The Desert Mermaid

God dammit.

I've got to start over on this latest Scatterstone installment.

Those of you who know me might have heard about the unfortunate way my writing process works:

1. Have some idea how to get from Point A to Point B in a story
2. Take a long, laborious time to write a boring scene depicting it
3. Have a much BETTER idea about how to make the scene INTERESTING
4. Write the damn scene AGAIN

Step 2 takes forever, but unfortunately it seems to be an integral part of my mental process. So, yeah, I've gotten it written, but it's extremely boring at the moment. The good news is that, according to my process, I now know how to make it far more interesting. The bad news is that, yeah, it's gonna take a while.

I have got to figure out another writing process.

I keep trying to write up a commentary about one of the most interesting fantasy tropes: the Religion Is True trope. Mostly because I've been fleshing out some of the mythological beliefs of OGYAFElanders,* although it's also because I just read Tamora Pierce's Battle Magic and realized that I've been ... slightly disappointed with the direction the Circleverse has been going in for the last couple of books (this one and Melting Stones) on account of this specific trope.

I always liked the Circleverse because the religion, while a central part of the story, was not indisputably, unambiguously true. You had the temple dedicates praying to and swearing by and honoring the gods, but unlike, say, Tortall or Lord of the Rings or David Eddings' books or the Young Wizards or even goddamn Zelda,** in this world they don't do it because the gods regularly drop by the local waffle house for a short stack or leave helpful voicemails for the heroes or bequeath Our Heroes with Mystical Crysticals. Hell, it's entirely possible that the Circle gods don't even exist, and it's just humans ascribing random occurrences to them.

Y'know, like this world.

And don't get me wrong. I fuckin' like all the Religion Is True examples I listed up there. You can tell some great stories with a premise like that. Hell, I'm even working on a Scatterstone installment featuring some True Animism. But even then, making folklore True actually removes an important aspect from the people in your story: their unbridled creativity.

Now, y'all may know I'm an atheist. I grew up an atheist. My big adolescent revelation wasn't so much that I was an atheist as it was the realization that other people weren't. And while that did lead to a good bit of WTFing on my part--wait, you all BELIEVE this?!--and I do think there is a lot of harm to be gotten out of religion, I also think that religious mythology is fascinating. You can learn a lot about people by the myths they come up with. The stories teach important ideals. You can see the way the mind works in magical thinking, anthropomorphism, spiritism, and just-so explanations. And of course, they're really damn inventive. It takes a lot more cognition to make up a story than to report it.***

I don't think I'm the only one who finds this a bit of a gap. Terry Pratchett (of course) explores it a lot. Discworld's got a sort of symbiotic nature of folklore and humanity--like in Hogfather or Small Gods, where the fairies and gods and Anthropomorphic Personifications are real and concrete, but were born of and fueled by collective human imagination. And even Tortall suggests that the Immortals have a similar backstory, though it seems once they're dreamed up they become independent of humans. But those all still have concrete representations of those concepts. The Circle books were the first time it felt like it really was like our world, where it really was all abstract.

And that was the model I used for OGYAFEland, where there are a bunch of different religions/folklores/mythos ... es ... that are not objectively True, but that influence the thoughts and actions of the humans. It looks like how I see the world. And while it's cool for Pierce to change that around, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was a little disappointed when the Circle Religions started to leak into reality.


*And I just recently had a FABULOUS idea for a short story set in OGYAFEland, god DAMMIT who turned on the Inspiration Fire Hose?

**Or even His Dark Materials--weird, if you've read the book, but while the point is that religion is a construction, it's still not a human construction: angels are a Thing, and they are Messing With Us.

***When I was a kid, it frustrated the hell out of me that everyone was trying to figure out what might have inspired fantastical artworks. "Where could the idea of mermaids come from? Could it have been sailors seeing manatees?" I couldn't figure out why it never crossed their minds that maybe somebody just thought it'd be cool to give a human woman a fish tail. Yes, I know people had frames of reference to work with, but hell, they had fish and women. All it takes is one weirdo with a bit of abstract thinking.

I guess my dwarves are more Pratchetty than anything, really. I am hoping the whole "dwarf women have beards" thing really did come from that one stupidly ambiguous line in the LotR Appendices that suggests that they are so alike in appearance that they are often mistaken for dwarf men, because that would mean that someone besides tweener Amelia read that and thought "Wait ... does that mean ...?" And because it's spawned such fun results.

