marmota_b

With the previous reflective post out of the way, here's what I originally wanted to write.

The upcoming chapter of We Can't Fall et cetera* is finally, finally beginning to look like it can be finished. Background: I need to introduce Boba into the story at this point. Specifically, I need to break up the string of Kil-centric chapters to focus on some of my other characters, and for Reasons it needs to be Boba. The trouble was, Boba's introductory chapter categorically refused to come to me in anything but very tiny pieces. It threw three characters I had not intended to include at me, and refused to reveal what the encounter with the one I did intend to include was like before the other three got their say.

They finally have, and the other meeting and the environment have finally begun to take shape.

Despite the difficulties, I really, really like the shape the chapter is taking now; I think it is much better for having revealed its form on its own terms instead of being forced into it. And so will the story be. The chapter needs to carry a lot of weight on its shoulders, what with Kil unexpectedly having gotten a lot more space than originally planned, and I think it did find a very good way to do that. I'll still be chiselling away at it so I cannot promise any posting date because Real Life is Real Life. But soonish.

Am really enjoying finding the right words to say things, too, which is a joy I had lost somewhere in the messiness of the past couple of years.

* 2020 Marmota, why did you give the story such a clumsy name? Probably because you did not realise it would grow EVEN MORE and become A THING.


Also, with more time to reflect on things again, I realised one of my significant stumbling blocks with Narnian fanfiction, both the Choruk'la'kajir universe and (especially) The Peridan Chronicles has been the inability to sandbox my worldbuilding and plots on a map and imagine realistic travel times et cetera. So I googled around, and found this post with a composite map, which I think is an excellent starting point for my own experiments. Pleasant surprise to be told the maps actually are to scale and do more or less match up with travel times mentioned in the books (except for the sea and islands). I had a hard time picturing it, and kept thinking it did not line up, probably because I did not have a clear-to-read map of the whole world at hand.

It's still not quite enough for my needs. I will have to make my own version of the map and place my own inventions on it, like Stormness Fast, to see how exactly they relate to the places we know and where exactly they fit on the map. There are areas where I need more detail than the symbolic features of a fantasy map - especially around Stormness, obviously.

Computers are helpful and open source / community-built free programs are one's best friends for this sort of thing. The author created that map by smushing the existing ones together in GIMP. I think I can easily continue by putting that map in Inkscape, adding a grid, and figuring out the scale of things in specific places, without ever having to go to the trouble of drawing and undoubtedly erasing things by hand. Do something about the questionable location of the islands as mentioned in the post. Probably create a sort of gridded flat blank without the fancy fantasy map details that I can print out and play with further by hand-doodling. I will share it for anyone else's worldbuilding purposes when I do, of course. :-)

 So, guess what, it wasn't just Lyme disease, it was anaemia. BAD anaemia...

This is a public service announcement: iron deficiency can make you depressed. If you feel scatterbrained, and always tired and out of spoons for no particular reason, and depressive, try looking into that possibility. Obviously anaemia has other symptoms but one of the terrible things about it is that they're all fairly minor on the surface and it makes even your brain go weird and then you don't put things together. I had it bad some years ago and have to watch out for it now, now that I know what the other things feel like, too. My sister has it now, worse. I think I might try to put together some descriptions of some of the odder, less-listed but typical symptons we've both experienced so other people may also know what to look out for and maybe realise they have it? It's apparently pretty widespread, especially in women (for obvious reasons).

Contrary to edenfalling who says August is the month nobody takes vacation, in my world for the past five years it's the month when everybody takes vacation. I'm starting my two weeks off on Monday. The two weeks before were supposed to be light work as things are getting finished and orders are petering out, but yesterday it suddenly ended up being "light work but I had to stay at work for nearly twelve hours as things needed to be finished."

Like, mostly doing nothing in particular but I had to be there and watch over things. So I took that opportunity to do some sorting out of myself, among other things making some mind maps which my sister recently suggested as a way to organise my tangled mind processes.

Turns out that yeah, it's a great way to put down all the scattered interconnected ideas I carry in my head for WIPs and ongoing stories and crafts that can never quite be put down in a linear manner. So I'm definitely going to do a lot more of that during vacation. And hopefully it will help me work on some of my ongoing stories. This is also a public service announcement of sorts. If you have trouble writing chronologically and filling in the gaps even when you have vague ideas of what needs to happen... maybe mind maps are a good way to fill the gaps? Not sure. I have yet to see how it works for me more longterm. At the very least, though, I think it may be my best way to battle block in that my blocks often aren't necessarily a lack of ideas (as most advice on conquering blocks assumes) but rather a lack of ideas on how to make the existing ideas work organically... and mind maps are kind of an organic way of organising thought.

