Milo's World
author's blog for Oct-Dec 2005

last update 2006Jan20 up home

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005: I think I've learned something new in the process of doing Heroes and Witch Girl. I read Aristotle's volume on drama and epic poetry a few weeks ago and he makes a point about the 'reader' needing to experience an emotional catharsis during the piece. This must have sunk in. I don't think I really understood what he meant at the time I read him -- I believed that all a good story needed was a change in the main character and some interesting goings-on to hold the reader's attention. Maybe a good fight scene.

But Heroes evolved in quite a different way than my earlier efforts -- it built itself up around its conclusion and the emotional movement of the conclusion was in focus throughout the story. Likewise Witch Girl, which I started later. Looking back I can see my earlier efforts -- notably Totem Animals -- have not failed for lack of anything quite so much as they never carry the reader along to a moment of personal resolution. They do so for the characters, and I've thought the problem therefore was that the story failed to involve the reader enough with the protagonist -- but this idea of emotional catharsis is really something unrealated.

The characters must reach their own moment of high emotional tension and resolution, but independent of that the movement of the story must bring the reader to his or her own probably different catharsis, not simply the weaker catharsis of sympathy for the emotions of the hero.

I think a good story transforms the hero in one way and the reader in another.

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005: I wrote a first draft of a story that will be named Sudden Unexpected yesterday, and the first draft of an untitled story about a goth girl and a psychology student from Indiana today. The former's about ready to go -- I'll take another look at it maybe tomorrow or Friday and send it off. The latter I think needs to lose about three paragraphs in the final (third) section and be tightened up a little there, and might have two more drafts ahead of it. But I like its characters. ;-)

Milo's World has been on hold for a couple weeks now. I set out to do a two-day conversion of the bulk of the old Milo's World flat-text notes into the current hierarchical HTML management system and -- well, if you've read much of this blog you've realized I chronically underestimate time requirements. The two stories above mostly got written because I was going insane sorting text files into their appropriate places in the HTML structure. It's got some days to go yet, too. When that's over I'll get back to MW and in the meantime I might do one more short story to pass the time sometime next week.

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005: I think it's important to make a story as good as it can be before the public sees it for the first time. This seems to be the practice with most authors (Lucas is an exception, he seems to be unable to leave his Star Wars movies alone). But it is tempting sometimes to take a shortcut with the intention that perhaps the thing can be fixed if a story is reprinted later. I believe the reason this isn't done is because the vast majority of readers simply don't ever want to go back to the same piece of fiction twice -- I see this in my proofreaders, who are sometimes very difficult to persuade to reread a piece.

I think something related to this is seen in the public fascination with the `new', as well as the reluctance of periodicals and publishing houses to rerun any material that was less than very successful the first time. Here as well Lucas is an exception in that his legions of fans continue to eat up successive "special" revisions of Star Wars.

Another exception seems to be Asimov, for whom I've seen a reprint volume publishing his early drafts for comparison with his finished versions. You know your career is established when people will pay extra for your rough drafts. ;-)

So Milo's World comes slowly, but I hope it comes well.

Friday, October 21st, 2005: There's a lot of drudgery involved in constructing a long tightly-written fantasy. Short works I'm sure are easier in this regard because the sustainment of a realistic, plausible environment in light of the way one fact ripples outward in its influence until it's affected a hundred others is constrained by the boundaries of word-count. That is to say, if the entire story takes place between a family of four upon their rural front porch on some sunny Sunday then the `container' of the story's limited context ensures that the family's relationship with Uncle Ted or national politics or Brazilian economics is a possible influence on the state of the characters that the author can safely discount (unless of course national politics happens to be the whole point of the story).

Likewise a long work that's written episodically or at least mostly episodically, or engineered with popular rather than literary value foremost in mind -- such as Howard's sprawling setting for the Conan stories or Moorcock's Elric setting -- doesn't demand the tight construction and balance seen for example in Tolkien, or Herbert's Dune. Put simply, inconsistency is forgivable when the plot doesn't rely on consistency.

Unfortunately, Milo's World is both long (inarguably) and tightly-written (hopefully), and so for the author (again, hopefully only for the author) some tedium arises in terms of necessary background labor. I think I can claim now to understand the truest reason for Tolkien's lengthy appendices.

I'm talking about this for the benefit of other authors setting out to build an extensive and intricate world for the first time. I've found there's a line between solidifying background which will never directly appear in the narrative and writing in the foreground, i.e. what will be the narrative -- but it's not all of one and none of the other, and I find myself sometimes spending an entire week working primarily on some facet of Milo's World that will never directly see the printed page. At times this is discouraging but I always find when I get back to work on the narrative which the background is intended to provide a foundation for, that the value of that effort comes through in a richer feeling in the prose itself.