Anyway, now that I've gotten the Scatterstone post up with its little treatise, I can tell y'all what a huge relief it was to discover that dwarf women did have beards in The Hobbit movie.* Pratchettish dwarves are fun, but I also find the idea of fancily beribboned and bejeweled and styled ladybeards** terribly entertaining. (Torn World's Elizabeth Barrette also has a take on pretty sparklies for beards.)

Unfortunately, the movies' takes on Dwarf women rather preclude the possibility that any member of Thorin's company might be a lady dwarf, as my sister and I theorized. I mean, they still might, but it's not the default. Ah, well.


*Somewhere off in the Didn't Get To Be In The New Movies Actor Warehouse, Dominic Monaghan is elbowing Viggo Mortensen and waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

**I mean, you know, ACTUAL LITERAL FOR REAL ladybeards, not that other kind.

What I Learned Since The Autumn Equinox:

• It's a bit painful to win the trust of a shy cat and then have to destroy it again when you have to give her eye medication every few hours.
• Those profoundly stupid-looking Breathe-Right strips you stick on your nose? They help ENORMOUSLY when you have swollen sinuses.
• Awesome animator Friz Freleng would concentrate so hard on animating a scene that you could literally set fire to his desk while he was at it and he would not notice. His friends discovered this through several practical experiments.
• Some gallbladders have really recognizable problems, like gallstones. Others just slowly croak over several years.
• Trunk or Treat is not reserved for just Utahns.
• Sharpie makes good pens that don't give me a headache now!
• Quenya has an extensive case system, but it's also kind of weirdly redundant. Seems Tolkien had trouble making up his mind about a lot of things.
• If your political party forcibly ejects anyone who demonstrates even an iota of rationality, it will not go well for your crazy-go-nuts party come Election Day.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is known as the movie that invented the twist ending, but what I didn't know is that it was invented by accident because the studios thought the original untwisted ending was too macabre. Studio execs--messin' with your movies since 1920.
• It may be sad to leave your cross-town library job, but dang is it a relief not to have to drive that far all the time.
• When I observed a couple of years ago that Kevin Clash has gone mad with power, I was more right than I knew. (I was talking about the supersaturation of Elmo in everything! I didn't expect THIS! DAMN YOU, KEVIN CLASH)
• A single episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Youtube exactly equals one medium session of boring WiiFit Free Step. Time flies when everything is hilarious.
• There may be another unexpected upside to switching narrators in my Doctors! story: my former narrator gets back all the weird characeristics that got in the way when he was narrating! Why didn't I do this sooner?!
• That butter-and-flour mixture I've enjoyed making for years as the best part of soup-cooking is called a roux.*
• The ch in "chalcedony" is pronounced as a k.

*I know how to do a lot of things in the kitchen, but I don't know what to call a bunch of them. So years after I've learned something I'll find out there's a word for it. Clearly I need an authoritative 1950's narrator looking over my shoulder at all times.

The regularly scheduled freak October blizzard came about two weeks early this year. The pumpkins are unimpressed, but that might be it for the tomatoes. And the cat has been absolutely letting us have it, grumbling and carrying on about the cold and the wet. I think she thinks it’s our doing.

And it never fails: I look out at the first snow of the year and get a surge of happy chemicals in the brain.* What’s with that? I swear I’ve got some kind of reverse-SAD or something.

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Book club discussed Song of the Lioness! At least, I think that was a discussion. We’re not exactly a group of real conversationalists. I chatter on about books, then try to let others get a word in edgewise or engage them by asking questions, which usually gets mumbled responses, followed by awkward silence. So I fill the silence with more noise and t turns back into a monologue.

I like them, though. I just wish we could talk a little less awkwardly.

(I did get to traumatize them by telling them how the Narnia books ended. By request, of course.)

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Latest fun topic of research for writing: pregnancy and childbirth. My Playtime Universe presented me with another story idea, but the timeline means that one of the characters will be very pregnant when it takes place. I figured that wouldn’t slow down her determination any (she's awesome like that) and it’ll actually make the story a lot more entertaining if I can swing it. I dunno, the idea of a pregnant hero in a swashbuckling pirate adventure amuses the hell out of me.

