just wanted someone to pose for his paintings. The sex scene I wrote is actually really good, and I enjoyed it because it has lots of moments of cinema verite, like this:
Darzi’s mouth watered with desire for her, a feeling he appreciated even after so many months together, and he was grateful she was on top and he could keep swallowing. He didn’t want to drool on her, not yet.
I dunno. Maybe that’s just one of my hang-ups. Here’s a better scene, one in which Darzi has been forced to separate from Peren during the college’s summer break, and is using Jouet, a robot whose brain has been erased and is now slowly recovering. In the meantime, the AI looking over Jouet has given her to Darzi as a posing mannequin:
“Do you think you’ll be able to return to this pose tomorrow?” he asked her. She nodded her head only slightly. “Then let me help you down.” She relaxed slightly. He took her arm and guided her back down to the bed. He touched her cheek, and she tilted her head against his hand. “Don’t fall over, okay?” She moved her arm down to the bed to show she could hold herself up just fine.
He looked at his canvas. A portrait is three things: the patience of the subject, the talent of the artist, and an expression of the relationship between the two. If that was true, as he had told Peren, and as he believed, then what was his painting of Jouet expressing?
He wasn’t sure yet.
He sighed deeply and turned his attention to the kitchen. He had never been a good cook– for that matter neither was Peren. Robots were famously good cooks, part of their talent for taking care of the humans they cared about. He wondered if Jouet would ever be smart enough or whole enough to take care of Peren and himself.
That is, if Peren wanted to accompany him into the future. He looked back at Jouet and wondered if she would. If she had a choice in the matter. When he had acquired her, she’d been empty, blank. But she was made to learn how to be human. It just took time.
Anyway, I’ve done about 3,500 words in the past two days on this, including a delightful love scene, Peren’s addiction to nicotine, one of Darzi’s friends being smug because, with Peren back on Pendor visting her parents he’s getting laid much more than Darzi is, and the set-up for Darzi to really start getting it on with Jouet. It’ll be good for both of them. For Peren… not so much.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.Tags: muse, uncategorized, writing
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Muse and I have been on a tear the past two weeks. First, she delivered on Moi Neuroses and I have a solid rough draft, and she's been pushing forward on Wishing Well: Homecoming, a kind-of wrap-up where Wish assembles all the thoughts she had during her trip out to llerkin and comes to some important conclusions. We've been in a relentless "Finish it or Kill it" mood, which brings us down to the question of when should a story be abandoned. Cybernetic Control Authority started life as a role-playing game scene, and I thought I could adapt it to a Journal Entry. As it stands, it's not too bad: "Cheyenne versus the Terminator," ending up as a huge diplomatic brouhahah. The problem is that there's no sex scene, and no real justification for one. Muse's response is that I should try making the story bigger. "You need a reason for Cheyenne's behavior in Robots of the Deep Versus the Vampire Girl of Fallow Five; maybe this is the chance The Deep takes, here and now, to seed the universe with Encompassment Enforcers, and Cheyenne becomes programmed, unknown even to her, to be one of them." Grief, I'm not sure I want to write another novel, though. I've got too many already. Still, looking through the catalog of unfinished works, it seems that I'll be finishing quite a number sometime soon. And the queue will get deeper. Oh, but Muse has more for me. Last night she said, "You complained that the family reunions in the Honesty and Heroine arcs are too similar. Okay, let's play with Heroine, since the backstory in Honesty is too solid. Does Dove have a sister?" Wretched girl. Tags: muse, writing
Current Mood:  giggly
Current Music: Maya Sakamoto, The Zit on my Right Cheek
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Yesterday, I had to take the cat to the vet. She's fine, generally, doing well, although she now has very high blood pressure as a result of her ongoing kidney failure. So we had to give her a new medicine. She's not incontinent (thank Bast), but she apparently chose to show her dislike of the transport box by letting go and urinating on me. She's never done that before, but it was an instant story idea: "Whew," Muse said, "I bet you smell just like a homeless catboy." Yeah, you go make a note in the Yowlers wiki, Muse. Have fun with that. Oh, hey, after the Meg Ryan chickflick plot, do yourself a favor and make it a tragedy. Tags: life, muse
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Simoun OST, Inevitability and Sympathy
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Yesterday, I just couldn't stand it anymore. I sat down, opened up a blank file, and started writing Heroine Souls, the next Dove San Cioni story. Muse had been playing with it on the sides, tempting me, and dammit I did pass 50,000 words in Caprice Starr, the story's a heck of a mess, and I kinda know what Chapter 9 10 is going to be about, but right now I'm a little burned out after 45 days straight. I needed some comfort writing. Muse delivered, in spades. I've been struggling to write Caprice, struggling to do 1,000 words a day. I haven't made it every day. Apparently, just writing porn with familiar themes of neurotic characters dealing with emotional situations is my comfort writing, because in two days I did almost 7,000 words. It's just (1) set-up: show Dove and the Twins settling in toward the end of their first year together. Domestic bliss of a sort, with long and involved threesome sex scene. Be affirmative about their affection for one another and how the infatuation is wearing off but the relationship is still working. (2) conflict: Dove's mothers show up, and Dove's conflict is immediate. For the past year, she's been able to pretend that she doesn't need their affirmation. Now she has to either prove she doesn't need it, or earn it. Or both. Or something in the middle. Show an attempt at make up; show Dove and the Twins having Bad Sex. (3) resolution: someone makes a decision. Something important and significant to the story, even to the series. Dove and the Twins have make-up sex that's better and more meaningful. (Actually, I have one very strong idea for how the story will end, and it's one of those things that's got my brain twonked: the Twins come to an understanding about human/robot relationships that might turn the whole idea of the Encompassment over, or it might affirm just how important the Encompassment was, or it might just be unique to them and Dove. Whatever it is, it's different from Purpose as it's been understood in the Journal Entries, it's a more mature kind of relationship between Dove and the Twins. My problem is that it's such a unique problem to the Journal Entries, even if I am trying to write my way around the whole issue of 'friendly AIs', that I'm afraid no one else will get it.) Muse was so deliriously happy the past two days that she cheered and gleed and then said, "I've got three more for you! You know your catgirl/catboy universe?" "The yowlerverse? Yah?" "How about you write one set in the late 1970s? What would yowlers be like then? Disco! Cocaine! Catnip!" She giggled. "Okay, it's silly. I like it. And?" "How about one set today, in Seattle? You could write about the chill. Send a catboy to the club." "Okay, but... where's the angle?" She leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Remember Andrea? The Vogue, 1998?" I paused for a moment, and remembered, and said, "Oh. Oh, oh! You're an evil girl!" She giggled. "Okay," I said, "What's the third?" "A catgirl works at Pike Place Market, at one of the fishmongers. Not the flying fish place, how about the clam place across the way?" "And?" "You're the writer, you figure it out." "Muse!" Tags: muse, writing
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: Rick Astley, Never Gonna Give You Up (really!)
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