The Desert Mermaid

Anybody want a space-gorilla-doctor origin story?

This is a project I started for no good reason. I'm pretty sure there isn't a market for Autistic Space Gorilla Delinquent Sets Up Technology Black Market In Stanford-Torus Pleasantville, but I've been having a blast writing it. I might make the book this is spun off from, the infamous Space Doctors Alien Medical Drama, available, but for now I'm just gonna post this one. If you like autistic main characters and space opera, this is gonna be your jam! It's a bit of a love letter to Mystery Science Theater 3000, too.

So: Here goes!

Gonna make this an index page for all the chapters, so:
Prologue (You Are Here)
Chapter 1: Civic Hygiene
Chapter 2: Focal Citizens
Chapter 3: New (Metaphorical) Horizons
Chapter 4: Healthcare and Ecomanagement
Chapter 5: Arts and Culture
Chapter 6: Hidden Gems
Chapter 7: Beacon Studios
Chapter 8: Safety Protocols
Chapter 9: Societal Breakdown
Chapter 10: Lessons From History
Chapter 11: Policy Amendments
Chapter 12: Station Identity Politics
Chapter 13: Centrifugal Force (Final!)

Oh, hey! Here's a ✨Paypal link ✨ in case you want to tip me! No pressure, but there it is.

CW for shitty family members and a reference to a gruesome death!

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In retrospect, I don't think I was supposed to know my dad was experimenting on children, but that never stopped adults from talking about it in front of me.

Not that it was a secret, exactly. But apparently I wasn't supposed to join the conversations about it. Once I asked Grandma and Ms. Coralym if they were talking about one of my dad's subjects, and Ms. Coralym's response was, "My, my, somebody has big ears."

Then she smiled at me in that way some people have, that always makes me feel guilty, as though I should be ashamed of myself for reading in the backyard hammock when she decided to lean over the fence to talk to Grandma.

I had no idea how to respond to something like that, so I ignored it. "But are you?"

They'd been using a lot of the same phrases Ms. Palbert had heaved out between sobs when she'd brought her son over to our house the night before: "wit's end," "unmanageable," "damaged," "unmotivated." The son she was describing stood a bit behind her on our porch, gazing at the sky panels dreamily. I thought he might be older than me, but it's hard to tell with paquos; they're smaller than koranos like myself, and they mature faster. At any rate, he seemed not to hear his mother's complaints, but when his gaze crossed mine through the front window, he flicked his ears amiably and continued scanning around at nothing in particular.

(Come to think of it, this might have been another discussion I was not supposed to hear, even though I was sitting on the floor doing a jigsaw puzzle not two meters away.)

Dad stood at the door, listening to her in his characteristic stonefaced silence until she ran out of superlatives. Then he said, "No."

( Ms. Palbert stared at him, openmouthed. )

Merry Xmas, amigos! Around here the X stands for whatever you want it to. Although it does look rather a lot like Christmas over at the Treehouse.

But what’s this? A new doll? Why, yes! I actually got her for my birthday, but I had some putting together to do before I introduced her.

But you don’t get her full background from a silly Xmas album. So. Let me tell you about Rocket.



( Okay, okay, I’ll cut her background. )

Anyway, tl;dr: I’m having a lot of fun coming up with Space stuff for her. I’m all over shiny space clothes, space robots (I couldn’t resist tiny Tom Servo even though he's not "canon"), space guns, space computers, and other such space necessities. She’s even got a jumpsuit in the works. Because god dammit, this is Raygun Gothic Retro Rocket, and I will do it right.

Okay, THERE! This time I really did finish typing up Doctors! With an ending I like and everything! I now have the entire thing typed and formatted, and 7/8 of it polished enough to send out. Once I run through that last 1/8 it’ll be time to whip out my d10 to see which of you volunteer nerds get to beta it while I decide on the place that’ll reject it first.*

But that will be tomorrow. I’m thinking tonight I’ll wind up reenacting the beginning of Romancing the Stone—the sad little yay-I-finished-the-book-time-to-party-with-my-cat scene, not the totally awesome dumbass western romance scene. Because god dammit I finished this fucker, and I gotta celebrate SOMEHOW.


*Of course it’ll be rejected right at first. This is why I plan to buy a shit ton of printer paper.

The problem with insomnia is, of course, the lack of sleep and the resulting bleak outlook on life and of course the health issues, but hey: sometimes while tossing and turning and hating the universe, you have REALLY AWESOME IDEAS.

Take me, for example. I just figured out how to finish the OGYAFE.

Granted, that's four books away, but goddamn I had to jump up and write down the epic climax at six in the morning. It's not like I was sleeping, anyway.

I am working on the OGYAFE because this past couple of weeks I've been so sick of Doctors! I can't even look at it. But it has just occurred to me that I'm one episode of editing away from having a REAL MANUSCRIPT OMG, and I think I'm dragging my feet because once I get that done I'll have to actually submit it for publishing, and that is scary. I just have to remember two things about it:

1. Dude, wait, that was the whole idea, and
2. IF I FINISH EDITING IT I CAN GET RID OF IT FOR A WHILE AND WORK ON THE OGYAFE GUILT-FREE.

So! Back to the writings--just as soon as I get some sleep. Goddamn, sleep. What a glorious idea ...

So, I have finished the composing part of writing Doctors!

Now to type it up,* edit the hell out of it, read it through to double-check for continuity, find a couple of beta readers, put it in manuscript form, send it off to a publisher, and prepare myself for rejection!

I will also be starting back on the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic (OGYAFE for short), on the theory that if I stay in the Doctors! universe too long the common belief that THIS IS THE DUMBEST BOOK ANYONE HAS EVER WRITTEN will overwhelm me unless I can retreat to a project I don’t hate with every fiber of my being yet.