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Also, still into Raygun Gothic for my latest project, and decided to finally watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I’ve wanted to see it, but the blinding sepia tone put me off. Now that I’m watching it, I still dislike the filter something fierce—I realize it was meant to echo the sci-fi serials, but prefer my old-timey future to be bright primary colors, deco pastels, and crazy halogen neons, a la Frank R Paul, and I have the feeling if they could have made them in color, the ’30s would have agreed with me. The special effects are updated to match what was in the people's heads; why not the colors, too?

Also, Jude Law really isn’t the Spaceman Spiff type.

But goddamn, the story is spot-on pulp sci-fi, damn fun and totally entertaining. I keep squeaking with happy when I see the giant robots marching, or the ridiculously implausible airplanes diving into the sea, or the big goofy monsters,**or the amphibious jet packs, or Giovanni Ribisi's gratuitous Actual Raygun. The vintage ads were a nice touch, too. And this marks the first time Gwyneth Paltrow worked for me, so hey—I can deal with sepia for that.

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Smashed my pinkie with a book truck today. It hurts to type. So I’m gonna stop now. Off to play Zelda.

*Also an equally inexplicable overwheming urge to play Zelda games.

**Another improvement over the old serials: the critters can actually be in the shot with our heroes, and don't appear to be occupying some parallel dimension.

Today's ridiculous Google search for the sake of a story: "How to kill a bear with a knife."

Damn, I love writing.

(Unfortunately, it turns out you can't kill a bear with a knife. Bears without knives have enough of an unfair advantage against hobbits. Bears WITH knives ... don't even try.)

ME: I believe I am entering a manic writing idea phase.

MY MANIC CREATIVITY: (hobbit pirates again and dragons for OGYAFE and magic systems and orange blood and space!kraken …)

MY SISTER: Along with your “I love Alien” phase, does this mean you’re going to write some epic Alien fanfiction?

MY MANIC CREATIVITY: WHAT IS THIS I HEAR ABOUT ALIEN FANFICTION? BECAUSE I HAVE IDEAS ALL UP ONS ABOUT THIS VERY THING!

ME: Well, I wasn’t, UNTIL YOU SAID THAT.


Dammit, this is going to be one of those phases where I have so many ideas I get none of them written, isn’t it?

Okay, okay, the ginger Klingon is less irritating now.

I could have done without the ginger-Klingon sex, though.

The idea of introducing Pilot to Gypsy, however, has given me an excellent twist for an upcoming Doctors!verse novel. When I return to a sci-fi ruining state of mind,* the medical saga of Shipmonster G. Space!Kraken,** already inspired by an aspect of Gypsy, gets an upgrade. It hasn't made me cackle before now. I love it when I cackle.

Speaking of medical drama, I can't stop writing it even in high fantasy, it would seem. You rarely hear, "There will be a slight delay in our world-saving Quest on account of our hero's recovery from open-heart surgery" in these stories. I'd like to see the Houses of Healing deal with a character whose heart has just exploded. THAT'S RIGHT, YO, MY NOT!ELVES ARE WAY COOLER THAN YOUR ELVES.

Damn, I love this hobby. You wish yours was half so much fun.


*I oscillate between sci-fi and fantasy moods pretty regularly.

**Another placeholder name. It takes me YEARS sometimes to come up with good names.

For the record, the G stands for Gamera.

Ah, buggrit. Here it is less than a week before my birthday and six weeks before Halloween, and now I realized what I want to do for both of them. Seems that my current creaton* bombardment doesn’t just include the four or so entire fantasy sagas demanding to be written by last week SEND HELP; it’s also about art projects—such as pirate and Halloween costumes.

Unfortunately, I can’t just do one of these things, because I have dolls. I’d have to make ten costumes for each occasion, and I don’t have the time or the money to do that right now.

So the upshot of all this is that, unless I drink way too much PowerThirst over the next month, there will probably be no doll Halloween album this year. On the plus side, I have tons of ideas written down** to do for next year! And don’t even ask me about next year’s Talk Like A Pirate Day. I will try to make it epic.


*Creatons are particles of creativity. Not to be confused with croutons, which are particles of salad.

**God help me, y’all, I have started a CRAFT NOTEBOOK.

An Open Letter To Disgruntled Authors

Please quit hammering on about how your characters are like your children. I realize that your characters are important to you, with a bond that cannot be understood by outsiders, but dammit your simile’s just inaccurate. I have read your books. I know what you do to those poor dopes. Your book is not a nurturing environment.

Therefore, when I hear you say they’re like your children, it makes me want to call child protective services.

C’mon—you can come up with a better comparison. You’re writers. I’m sure you’ll think of something.