Zornhau

Kurtzhau (8) is back from a trip to the museum with friends.

Me: "How was it?"
Kurtzhau: "OK..."
Me (referencing an earlier discussion): "Did you end up fighting mummies?"
Kurthau: "Yes, actually."
Me: "Did you use my sword in the end, or plump for the african throwing axes downstairs?"
Kurtzhau, judiciously: "Well, the throwing axes at first, but your sword was good for close quarters."

Then pink little Morgenstern (4) pipes up: "The bit with the Liopleurodon was funny. The dinosaur thought he was catching fish but the Liopleurodon ate him!" (Giggles)

Yes, she's been watching Walking with Dinosaurs and is determined to grow up to be "An Adventure Girl Who Finds Dinosaur Bones".  Later, in the bath, the pair of Liopleurodons I originally bought for Kurtzhau have great fun eating smaller plastic dinosaurs. However, in deference to several years of nursery school training, she makes them share the turtle.

Kurtzhau, meanwhile, watches Youtube Lego Star Wars animations on "his" netbook. Once he's asleep, I preread the first Halo novel and agonise over whether he's ready for super soldiers made from kidnapped children.

However, earlier on the same day in the muddy garden of our Victorian tenement, I blew bubbles and the wind whipped them around wild vortexes while brother and sister gave chase, laughing and jumping as children have always done. 

So I have this lull in contract work - one client is editing my work, another is scheduled to deluge me with material next week - and it's time to get some writing done.

Only, I can't.

Or at least I can, but I just can't write the last couple of chapters.

This isn't some angsty thing. I have the adventure outline, what's missing is the right thematic arcs ending in them.

By "arcs", I mean the good old Question-Answer-But-Now (QABN) structure I've been using for years. The adventure arc is pretty simple, "Can hero beat the bad guys? Yes, but in a surprising way. Now he must cope with what he's done."

However, the thematic arcs, the questions about life and humanity "answered" by the story... these are too roughly formed to give the ending any sense of meaning.

I'm not panicking about this. This is my third novel. I expect a story to "grow with the telling". Themes are something you explore as your write, and they exist in dialogue with the adventure itself.

So, now I have to backtrack and try to relate my themes to the adventure. The results should let me find extra wordage, but more importantly take me to The End.

Wish me luck.

"Mainstream" SF&F sometimes seems a little moribund. The SF part enjoys a sort of clubby dialogue with itself. The F part seems more and more soft and angsty with an odd weighting towards the mundane and away from the fantastic, or a dwelling on the fantastic at the expense of plot.

But then there are the subgenres.

• MilSF - "Military Science Fiction" - is a fine balance between strategy porn and blowing shit up. At least 50% of the action could be a transcript of 8-year-olds playing with Lego. "Rah. My Dreadnaught spews missiles!" "Boom! Boom!"
• MilHis - "Military Historical" is basically "your local model shop the tie-in series". It puts you down there among all the plastic figures.
• The New Sword and Sorcery/Heroic Fantasy - Owes a lot to the old stuff, but dumps the hard boiled characters into full novel-length adventures. More than that, it takes over the top ideas that would have been throw-away lines for Moorcock, and develops them to the full. Good example, James Enge's"Wolf Age" - a full on adventures set in a werewolf "civilisation".

These subgenres have three things in common:

First, they have the same feel. It doesn't matter whether you're reading Scarrow's Romans beating the crap out of Britons, or Howard A Jones's Arabians battling Jinns, you'll always get a powerful dialogue between big and small picture, glory and grit, wild imagination and realism of motivation and action. There's also grim seriousness and black humour - the characters may play things for laughs, but the author rarely does.

Second, they are like rebel colonies of their original genres. For example, MilSF is as likely to feed off MilHis and actual history as it is what's going on in mainstream SF, which in turn has an "Oh God, them" attitude about the laser guns and space dreadnought brigade. Meanwhile, people who consume these sub genres are unlikely to touch the wider genre unless it's absolutely best of breed. For example, I can't plough through mainstream Fantasy anymore. Meanwhile, on my former boss's bookshelves, David Weber jostles with Patrick Robinson.

And that leads to the third and last thing in common; the readers.

