Monthly Archives: September 2010

puppetry and robotics

I went and saw a very odd, whimsical little puppet show tonight. If rubber gloves full of water with tin-can heads having sex and/or eating each other can be called whimsical…

It reminded me a lot of how I felt seeing Asimo interact with his human. It made me realise how impossible it would be, in a world with robotics, to emotionally distance myself from the robotic beings.

It made me think that maybe the ancient art of puppetry – of bringing inanimate objects to life, and through them expressing some of the deepest base human emotions – has a lot more to do with robotics than you would at first think.

I’m going to look into it and get back to you!

character building

A couple of posts ago I was thinking about narrative tension, and how as a reader we want the conflict/problem to be resolved, when actually it’s the fact that it’s not solved yet that keeps us reading.

Well I just read this article by Doris Egan, one of the writers on House, that takes that idea further – to an interesting, complex place.

She suggests that the interest isn’t so much in the hero solving the problem, as in how the hero adapts to the problem.

I won’t paraphrase the whole article, because I couldn’t do it nearly so well as she does, but it’s definitely worth a read. One of the best frameworks for building believable characters that I’ve seen for a while.

touch

I just watched part of a documentary about, you know, life the universe and everything. Also about how you never actually touch…anything.

It explained that the reason you don’t fall through the ground to the earth’s core is that the electro-magnetic force being given off by both you and the ground are much stronger than gravity.

So, the reason you can’t walk through a wall? The negative ions around your atoms are repelling and being repelled by the negative ions around the wall’s atoms.

Special k and I touched fingertips and he said: “So we’re not actually touching. We will never actually touch.”

And for a moment I could feel it – this giant force that our atoms exert against each other so that they will never touch.

A very, very odd feeling.

what football, good writing and Sherlock Holmes have in common

I watched the last 20 minutes of the AFL grand final today. I’m not a huge sports person, but I was doing that mad thing people do when they watch sport, where they leap around and laugh in disbelief and yell at the tv – when there’s no one else around.

It redefined nail-biting.

So what it has to do with writing is this: When it’s so tense, and the teams are alternating the lead but never moving much beyond one point’s difference, you’re desperate to be released from the tension. But then, when a game is too one-sided – the outcome too obvious – it becomes boring.

Andy Griffiths spoke to our class recently, and he was cautioning against listening too hard to what readers say they want. “No kid would say ‘What I want from a story is to be terrified for half an hour’, but they love it.”

A friend of mine was talking about the pitfalls of publishing her novel online in sections. She said her readers were pestering her to resolve the unresolved sexual tension in the plot. But as she pointed out, they don’t really want her to do that. It would kill the forward motion of the book dead.

And lastly, watching Sherlock Holmes last night, the following exchange struck me as true:

Langdon: “Oh so many people, so little purpose – that’s God’s conundrum. If only we mortals could answer that!”

Holmes: “Then your life would have no meaning.”

There is something we want to solve or see resolved, but the reading/watching/living happens in the solving, not in the solution.

life according to pigeon

just to prove that I don’t only read romance, here’s a passage from Austerlitz by W G Sebald. It filled me with a sudden, sharp melancholy – because,  I think, it is at once recognisable as the experience of being alive, and also foreign in its blind surety of direction:

You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle of a snow-storm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will infallibly find its way home. To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin.

a really great rejection letter

Susannah Taylor from the Richard Henshaw Group just went right to the top of my desirable agents list.

Her rejection letter left me feeling invigorated and inspired and like I might actually be able to do this. Quite a feat, no? It makes me grateful that I was already so far along the rejection letters road when I got it, so that I could really appreciate it.

I won’t copy it in here, because I’m not quite sure about the copyright issues with that, but just the gist:

she gave a comprehensive critique of the piece and went very specifically into the reasons why she didn’t think she would be able to sell it on the market.

She was very encouraging about the writing itself, said she thought I was a “wonderful writer” and that she would like to see other things from me in the future (when you have a pile on your desk as big as the regular agent, you don’t go saying this unnecessarily).

When I replied to thank her, she replied to my reply, saying that nos are hard and it’s great to know her critique was read the way she intended it.

She has the amazing knack of making it feel like a great favour that I let her read my stuff. Again, considering how busy agents are and how many thousands of manuscripts they read and reply to, this is no mean feat.

And lastly, she represents Elizabeth Hoyt. If you’ve read any EH, this fact speaks for itself. If you haven’t, your life has a big EH hole in it, and you don’t even know it yet.

intimacy

years ago a friend made a throwaway comment to me, that she thought having an orgasm was one of the loneliest moments in life.