By way of example I'll relate the hair-puller that inspired this short essay. It's also a good illustration of exactly how trivial this sort of background effort can be in terms of its direct influence on the "surface" of the narrative -- and yet I feel that if the work's not done, I'm left with inconsistency in the narrative, possible confusion for the reader, and I believe a sense in the reader's mind that the work is slipshod.

In early drafts of ch05 Bester refers to the country around Highsmith as the "north lands", and later refers to his own country north of the north lands with the additional adjective "far". This became a technical term: the land around Highsmith was the "north lands", and it included the "far north lands", which was Bester's country.

Time passed between the first drafts of those early chapters and the time when I needed those terms again -- I'd begun working on the as-of-this-writing untitled short story set 23 years before ch05 and concerning Durant and Kuora. Durant is a city in the far north lands, and some of the narrative in the short story refers to events in the surrounding north lands and the far north lands they encompass.

The problem is, I'd forgotten what exactly I'd previously meant by those terms, and didn't realize I'd forgotten. I wrote considerable background that now treated the term "north lands" as though it referred to what I'd originally called the "far north lands", and now used the term "far north lands" to refer to the foothills and mountains at the north extent of the far north lands. Basically, I'd subconsciously shifted both regions north. :-)

When the time came that I had to make a decision about the mess that had ensued from my error, I could see two solutions. One was to ignore the inconsistency on the assumption that most readers wouldn't pay much attention to such general regional descriptions anyway, and the effort required to repair the problem wouldn't pay me back for the readers who would be irritated by the sloppiness. The other was to invest the time in reviewing all the occurrences of both terms and fixing them.

There were approximately 25 uses of each term between my background notes and the actual narrative. I'm still not done cleaning them up. And in the end I hope doing so will make a stronger story. Drudgery... but drudgery with a purpose.

Monday, October 10th, 2005: Never having been one to stick to my own plans anyway: My wife's computer and Omaha are waiting indefinitely. I mentioned intending to work on them an age ago on June 16 (this is more of the "ancient history" that I'm sorting out of my todo file that I referred to back on September 22), but as it happened I ended up going right back into MW before I did. They were to be the final project of a sort of tech-oriented working vacation I was taking from MW back then.

Friday, October 7th, 2005: Just a general note to clarify what's going on. Up until a few days ago I was ostensibly dividing my time on the ch08 Demon Bear sequence and the untitled Durant story. In fact what I've been working on is extending the structure of the Milopaedia such that I can import a large amount of historical and geographical data out of the Durant story file -- I wrote it for the region but never really dovetailed it with the rest of Milo's world, and that's necessary before I write much more on the Durant story for sake of avoiding inconsistencies that'll be even tougher to clean up later.

I think that's the second time I've mentioned the Milopaedia and still haven't explained what it is. It's the HTML "database" I use to organize all the non-narrative Milo's World material. Think of those long obsessive appendices at the back of Tolkien's book and you've got the basic idea, except I happen to be organizing mine by encyclopaedia-style entries.

Anyway, that detour was derailed a few days ago when a story that had been brewing in the back of my head for a while (a whole year now taken from its earliest point) grew up suddenly and wanted written. It's called "Heroes". It's coming together quickly and I wouldn't be surprised if the first (very rough) full draft is done in 36 hours.

And then what happened last night is an alarm I'd set to go off six weeks after I finished the last proofing cycle of Totem Animals went off. ;-) It was to remind me to go back to work on the story after giving it six weeks out of my mind so I could reapproach it with a fresh head and finish off the once-and-for-all final draft.

So, the plan is currently... finish a rough first draft of Heroes and get it in front of a new group of proofreaders. Finish the next draft of the Demon Bear sequence, which I was close to anyway, and get it in front of the current ch08 proofers. Start back in on Totem Animals with another new group of proofers. The Durant story, which ironically my proofers seem in general most excited about, will go on hold for a little while while I get these other loose ends out of the way and get the Milopaedia hammered into shape to let me extract some of the miscellanea cluttering up the Durant story file.

"Fear is the Color..." is also on hold right now... it doesn't seem to be wanting to gel just yet.

Something that might be of passing interest -- Totem Animals, which I've spent weeks upon weeks writing and rewriting since I started it late in June, began as a project to see if I could turn out a story from start to finish in one week. ;-) I started getting initial pieces of it on May 17 and finished the first complete draft on July 3, but I didn't start writing in earnest until toward the end of that range. If memory serves I actually did complete the real writing of it (instead of just jotting notes of important scenes and dialog) in the neighborhood of ten or 12 days, but of course it turned out to need a whole lot of work after that. As my MW stories go, I don't think I'll ever be quite happy with this one... it has some flaws all the way down in its foundations that I consider uncorrectable. Their presence is a result of my being such a green author -- I don't believe I'll make the same mistake again.

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