It Came From Outer Space…

I was thinking this morning about the irony of the last doctor’s appointment that I went to. I was all ready to ask him what he thought was the best weight loss supplement so I could get him to prescribe it to me, because I was at the desperate point of wanting to lose weight; and it turns out that my thyroid level is out of whack and so he prescribed me synthroid to fix that so that I would be able to right my metabolism and since then I’ve lost about four pounds and my energy level is returning which is going to be able to work in tandem to keep that going.

It’s gotten me thinking about weight issues and appetites of certain characters. The two stories that I’m working on right now feature very different takes on food. Sam, from “Too Deep” is liable to eat anything that’s not nailed down and hoard what he can because he’s so used to not having enough to eat, whereas Jay from the werewolf story hardly eats at all, which is a big issue with him and his family; and I still haven’t quite nailed down why this is on his part. He has plenty of food. He can eat. You’d figure werewolves have a really high metabolism and need to eat A LOT.

I some times have problems with these. I don’t want the characters to all wind up being carbon copies of each other like my Sims often wind up being. I have a ton of goth style sims with multi-colored hair and very unisexual in looks a lot of the time. It’s hard for me to sort out how someone who wears hip hop clothing would look as I don’t, and most people I know don’t either. So, while I might be able to look at TV shows and see people in those clothes I have no idea what is actually “in”. It makes me feel old, but there you are. My co-worker’s niece not knowing that Beyonce was in Destiny’s Child also made me feel old.

On the one hand it’s safe to stick with ways of describing people that you like, but other people aren’t necessarily going to like or be able to relate to that, and also if all the characters are the same in look you may as well be writing horrendous fan-fiction.

The vignette writing is going well. I’ve done four small blurbs centered around roofs and Jay’s habit of hiding out on them to chill. The instances are at four different times, one early teens in Virginia then a few years later in Scotland talking with his cousin Cora, and then a year or so later talking to his other cousin Clair and then a year or so after that talking to someone else on the roof who he hasn’t seen in some time.

I find them interesting for the little snippets of ideas that come out, such as that he had a school appointed counselor who he went and saw but didn’t particularly like or really talk to. I have a feeling it’ll work out to be one of those “you will do this or you will get kicked out,” sort of things. I imagine the family had this whole “he’s gone through such a trauma, the death of everyone in his family, we’re trying to connect with him, we need help,” bit. I have a lot of images of their mother, his aunt, acting quite a bit like Molly Weasley.

Some times my characters surprise me. I was absolutely sure for quite some time that Cora, one of the characters in the werewolf story was going to get a minor scholarship to go to medical assistant school and that’s what she would be doing. However, I realized that really wouldn’t be a reason to go all the way to London for school she could easily do something like that in Edinburgh.

However if she got a scholarship specifically for the University of London then that would definitely be a reason why she would go there. However the more her character presents — while she likes helping out with the “vet” and the hospital she also is interested in legal matters, so it makes much more sense that she would be studying legal matters and working in that capacity while in college.

Now I just have to work out what the main character is doing in college. In an alternate rendition of the story he was studying astronomy, but that was also a version where he had essentially been given away by the family who were a lot darker than they are in this version; basically a pack of feral wolves. In this version the family is a lot closer, nicer and more inter-supporting. However, he doesn’t have that much interest in the school aspect of things. He barely attends school and hardly studies using some of his abilities to retain good grades. Why would he go to college? On the one hand there’s the wish to experience the world and get away from the clan home itself for a while; but at the same time I’m not sure what his program of study would have been; and in college it’s a lot more difficult to get away with not going to class. The teachers don’t crack down on you as much about it because you’re paying for the courses and they get paid whether you go or not but at the same time they don’t go on your grades and actually doing the tests in order to keep your grade, you don’t attend and you lose points overall on your grade and so twelve absences and you’re failed and kicked out of school if you do that in enough classes.

I need to explore his motivations a lot more on that regard. I know what sort of things he’s doing socially. The people he hangs out with. The girlfriend that he has. I know he lives on campus; but I just can’t work out what exactly he’s studying. I suppose initially it would just be general education, at least if he were in the states, but I was not in England for college so I’m not sure how those programs work. If I’m remembering what I was going through I’d had specific areas of focus I’d studied in high school with the intent of concentrating on some of those in college; but I never got to college because we emigrated. So, with some research into the way college programs work perhaps something will click with me as to what he would be doing. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not music.

I’m thinking of writing in vignettes for a while. I had the idea a while ago as a way to work on stories when I’m having a hard time completing the full length novels; but instead to write short stories with the same characters, which essentially will give me the chapters of a novel in a haphazard manner. Then I can rearrange them into the actual story later on, much the way you take snapshots with your Canon camera and the arrange the photos to make the story the way you want it. I know in our wedding album there are a few shots which are “out of chronological order” because they make the story more dynamic; and some times in stories that’s what you have to do, to tell some of the story with flashbacks after the characters are established.