I feel like I’m actually making progress. It’s kind of … weird.


*I am an idiot and do all my raw composing in pretty notebooks with silly pens—either fine-tip Sharpie markers or ridiculous gel-writers. Partly this is due to a color-coding System I have worked out, and partly because Sharpies are fun. Either way, I like it better than trying to type.

Aww. Loke just Picarded all over my notebook. My widdle character is giving speeches on moral philosophy!

Actually, except for this one scene which is all climactic, I’m trying to trim down all the incidental Picarding in my stories. And the careful specificity. I have the same problem as my narrator—when I refuse to make gross generalizations, it’s that damn basic need for accuracy that’s driving me. I understand the importance of modifiable prototypical concepts to make for quicker recognition,* but my precision-driven brain resents them all the same.

Basically this means I have to take out quite a few “Of course, there are exceptions” caveats. Readers are smart and should be able to figure that out.

Anyway! I haven’t finished the rough draft—got an episode and a half to go—but I’ve got a whole outline of things to insert/delete/change in older episodes—fix Jack’s age,** tweak The Hive’s dialogue, add a few alien mannerisms to Shuliu, scare the hell out of a few people, wedge in some flashbacks to foreshadow our main character’s Dark Weird Secret, etc., etc.. The difficulty with writing a novel is that I’m learning as I go, which means I make a lot of mistakes that have to be fixed. I’m hoping that I will get better at doing it right the first time as I get the hang of this.

It’s kind of exciting, though. On the days when I’m not gripped with melodramatic Artistic Angst feeling that it’s all terrible and I suck and who am I kidding, I actually think it’s coming together nicely.

I can’t wait to write the sequel.


*Think “dog.” You probably have one particular sort of proto-dog associated with that general image. If I say “husky,” “German shepard,” or “Yorkie,” you modify that prototype.

**I also had to think up a more in-depth understanding of how to make his leg fall off, which led to the dreaded Long Runaway Backstory and a scream-inducing visit to the snakebite page of Wikipedia. It was exactly what I was looking for, but the photo—DEAR OPTIMUS CHRIST, THE PHOTO!

Finished 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 …”

Well, I didn’t get the bookstore job. On to Plan B, which is not, much as I wish it were, sitting around waiting for the boss of the guy who turned me down to call me back, apologize for the clearly drunken insane behavior of his underling, and hire me. It is looking at other bookstores! With blackjack! And hookers!

Meanwhile, trying to become a Famous Author continues, with steps forward and steps backward.

Forward:
-I have sent out the Hive story, the one that the Captain Crazypants Writers of the Future people thought was pretty swell, off to another magazine.
-Speaking of Writers of the Future, the madness inspiration gripped me last night and finally forced me to write almost the entirety of the exploding cow story I thought up a few months ago and then promptly forgot about. I’m on to the denouement now.
-Doctors! continues to trundle along toward its first really climactic episode chapter, in which our hero begins to fight for his friends instead of just sitting around wishing everyone thought like he did.

Backward:
-The OGYAFE, which so far consists mostly of crazed notes to myself and plot outlines, is demanding some actual prose and attention. It is trying to distract me from my Doctors! before they are done.
-The runaway characters are beginning to swarm, too. I do not have time to write the Susan Epic, or the Romeo and Juliet and Space Pirates story, or Dweiji’s adventures in SPACE.
-And while the current Fukitol has steadied me mentally, it once again saps my motivation. Napping wishes to outpace writing as my main form of activity these days.

In limbo again, but I feel this limbo is not very bad. I am enjoying myself, at least, and I have Goals, so limbo will not continue indefinitely.

Back to the notebooks!

Shit!

So much for naming my tragically sane alien “Squishy”.

Yes, it would still be feasible, but since Formerly-Known-As-Squishy’s storyline actually involves studying neurotransmitters, I may just give up and give her another name.

Plus, come to think of it, I rather like “Sparky” …

Man, writing a first contact scene without a Babel Fish is hard.

Especially when the first thing you want to communicate with the aliens is, “Hi, we’re sorry unscrupulous pirate aliens abducted you, but you’re safe now in the galactic community! Now … can you tell us roughly which of the stars in this vast whorl of glittering systems is yours?”

Not to mention I still have sickbrain,* which means for all I know I just wrote a scene involving psychedelically furred aliens whose faces can fwoomp out like giant inside-out umbrellas and whose language sounds like dueling banjos.

Hah, wouldn’t that be crazy and … oh, it looks like that’s what I did write.

Good god, I’m not even on any drugs other than your basic antidepressants, and yet I see colors in music and firmly believe that the number eight is male and invent flying umbrella-faced banjopeople.

I probably wouldn’t even notice if I took LSD.

Well, anyway. This scene is complex enough that I wasn’t sure I was going to put it onscreen. The aliens are important enough to the plot of this Doctors! episode, but if it weren’t for the fact that it also provides a very useful setting for secondary character development, I might have just scrapped it. I myself would find a slow, uncertain scene involving a somewhat lost galactic culture trying to talk to a thoroughly lost pre-space individual to be fascinating if done right, but then I also found the linguistic appendices in The Lord of the Rings fascinating, so I’m not the best judge here. But I think if I do it right it’ll wind up useful and interesting.

I just hope I still think that when I get all the mucus out of my head. Otherwise I’ll have to try again, and damn, it was tough enough the first time.


*I know I’m whinging, but I am sick dammit and GET to whinge, and I hate the way I think when I’m sick. It’s sort of fuzzy and soupy at the same time.