The core readership for these subgenres is the same and they don't really differentiate between bullets, blasters and swords. These aren't interchangeable, but are satisfying in similar ways. If you like Bernard Cornwall, you'll probably like John Ringo and Joe Abercrombie.

This commonality isn't new. It's what you'd get if you browsed a 1930s magazine, and you'd find Pulp writers like Lamb, Burroughs and Howard hopping between subgenres without a second thought. For this reason, I coined the term Neo Pulp.

Now, I'm not sure. This new literary cluster occupies the same niche and resembles its predecessors, but in the same a dolphin looks a bit like an ichthyosaurus. Also, if "Pulp" means much today, it has connotations of a guilty pleasure, rather than a genuine literary endeavor with plot and theme and embedded wisdom.

Then it hit me. There's another cluster of cultural forms that's very similar in it's diffuse commonality; a musical genre encompassing influences from folk, through mythic, to modern, but all under one banner - Heavy Metal.

Metal deals in glory and grit, and does so without knowing irony. It's fun, but not - usually - deliberately silly. In other words, it shares an aesthetic with the cluster of subgenres I'm talking about. Even the covers look similar -no surprise because there's a huge overlap between Heay Metal fans, and fans of MilSF,MilHis and S&S.

For this reason, I'm starting to wonder whether the these books fit into a new genre all of their own. Fic Metal, perhaps?

I'm at the point in I was a teenage space mercenary where the military tech will determine much of the prose. Up to that point, it didn't really matter what the characters were shooting each other with. Now, however, during the showdown, Uncle Max is going to bring out a BFG or equivalent. Unfortunately, my worldbuilding hasn't quite caught up (some BS about being fired, rebooting a business, winning contracts etc.)

Here are the world-building challenges I can see right now:

• Punctuated Equilibrium: It's the Far Future. Just about every possibility will have been explored and the optimums identified by a Darwinian process. Once in a blue moon (of Q'Argon 7) there'll be a new development. However, mostly this year's plasma carbine is going to be pretty much as good as the year before that. Expense and scissors/paper/stone should determine advantage.
• Cascading Tech:  So we have FTL.  Does this mean we also have shields? If we have shields, does that give us encapsulated fusion pellets? If we have energy weapons, does that mean we have a cheap, miniature power supply...? Technology must be consistent.
• Uneven Tech: Go to the darkest most benighted jungle, where they cure your gangrene by communing with the ancestor spirits, and you'll find T-shirted warriors wielding AK47s. Tech level must be  qualitative, not quantitative. 
• Mutually Assured Destruction: Planets are big targets for cheap weapons such as rocks hurled at relativistic speeds. Military scenarios must to take into account the problem of escalation.
• Military SF must feel military:  Sense of wonder is greatm but it's no good writing about competing nano-swarms. Worldbuilding must result in technology and doctrine with which we can engage.

So, I've been tinkering with the idea of the shield/FTL technology supporting powerful E-Bombs, or even ship's drives being able to produce an EMP. This leads to the intriguing possibility of the far future battle being fought with Korean War technology. I've been trying to work out whether or not it's obviously bollocks...

I respect what wisdom your faith carries and its place in your mental ecology - most of my heroes were religious and they were not great and good despite their (sometimes idiosyncratic) faith.

However, despite that respect and our friendship combined, you must know by now that I can never share your faith.

It's not that we have different world views. It's that we have different ways of forming a view of the world.

Debate between us is like watching Athens and Sparta fight: your navy sails the sea of intuition and personal revelation, my army marches on the ground of logic kept level by Occam's Razor. A decisive clash is unlikely unless outside factors are involved.

Nor can we pretend away our differences.

As fellow citizens of the world, if not of a particular country, we are bound to be politically opposed from time to time.

As fellow humans, we are bound to be concerned for each other. You probably think I am courting pain in this life and the next. I think you are handicapping your authentic self and squandering precious hours.

So, once in a while we'll cross swords, part in fun and part in earnest, with half an eye to those who look on and might just be less firm than us in their faith or lack of the same.

When this happens, we remember that we still share core human values and that we are friends.

So, in the spirit of that friendship, I wish you a Happy Easter.