It’s doubly funny because we were over at a friends house over the weekend and Kore and I were both talking about the writing that we do. Kore’s actually taking several writing workshops in summer school, and I was saying that I’m not having much luck with the whole novel thing at the moment, and she said that she had been meaning to suggest writing short stories for a while to me, and that she was going to do some of that herself, because she knows that she doesn’t have enough time to get something done consistently and I have even less time on a day than she tends to.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not sure if I’m going to be working on the werewolf story or “Too Deep” for the time being; but I will be doing the little snippets. Right now it should in theory be a little easier to work on the werewolf story because I’m working on a short game based off that “universe” which has things narrowed down a bit better once more; but at the same time vignettes come more easily to the “Too Deep” story because of the way I’m writing it, as an interview.

Some times it takes me a moment to sit back and realize exactly how often I’m writing what I like. I will put characters in clothing that I would prefer to wear, much like most of my Sims characters wear corsets, or have multi-colored hair.

There are a few times I have to sit back and realize that the character would not wear that sort of thing, just because I prefer blacks, purples and reds, does not mean that they will, so I try to sit down before I write too far and work out more of what the character would wear, do they prefer natural or synthetic fabrics, what are their favorite colors? It all helps to recognize the character as their own entity.

Naturally a lot of the characters are an extension of me and my selves, but at the same time they’re independent from me. They exist within their story. I still write what I like, however, because obviously I’m not going to write something that’s just a fluffy romance for the sake of it, the story has purpose, there may be fluffy romance in there, but at the same time there are going to be werewolves, or aliens in there because that’s what I like, too. So, whether the alien or werewolf has a corset or a baby doll tee (now that’s an image!) they’re still a character that I like even if they’re doing things differently.

My room mate and I were discussing certain characteristics of gennies the other day. Gennies is short-hand for genetically engineered humans in the game I was running based on ‘Too Deep’ and ‘Too Deep’ itself. He was asking if one of the characters in the story was in fact a genny, and I admitted that they probably were but would not be aware of it throughout most of the story.

He said he had wondered based on certain descriptions of the character, particularly the joke about them not having hair anywhere except their head and the fact that they’d never use prototype 37c on themselves, and the lack of hangovers they experienced despite the amount of drinking that they did.

I said it makes a lot of other things make sense, but that while they had these genny traits they would have experienced them through their bloodline given they weren’t specifically engineered, they were born, but their family would have been gennies, either one or both parents.

These are those things that characters tell you though. I had started out the story, and the various iterations I had no idea that this character was a genny though the traits were there, always, in his character. I was as much a revelation to me as it will be to him in the story.

It’s very easy to want to make your characters perfect, or some times better versions of yourself, you can strip away certain flaws and foibles, transcend the boundaries of human existence but flaws are what make a character genuine. If your character is too perfect he or she is just going to tick off your reader, and in my case the writer as well.

My first stories at age ten involved people who discover that they’re princesses of some strange mysterious country, things of that nature are many little girl’s dreams but then to not only discover that you’re a princess but that you have super powers and billions of pounds in cash…all these just added on top make the story flat and dull. The characters become cardboard cut-outs.

I remember one story I started involved a family that moved to a mysterious island. Every family on the island and two children most one boy and one girl, but a few had two boys or two girls. I mapped out the entire island named every single family and all their members and wrote down who lived where what the island had as far as stores and other public buildings. I, of course, had names for the family moving in, including the fact that they had triplets, all girls, and how the twin girls of the triplets, given this story involve fraternal twins and one of the fraternal twins split into two. I wrote out several pages of it and gave it to Mum, she responded with a page of notes, asking me very poignant questions such as WHY would they move to the island in the first place? What’s going on with that?

All these mysteries needed to be answered, wouldn’t the family be very freaked out by the fact that every single family on the island is essentially a nuclear family? How do they feed themselves? The island can’t possibly be big enough to have all the animals and fields needed to supply it’s population. How does it function? Where are the multiple generations? grandparents? How are there no families with children younger than twelve? etc.

These are all valid points. I hadn’t really thought things through any further than “this is neat!” At the same time it taught me that even if you don’t initially tell your reader what’s going on you have to know the answers to these questions. To me the family was just another card-board cut out. I wanted them to be there so I put them there but that doesn’t work. There has to be a reason; it might not be a good reason. It might be that one of the parents grew up on the island and left but is now back because they’re looking for family inheritance; or it might be a caring reason such as a plea from a friend who is still there. The island might be an innocent place, or it might be some kind of freaky science experiment; either way there have to be reasons and motivation.

