throw another bear in the canoe

Progress notes for 31 May 2006:

Undertow

New Words:  1235
Total Words (actual wordcount / manuscript): 51,687 / 59,250
Pages: 237
Deadline: August 1
Words per day to meet deadline: 657
Reason for stopping: End of scene, cliffhanger, time for bed.

51,687 / 100,000 (51.7%)

237 / 400 (59.3%)

The caper plot may be weaseling out of the book on me. On the other hand, I might still be able to pull it out at the end.

Still have to figure out why first-murder-victim-girl was important.

Sigh.

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Stimulants:  darjeeling
Exercise:  two hours at the gym
Mail: I got a real live copy of Blood & Iron today. Wish I still liked it on a sentence level. OTOH, I think the story is pretty okay.
Today's words Word don't know: kissable, midgame
Word I completely made up and am really happy with: wearez
Mean Things: Cricket had to listen to a boring snarky fortune teller, and when she got back to the safehouse, people she didn't want to see were waiting for her.
Darling du jour: 

"It works better if you ask a question."
"It works better if I give you hints, you mean."

Tyop du jour: polyarmory
Books in progress: Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate; Jay Lake, The Trial of Flowers
Spam name du jour: Mark Whaleburg. Sending me zoophilia email, appropriately.
Other writing-related work: none
Interesting tidbits: My god, I have no life. And won't until Saturday at the earliest. And I owe the whole world email. Eeeee!

From the "any work but the work we should be doing" files, in the last forty-eight hours I have:

* figured out a major point of character motivation in All the Windwracked Stars
* come up with three or four nifty bits of worldbuilding and superscience for Dust
* written the first sentences of two short stories: The atheist died a martyr, and so came before God. and Orm the Beautiful would never die. But neither would he live much longer.. Death is on my mind, apparently.
* (because I don't have enough unfinished stort stories)
* figured out how Patience & Fortitude ends.

Alas for me, when I get home and can work on it (sometime after eight tonight), it's back to Andre and his compound fracture.

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*Cris Williamson, in my head. Also, duelling Damian Rice/Emmylou earworms

P.S. My short story, "The Cold Blacksmith," is among the many good things available in the June issue of Baen's Universe.

It's about two of the secondary characters in the Promethean Age series, a geas, two broken hearts, a nanny goat who used to be somebody famous, and the inadvisability of trying to get somebody else to do your own hard work for you.

It's a sticky one. Because one can try to be inclusive, and run the risk of offending somebody--or one can stick to one's own patch, and allow one's work to succumb to paucity and poverty.

Me, I go for inclusive, while wrestling, mostly inside my own head, with questions like "Why isn't Obi Wan Kenobi a magical negro?" or, to put it another way, is it racism if I make Obi Wan Kenobi black?

(Having been told I was guilty of stereotyping when a gay character dies at the end of Scardown, it's now the sort of thing I think of a lot. No mention was made of the two bisexual characters who survived....) (I also killed off some black and Asian characters. And a whole BUNCH of straight white people. Is it racism if I make sure the brother always makes it out alive?)

I think the guilty tic, the offensive thing, is othering. If women or gays or blacks or Asians or whites or men or whatever are representative of the mysterious inhuman, either through idealization or denigration, if they are unpersoned, then you have a problem on your hands.

Bad writing, unfortunately, does not qualify as cultural appropriation. Otherwise, I'd be standing on my heritage as a Slav to excoriate some authors of vampire fiction.

mrissa makes a very good point: it's also an issue to lump Europeans together in one group or culture. I'm mostly Ukrainian and Swedish. We historically suck at oppressing people, being mostly concerned with hiding enough food from the Russians and Finns to make it through the winter.

yhlee has a good point when she says it runs the other way--that there are expectations upon her writing because she has an Asian name. That there is the expectation, in other words, that her work will be--dare I say it--ineluctably non-Occidental.

I'm not Australian, but if I need to write about a bunyip, I will. And have. And I will grant that tradition exactly the same respect that I grant the Christian tradition, or the Celtic one, or.... (yeah, those are big hunks of pie I'm hacking off there. Just run with it.)

...which is to say, I'll pick it apart to see what makes it tick, and build cool things from the clockwork bits, as truepenny said. I've heard it said that 'Europeans' should only approach the cultural treasures and stories of others with due respect and a hesitant step, and only if invited.

But I can't grant the story bits undue respect. There are things I would not write down, ever, because they are things that are not written down, and I respect that. There are places I would not go, unless invited. I don't mock in other people's churches. (And everybody's church is somebody else's church to me: I do not belong to any religious tradition.)

But stories are my culture. They are my only culture. They are the country where I live. I get help, when I don't know them well, and try to find people who can help me make them work.

But I refuse to live in a country that is only inhabited by white Americans.