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Plowing On
May. 16th, 2009 04:45 pmFinished the latest episode! I hate tying up loose ends afterward, but after crumpling a few pages of dumb dialogue, I have a page or two of halfway decent dialogue for the end.
Speaking of dialogue, I want to redo The Hive’s dialogue. I like the idea of a somewhat unreliable voice synthesizer working off of the top of a stream of consciousness, like a Dalek’s, only less hysterical.* Of course, The Hive’s stream of consciousness is pretty complicated, but I have to use at least the top layer of it. I can’t very well make the thing work directly off the speech production centers, since it’s The Hive we’re talking about here, and it never evolved speech production centers. I’m trying to decide if it can learn enough to become fluent in a language, or if there’s a basic ability here it lacks. I want it to have good comprehension but difficult production, which suggests it's got some linguistic ability. And since it's got such a vast and weird consciousness anyway, I think it could compensate for lacking wathever possible intrinsic linguistic neurology other species have with pattern-recognition.
The next question is whether I want the synthesizer to default to “on” or “off”—whether The Hive has to consciously turn the thing on, or whether it’s always on and it has to hold it off until it wants to say something. The first suggests more deliberate delivery, while the second would be more haphazard. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning toward deliberate, with a tendency to drop grammatical words in favor of lexical ones. I’ll have to tinker with it a bit to see what works the best.
Meanwhile, I plunge headlong into the next one, where I tear down a couple of the more confident characters with a painful bit of biology. Whee for suddenly becoming the thing you have always loathed! Writing is fun.
*I think I’m going to start demanding explanations the way Daleks do: “EXPLAIN EXPLAIN EXPLAIN EXPLAIN …”
Speaking of dialogue, I want to redo The Hive’s dialogue. I like the idea of a somewhat unreliable voice synthesizer working off of the top of a stream of consciousness, like a Dalek’s, only less hysterical.* Of course, The Hive’s stream of consciousness is pretty complicated, but I have to use at least the top layer of it. I can’t very well make the thing work directly off the speech production centers, since it’s The Hive we’re talking about here, and it never evolved speech production centers. I’m trying to decide if it can learn enough to become fluent in a language, or if there’s a basic ability here it lacks. I want it to have good comprehension but difficult production, which suggests it's got some linguistic ability. And since it's got such a vast and weird consciousness anyway, I think it could compensate for lacking wathever possible intrinsic linguistic neurology other species have with pattern-recognition.
The next question is whether I want the synthesizer to default to “on” or “off”—whether The Hive has to consciously turn the thing on, or whether it’s always on and it has to hold it off until it wants to say something. The first suggests more deliberate delivery, while the second would be more haphazard. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning toward deliberate, with a tendency to drop grammatical words in favor of lexical ones. I’ll have to tinker with it a bit to see what works the best.
Meanwhile, I plunge headlong into the next one, where I tear down a couple of the more confident characters with a painful bit of biology. Whee for suddenly becoming the thing you have always loathed! Writing is fun.
*I think I’m going to start demanding explanations the way Daleks do: “EXPLAIN EXPLAIN EXPLAIN EXPLAIN …”
