I’m replaying Planescape: Torment in 10-minute increments between meetings and also rereading The Dark Tower[efn_note]My kid recently finished reading the series for the first time and wants to have deep discussions my memory is too hazy to participate in. She was expounding on something, stopped, and said, “This is sucking up a lot of my brain juice for something I didn’t even like.” And I said, “Yes, this is the Kingdom Hearts of books. You are now cursed to give it way more thought than the creator ever did.” That’s the thing that makes me love it, though—there’s just so much for my brain to chew on, both moments of genius and missed opportunities. Apart from the timey-wimey memory-slip stuff, it always makes me want to do something incredibly complicated with nesting stories. I don’t know what! But my brain funnel is ever scanning the universe for a sign.[/efn_note], so I’m eyebrows-deep in the two things that most influenced Grave Oversight and having feelings of the “maybe I didn’t give up on that forever, after all” variety. That was very much a sales-threshold project that failed miserably[efn_note]$14 was not the target sales threshold.[/efn_note], but if it strays even slightly into passion project territory, I might be moved to poke at Book 2 a little.
Heroine has taken her first of three voyages into liminal space, dramatically described as “a wound in the world.” I’ve got a floating note to do everything in my power to make “fistula” work there so my decades as a disposable healthcare worker weren’t a complete waste.[efn_note]My ever-watchful eye awaits an opportunity to whip out “crepitus,” as well. Maybe the necromancer lark for that one…[/efn_note] The best character for it is already delivering the line, but I’ve thus far failed to get him there, to my everlasting shame.
In her element, Heroine is knowledgeable and decisive. Her first time in the liminal space, she asks herself a lot of questions because there is nothing to be certain about.[efn_note]By the third time, she’s the expert and taunting an inexperienced adversary with her superior knowledge.[/efn_note]
I tripped over a page of Heroine trying to figure out the entire plot against her while she has almost no information (she wouldn’t waste her time with so few facts) and in the middle of a ticking-clock scene (she doesn’t have the time to waste anyway). It reads like something Past Me was fumbling toward for my own benefit rather than the reader’s. Even if what I was trying to get at was clear (it’s not), this isn’t the place. Rather than waste more of my own time trying to beautify what’s ultimately going to remain a structural flaw, I did another Exhilarating Chop™! If I miss the clunky, out-of-character part on the next read-through, there’s always the safety net of the previous draft to rescue me.
I had to check how likely it would be that educated people in my world would know stars are distant suns. Great news! “The first person we know of to suggest that the Sun is a star up close (or, conversely, that stars are Suns far away) was Anaxagoras, around 450 BC.” (Courtesy of the Stanford Solar Center.)[efn_note]Not-so-great news for Giordano Bruno, who “suggested the same thing, and was burnt at the stake for it.” By unhappy coincidence, that was also the fate of a science-minded legendary hero in story world. (Here, also Stanford, has more enraging details of Bruno’s trial. Obviously, it wasn’t about stars. “Recant. Come on, recant. We’re begging you to recant. Just say you were wrong and we’re right, and we can make this all go away and be friends.” My man wasn’t having it. Imagine how many other thinkers silenced themselves after seeing his fate. Imagine where we’d be if patriarchal institutions didn’t habitually brutally murder people who refuse to yield to them.) (Tangent because I can’t footnote a footnote: There was a movie with Alan Rickman and Madeleine Stowe called Closet Land that’s in keeping with this theme. Children’s author accused of being a dissident and tortured with the aim of extracting a confession. Eternally screaming at the reviews in the linked Wikipedia page criticizing it for not both-sidesing to create empathy for the fascists. PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS. “He’s not old enough to have been her rapist.” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ABUSERS LIE UNTIL THEY HIT A NERVE, YOU KEY-PRESSING BABOON? My dude, there appears to be plenty of empathy for the fascists already. *cleansing breaths* This is one of those bizarre cases where I remember experiencing something as a small child, but I was 17 in 1991, when the film was released, and I would have seen it on HBO or equivalent even later than that. Perhaps it made me feel small? It’s not fun in any way, but it’s powerful, if you’re in the right headspace for that and you can find it streaming or catch the stage play.[/efn_note] We’re at steam engines (an invention of our 1700s), so if we assume there’s a general order to scientific inquiry, we’re safely past thinking stars are high-flying fireflies.
In a bit of serendipity found during revision, Heroine (in regard to being extorted by a character who is mentioned but never appears in this book) “begrudged no one with the practicality to use the tools at hand.” The first bonus story from Hero’s POV is a prequel titled “The Tools Circumstances Provide,” which his father always encouraged him to use, and which Heroine will become soon thereafter. I screeched a little bit when I came across those words. Golly, this author sure was clever to pair this guy who has to lie to get help for his impossible quest with the one woman who’s all “hey, needs must, woulda done the same myself.” I gotta read all her stuff right away!
Hero had to give Heroine an “anchor” to the place he wants her to travel through an enchanted portal to get to, and what that anchor is is still a blank. This is a not-insignificant writing issue, since a) she has to receive it initially and inspect it to be sure it’s not dangerous, b) when she’s asked if she has an anchor, she has to do a frantic search of her person to be sure it wasn’t among her abandoned belongings, and c) it has to become “the object of her unwavering focus,” so she has to think about it in great detail. That’s a fair amount of words waiting on this blank to be filled. It needs to be something of that place, something Hero strongly associates with home but not something so sentimental he’d be unwilling to lose it, small enough to clench in her fist, not cheap enough to discard but not valuable enough to pawn, and something she can associate with Hero rather than a mythical place she doesn’t believe in. Sounds like a riddle. Who wrote this garbage? I’m never reading her crap again![efn_note]No, thank you, I don’t want suggestions. I am very much NOT a create-by-committee writer (day job on the story assembly line excepted). The louder I complain about the parts that are like pulling teeth, the more satisfying it is when I wrench them out. “Here, use this random tooth I happen to be carrying around, no need for all that effort” just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ll know it when I see it. (In fact, the bloody pliers popped loose the first viable option as I made that prediction, and the development possibilities spurted forth. Behold the power of complaining!) (Two hours of scribbling later: Gotdam, this is genius. This is Hero’s entire arc, and HE LITERALLY PLACED IT IN HER HAND. And yet there are people willing to outsource having ideas. Wild.)[/efn_note]
Heroine emerging from liminal space into the “mythical” kingdom she doesn’t believe in marks the end of Act I. Word count on the current draft is currently 24,800, down about 700 from the corresponding point in the previous draft, as the chopping has slightly outpaced the hole filling. I anticipate that balance will shift around the midpoint as we leave the “too much, too soon” zone and we’ll end up with roughly 170,000 words again.[efn_note]This is a prophecy, not a goal. I’m not under contract. It can be whatever number of words I think best serve the story.[/efn_note]