I'm sweaty and tired, it's hot and I'm feeling old, and my opponent is this 20-something Dutch guy.

Wham! My thigh blazes.

He's thrown some half-ass one handed cut. Had I been fitter, less tired, less burned out, I'd have batted the blade away. Instead, he's hit me.

It's hard to pull cuts like that, so now I'm in pain and the adrenalin makes everything blurry.

He hits me again. 

Game over.

Fencing isn't a test of might and should, only "is".

I've just soldiered through two hard months. They fired me - and 10% of the company - and I didn't break a sweat. I revived my side business, kicked and punched it to its feet and turned it into a day job. In the first day of operation, I won a contract which should amount for something like 3 months of my target earnings. And now I'm working on it.

All this at a cost.

I'm burned out. It's as if I really am stressed to hell, but in a walled off portion of my brain where I can't see it go on. I'm so mentally exhausted, I've double-booked myself at least twice.

However, it's raw exhaustion, not organisation, that forced me to skip the Saturday of the 2-day event. That sort of mental numbness had me walking from Glasgow Queen Street Station to the University Union venue, when wisdom would have dictated a taxi ride.

I still managed to teach my class, and absorb those of other people. Now it's the end of the day and there's no fight left in me.

The second fight. 

Another disaster; I hit the other guy just once.

These youngsters think swordfights are a conversation, a dialogue. I feel like a past-it stand up comedian, too tired to deliver the putdown line, to old to keep up with the banter.

Before my third fight, I have a moment to myself. I summon up, not the red rage of the berserk - which would be futile, unmannerly and dangerous - but the implacable wrath of the Active Knight, of the Soldier. A bit of Maximus, a bit of William Marshal. Perhaps something of Tertius from the stories I used to tell Kurtzhau.

And then I limp out not to fight, but to slay.

No, I didn't win the tournament. I came 4th.

Nor did I win every fight - my technique was too sloppy. An exposed elbow here. A too-slow attack there.

But whenever I "survived" the first clash of blades, I became an ambush predator.

My foe would leap back; intent on restarting the conversation of steel.

I would surge forward like an Allosaurus, wading through the primordial blackness to savage my target. I have a vague recollection of trapping somebody's sword against their own body while sawing at their neck while they stumbled backwards towards the piles of kit around the edge of the space.

No, I did not win. But I had fun.

When it comes to swords, I don't do "conversation". I do "execution".

Now to find ways to punish smart-ass skirmishing techniques and drill them into my students. :)

I have contract work :) :(

I just wasted a morning getting Windows 7 to let me move folders between "Users". It needed to be done; as Kurthau and his friends become computer literate, there's more and more chance that they'll do something to lose me work.

But what a bleak feeling it is to spend hours second guessing the basement dwelling geeks who designed Windows 7's rococo permissions system.

And now in losing a morning of productive techwriting, I fear that I have lost a morning of fiction later this week.

7 hours, 4K - about 600 words  per hour. However, had to flesh out three locations. I reckon each cost me 200 or so words.

Observations:

• Switching off the spellchecker - a no brainer I know - turned out to be a damn good idea.
• 8 chapters written at an average of 2K words. This will give me a 29K novel - I'll be missing 50% of the desired word count!!! However, I think I can add most of that through layering.
• I am starting to suspect that I have an upper limit of 4K per day, regardless.

Closing part of the last scene of the day:

    The thick metal door fell. Air whooshed out of the way and it slammed into the concrete with a deafening crash.

"Gosh, that was close," said Clarissa.

Jack hardly heard her. He was looking into the chamber the ancient blast door had kept closed. It was full of dust. Behind the dust, silvery shapes moved.

Uncle Max's words came back to him. You can never be sure whether all the Space Primitive Technology is dead.

"Killer robots!" he blurted. "Run!"

OK, this Thursday is definitely clear, apart from fielding client emails.

I'm at the point in the novel where I've stopped believing in it. A few years back, I would have stalled. Now I know on a deep intuitive level that I can write to the end, then go back and ramp up and foreshadow etc...

It's not just knowledge. At this level of productivity, relative to my past, I have more momentum, and need to hold my breath for less time before I hit The End.