I'm curious to see if it will also help with the process of processing, as touched upon in the previous posts... On that front, I have a while ago decided to write a list of all the little(ish) things that have been annoying me recently and that I haven't really had time to process because of all the big things, and then ceremoniously burn said list. So I started on that, too. It's a long list and it's definitely not complete but even just putting it down is quite therapeutic, and I'm lilooking forward to burning it because... fire is also a bit therapeutic, for me, in terms of things like watching a candlelight or a campfire.

... I just wish said future ceremonious burning could stop some of the (biggerish) things on the list.

Before you start yelling at me: no, of course I don't mean "but how do I even work in some POC characters" or "how do I even write POC characters".

No, what I mean is "how do I make clear this character is a POC without hitting the reader over the head with it or making it seem like I'm intentionally pointing out the POC characters against a white default (big can of worms)."

This particular pondering is borne out of a story on AO3 I was just reading where the author basically shouted "all these characters are POC, *** canon!" in the Author's Notes; and while I basically agree with their reasoning in that particular case and have zero problem with it beyond not sharing their opinions on which looks are the most handsome among their fancasts... :D
... I also felt like "okay, I also want to point out unambiguously that these and these characters I write are POC for the people who care as strongly about it and because I'd rather hate for my readers to default to white when I picture them this way; but I really don't want to go about it in such a forceful way."

It's a balance between "well, they look this way in my head, but will the reader know, or will they default to white?"and "I really don't want to describe the characters in a very explicit fashion if there's not a valid POV reason for me to be describing them like that since that way lie other cans of worms." (And since I tend to write mostly in character POV rather than as an omniscient narrator.) The third thing to weigh is - shouting that they are POC in an Author's Note like the aforementioned author did feels rather like the "Dumbledore is actually gay" sort of cop-out from my personal writerly point of view, in that I try to make the story stand on its own and make sense even without the Author's Notes (although I do often include more background info in there).

It's easier when you're writing in a Spare Oom environment and can just say where characters are from and people will form their own mental images. When you're writing in the Narnian world, that only works for all readers with Calormen, and even then I bet the mental images will differ (are they Arabic? Indian?). When you write in the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's... harder.
( Further elaboration of my mental processes )
It's also a pondering born out of my digging through my backup disk over the holidays and finding some old pictures of some characters I drew when I was a teenager and have largely forgotten about. Several years ago, I had copied them from my old desktop computer onto my backup disk, which was a very good thing indeed because shortly after father updated something on that computer and it crashed. (It may still be salvageable but he hasn't gotten around to full salvage yet.) The pictures were then sitting on my backup disk and I'd rather forgotten about them.
(At some point after scanning them I had decided it was a good idea to run them through a smoothing filter and only save them that way, so you can't really see how exactly I drew them. Our younger selves are often stupid that way.)

There's this lady whose whole story I've completely forgotten because I never wrote it down and it never progressed beyond some sort of backstory. I know her name because that's in the filenames, but that's it. Her name is Venus and I'm not sure I like it, but I think I'll keep it because people having names that don't go with them definitely is a thing so from that point of view I do like it (and it jumpstarted a sort of new backstory for her). She looks cool and needs to find her way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe at some point although I'm not entirely sure where to fit her. And she's almost certainly black (at least in the American sense; I think she's actually mixed race from the way she looks?).
I just designed a black character at some point in my life while trying out a new drawing technique, many years before that sort of thing became cool on Tumblr :D, and I didn't even think about it hard enough to remember anything about her backstory when I see her pictures years later, which hints to me strongly that the way she looked had nothing whatsoever to do with her backstory. The clothes she wears do (and the facial scars undoubtedly do); I'm fairly sure she was from the same space-opera-ish universe as the next character, which is why I think I can safely transplant her into the Choruk'la Kajir universe.