The book I just read made me think about this some more, because a very tender moment at the end seemed to say the same thing from the other side. I’m not going to infer anything right now – here it is:

He moved inside her, and their passion built, but neither looked away. They kept their eyes locked, unwilling to give in to the primal instinct that craved privacy at this moment of deepest vulnerability.

He didn’t drop his head to the crook of her neck, but kept it above her, staring down. She didn’t turn her cheek into the pillow but gazed upward.

The boldness of allowing another person, even one so deeply loved, to have such an open conduit into the other’s soul intensified every moment.

From Dream a Little Dream by Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

i like you, i like you not

The most frequent comment I get from my writing teacher is, “Aren’t romance heroines supposed to be sympathetic?”

It’s a hard thing to nut out, because, on the one hand, yes. But I do so love a bitchy/cold/unpleasant heroine who gets her just deserts (oh poor her, she has to be undone by love). So how to write this, without losing reader sympathies altogether?

For me as a reader, I prefer her to be all the way bad, because I know, because of the genre, that she is going to change. This creates enough tension for me to want to read on and see how exactly that happens.

Two heroine’s I’ve read recently who’ve inspired this post:

Sabine from Kiss of a Demon King. She’s an evil sorceress and she follows through. So how does Kresley Cole keep the reader on her side and reading? Firstly, she’s entertaining. Because she’s not trying to come across as good, she cracks open the boring “good” hero, and we get some sparks. Secondly, we’re made aware that she’s an unreliable narrator, i.e. she thinks she’s heartless, but we know why, and we are given the tiniest glimpses that she doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Thirdly, there is one person on earth she loves before herself.

Rachel from Dream a Little Dream. She’s broke and has nothing in the world but her tiny 5-year-old son who keeps asking “Are we going to die now?” Things get really bad, and then they get a whole lot worse, and she somehow keeps going. All she is is her need to survive. Again here, there is one person on earth she loves more than her own life, that we see her do anything for. There’s also admiration for how she continues in the face of absolute desperation.

I can’t stand wussy writers who write a bad character, but you never really see them do anything heinous. These heroine’s are so brilliant because they are absolute in what they need to do to survive.

vampire, vampire…demon?

I got a bit excessive yesterday, even for me, and read 1.5 books…

Which brings me to the end of book 6 of Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark – the series that has, as you know, swallowed me whole.

I think one of the reasons those last two books caught me in such a non-stop way was that the heroes were demons. For people who read paranormals regularly, demons are probably a bit old hat. For me they were a revelation, and a real head-scratcher.

Vampires, even for someone who doesn’t read much paranormal, are very familiar. (According to special k, the first vampire was Cain.) They drink blood, an act which normally brings a kind of pleasure to the biteee (when it doesn’t kill them) etc.

I just had no idea how she was going to fetishise demons.

It turns out that they have horns which are incredibly sensitive (i.e. you wouldn’t touch a demon’s horns in public unless you wanted to be particularly crude) and lengthen with rage/passion. When they claim their mate they go “fully demonic”, which includes their skin going red (which acts as a kind of stimulant) and their eyes going fully black. They grow top and bottom fangs which they use to, uh, bite their female in a particular muscle that stuns her. In other words, she goes completely still while they have their way with her.

Oh, don’t worry though, she can’t help her pleasure while it’s happening, either.

Can you see why it made me scratch my head? Not because of how bestial and random it is, but because it does actually work as a fetish – it comes off as erotic.

Will maybe think a bit more about why when it disturbs me less to do so.

is mess ever this cathartic?

so I don’t know if it was yesterday’s post that finally inspired me, or whether it was the super-vivid, early-morning visions of what was growing in my sink, but I cleaned today.

Actually, I know what it was. Special k lay so still in my arms this morning in bed, and because I was still mostly asleep I could interpret his stillness perfectly. “Don’t be disheartened!” I said.

And though I could feel how every cell in his body longed to just stay in bed forever, he still got himself up and went off to run a cafe/slay dragons. I dunno, would you be able to have a lazy day after that, if the gorgeous man was paying for you to follow your dreams?

Anyway. Off topic. The point is that aside from all the “averting the apocalypse” stuff from yesterday’s post, cleaning my space cleans my mind. I walk through my flat and my brain is quiet.

Bliss.

So I’m wondering whether, for people who are obsessively clean, creating a bit of mess is ever this cathartic.