Clarion West Occasional Report: the beginning of Week Six

[aithne]

Week Five kind of ate me. I think I'd finally realized that I'd been away from home for over a month and there were weeks left to go and waaaaah *throw toys*.

Then I went and got bubble tea and everything was okay again for a little bit. I am doing okay with the social, though I'm starting to get into the zone where I'm really pushing myself; my hearing comprehension is spending more time on the fritz than it has been. My Week Five story kind of fell on its face, I fear. It's a creepy little story that starts out with a body and a one-person spaceship and a sculptor; I mistakenly didn't mention where the body came from, because I honestly didn't care. If I learned anything from that story, it is that people are really interested in how random bodies came to be when and where they are. That interest completely overshadowed the arc of the story. It was another experiment in extremely tight third-person POV, and I still absolutely love it, but i will rewrite and revise. A really interesting species of alien showed up in the middle of the story, at least in reference, and so I am now gestating in the back of my mind aliens who deal with causality different than humans do and whose communication is completely nonverbal.

(This is the problem when someone with a linguistics degree tries to write about aliens. The awareness that the human capacity for language is exquisitely dependent on our brain structure makes, say, universal translators a completely laughable concept. See also the Native Tongue series by Suzette Hadin Elgin.)

Anyway, I wrote a story with a spaceship in it. I learned from it why I don't write stories with spaceships in them, and it largely has to do with my allergy to putting into a story any more technical information than absolutely necessary to move it along. I do think I should try some more SF; what I really would like to accomplish is hard SF without technical infodumps, as an exercise. It's likely going to be easier for me to accomplish if I stick to my sciences (biology, botany, linguistics, etc) rather than try to play in the realm of physics. I was attempting to explain to someone the other day why it is extremely important why we not confuse the measurement of time for time itself. I pretty much failed, as I can only manage that explanation when I am well-rested.

Anyway. Week Six is upon us; my last stories will be critiqued tomorrow. I have a revision of "The Isthmus Variations" and an ill-conceived transreal story on the docket, the latter of which I kind of hope nobody reads.

I have in the back of my head a post about why i tend to write fantasy, which I will at some point write out, but the meat of it is this: fantasy is the literature of the human soul. It is what comforts us around campfires and what we will take with us to the stars. Fantasy shines a light into all the primodorial places and asks, "what distinguishes us from the monsters both within and without?" Fantasy is the literature of our blood.

I'm good with writing that.

Comments

[doctorturvy.livejournal.com]

I thought universal translators were impossible to avoid. Of course I never considered them to take on a form like a babelfish or a very clever robot. I look at it more from the point of view of physics. You ring a bell over here, and everything bounces around a little, for miles and miles. An alien creature does this or that and it can't help but impact every cell in our bodies just a little bit. From that point, once it hits us, it's our job to take up the translation. To interpret it, no matter how strange the medium and how unnatural the pace, to translate it into our own peculiar, tralfamadore-hostile, cerebrally-tuned context. Everything that feels, and thinks, and communicates, has no choice but to be a universal translator.
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Oh my gawd, that sounds so pedantic. Punch me in the shoulder.

[maramaye.livejournal.com]

I know that in the last week of an intense workshop the last thing you're thinking about is Week 7... but I have a question and possible request for your photography. =) maramaye at yahoo and tell me if you're still doing that, rates, etc?