My main focus had been the fact that the twins were literally trying to kill their sister Odette. Why would they do that? Were they just messing around? Why would sisters suddenly turn so malicious? Sociopathy? Mind control? Alien possession? Boredom? I’ve since realized that killer twins is a bit cliche but at the time it was a horrific and enticing idea to my fourteen year old brain. Odette was the “perfect” child and they were the “devil” in return, foils, as I had recently learned in English class; but since then I’ve discovered these things should be more dynamic, that characters work better provided they’re more well-rounded and have more motivation than just that their author is bored and wants to try something; but then when you’re younger it’s easier to see the world in black and white, there are less muddy areas.

Now, I’m very embroiled in the mud. I understand that people who are good can do some horrendous things if they’re properly motivated, and that people who are on the bad side of a conflict, as far as a main character might be concerned probably have positive motivations for doing so which make them much more sympathetic. Still my characters surprise me. I was writing something out last night which wouldn’t let me sleep about Sam from “Too Deep”. He was talking about his “nemesis”; a character that’s on his side who he can’t abide and I realized that it was a really good thing said character was there. While he and Sam despise each other and disagree on pretty much everything, that character is the only reason that someone who is very significant to the plot lives, because if Sam had his way he would have just offed her because all he sees is liability.

Normally I see Sam as someone who is pretty conscientious of humanity and people’s right to life. I find it hard to imagine he would just kill someone even though I acknowledge that early on he’s very kill you as soon as look at you. Later on I see the conscientious person and I forget the evolution that has to go on for him to get to the point where he realizes this. You don’t just switch from feral to educated.

There’s one point I’m writing out where he and another rebel are essentially “lost” and they stumble across a group of houses and are looking for supplies, and I realize, this is someone whose grown up on the streets of what is tantamount to hell…why would he think twice about killing these people if he views them as a threat? Just as he teaches his rebel ally about emotion, conversation skill and intuitive response, there are things they may well agree upon that I find objectionable but he wouldn’t.

Other than coming up with juice as a future uber-meth is the fact that I was trying to decide if there would be other addictive things, what the fate of drugs like heroine or actual meth would be in the face of something like juice.

However as much as I idealize that we might have evolved beyond alcohol and cigarettes I can never see it actually happening. I can hope that they might find a way to make these things less bad for a person, but at the same time I wonder if that might just be because it’s easier for humanity to repair the damage that they do to themselves with their little addictions.

So, thus it is that Sam’s boss will continue to smoke his arturo fuente cigars, and Sam himself will continue to drink his “elixir” of varying kinds of vodka, and others will all throughout their universe until such a time as I can find away for humanity to evolve. Perhaps once the aliens arrive.

I’ve been writing a lot, yikes I just typed alot, which reminds me of something I read on Hyperbole and a Half, which was awesome: The Alot is Better than You at Everything. She’s a really awesome author, thanks to her I’m wondering if bear’s like coach gifts, see she wrote another article on Bear Fashion & Accessories I recommend her alot. (See what I did there? I’m SO witty :p)

Anyway, my point was that I’ve been writing quite a bit (phew) about Max/Sam/Dan and his adventures in “Too Deep” (that’s a story not a place). The title comes from the fact that often times when I’m writing his stuff this one lyric comes into my head, “’cause I’m in too deep, and I’m trying to keep, up above in my head, instead of going under.” (Apparently they’re by Sum41). I’m not sure what it’ll be called when I’m done with it but “Too Deep” works for now as I have a file name on my computer rather than maxdansamnadirzenithlunarwarstory.docx.

So, I’ve been writing quite a bit of that stuff and it’s proving interesting because of the way his voice comes across, several of my friends who have been privy to this early drafts for editing help have commented that they can hear an accent on the words when they’re reading, so I’m figuring that’s good. The main character has a “definite voice” woo!

Here’s a little bit of him as I’m being all braggy and hyper right now.

Swipe a cred stick from two people I pass there’s a bit of “OMG are you okay?” “I’m fine. I’m going for my boyfriend, we’ll go to the MPs, no really it’s okay,” one good thing about most Zen siders is they’re quick to forget you if they don’t really care and are just playing polite.

I buy some dark comfy things at the mall, and some bandages, gauze and ‘septic. Remember the first time I came back all beat up and Chambers was all put this on it and we’ll tape it and I’m all WTF is that? and he’s all it’ll stop the wound getting ‘fected and I was all…whu? We used to put water on it. I mean not water like over here, Sol used to call it Rooskywater burned like Hell but–Chambers thought that was real funny. He’s all, that’ll work in a pinch but ‘septic is…’septic is…better…yeah.

So, I was up and patch up. Then I buy new lighters, cigs, aspirin other mini-med things and stuff I can trade with over on night side, food that won’t go bad real quick, can openers for that food, blankets, clothes that’ll last. It takes a bit of time in the bathroom to pack it all nice and tight. I put Helena’s tag on the other chain I found and put it under my shirt. Then I take the done for cred sticks and wrap ‘em in my clothes and throw ‘em in a ‘cinerator by the casino before going for the border.

So, here’s hoping I can pick the thread back up once we get back from all our errands today.