So there's this other lady. I do know who she is, she was from a story I wrote when I was about twelve or thirteen that was a rather clueless ripoff of Star Wars and some other things, and she got to be a big player in that universe though mostly in a behind the scenes capacity (but due to her shaping up entirely on her own as the sort of capable behind-the-scenes character who pulled off things before my floundering protagonists did, she's a character I'm still very fond of many years later). Her name is Arve; which turns out to be a male name in Scandinavia, fictional names can be funny that way. She is definitely Asian in her looks (I've now tried to pin it down and I think Nepali is probably closest to my mental image - but how exactly do you describe that when you're writing a character from a different planet in a fictional universe?). It's pretty funny because I found one picture of her I'd forgotten about right after I stumbled upon a Tumblr post on how (not) to draw Asian people (which I now can't find), and there she was, I got it down pretty well when I was a clueless teenager. :D (A bit more of an explanation why I did further below.)
Not that the pictures are anywhere near perfect, because my drawing skills as a teenager were not quite up to the task of drawing just from mental images (and they probably still aren't). But I think I captured all the respective features well enough that you get the idea, and if you combine the two images you could probably find a good "fancast" if you wanted to badly enough.
It's rather telling in this context that I had a pretty clear image of her in my head but somehow never even described her in the story. It's equally telling in this context that Arve never got a description in the story because that's exactly the kind of character she was - people overlooked her, and she made full use of that. She would be overlooked and underestimated, she would observe, draw her own conclusions, and then act decisively upon them.
Goodness gracious, I love Arve, but I'm not sure she could make the universe hop quite intact.





The third strike in this vein is another character, from a bit later, from what was already a conscious Star Wars fanfiction that never got too far but which will definitely find its way into the Choruk'la Kajir universe later, in some form. That character looks exactly like Sridevi. Not in the sense of "I fancast Sridevi in the role"; in the sense that I had this image of a dark-haired lady with huge dark eyes and a certain facial shape in my head (and attempts on paper), and then my sister showed me a video of Sridevi on YouTube years later, and then my mind went "whoa, that's Anadarya!" I can't look at pictures of Sridevi without going very emotional for entirely different reasons than her fans probably do.
The name started out as a bit of a placeholder because she's something of an Amidala expy (it is, of course, Anna + Darya, and a vague mirror of Amidala) - but it stuck so that's her name now. (And BTW in my Czech mind it's been up till now spelled with a J, not Y, until I wrote it down in this English text and realised you'd pronounce it differently.)
I won't show you the pictures of her because just like with Arve my drawing skills were not up to the task of capturing the mental image so mostly they would just show you various degrees of how much I could not draw Sridevi properly as a teenager. :D

And I think there lies my writing POC problem. If you asked me to draw the characters in my head, I would draw them a certain way because duh, that's what they look like - but how do I capture that in writing when I tend to intentionally just hint in my descriptions?

Of course I do succumb to the weakness of defaulting to white, too. But I think I can lay some credit at the door of Karl May, of all things, for actually having grown up with a more colourful world than there was around me in Real Life during my childhood. His books may suffer from the Mighty Whitey and Noble Savage complexes and whatever other accusations are being levelled against them at this point in history. But the indisputable fact is that a lot of his characters are not white, and the stories are never "whites vs The Other" - the protagonist groups are always mixed, which frankly can be quite progressive even for today, let alone the 19th century...

It's rather funny because when I look back at my old characters, I find out they were actually often more diverse than the characters I tend to write now... that when I was coming up with stories freely and still largely unencumbered with writerly concerns, that's what I came up with. The stories were a lot more silly, but the characters were more diverse. I had characters of colour, I had mixed race characters, and I don't think I even thought of it that way, they just looked a certain way, they just came from certain cultures, they just had parents from different cultures. And whenever I am reminded of all that, it feels so strange to compare it to all the discourse around POC characters I come across now, that I just... did that.

Also: We never had TV, so a lot of contemporary popular culture got to me only in variously convoluted ways, like articles about TV shows and films in magazines, or catching part of a film or an episode of a series here and there when visiting other people. I read rather a lot of travelogues when I was a teenager, books and a magazine (lots of isssues over the years), and there were all these people. Especially in the books, people living their lives, people the Czech authors did things with, and were on first name terms with, and were joking about Czech beer with, whatever. So my characters looked like people. In retrospect, I can't help but think that sort of travelogues is actually a lot better for casually exposing you to diversity than films and other forms of popular culture; but I also understand why people are pushing for diversity in popular culture because obviously most people don't grow up casually reading travelogues.


Anyway.

Right now, in the Choruk'la Kajir AU, I can get away easily with canonically POC characters with maybe brief descriptions (one would have to be particularly stupid to argue Aravis and Lasaraleen are not POCs, and Boba Fett has also been firmly cast for a while now).

And I got my headcanon racially ambiguous Peridan across very easily by way of describing him from the POV of a character meeting him for the first time. (Either he's the Peridan Chronicles Methos, in which case he's vaguely Near / Middle Eastern of uncertain ethnicity, or he's Telmarine, in which case he's mixed race Polynesian / Causasian, which I think is almost as good as canon for Telmarines anyway. I will probably have to do a whole post about my headcanon Telmarines one of these days.) In fact, since that's simply how I headcanon Peridan, funnily enough it kind of only hit me afterwards that what I did there was fairly explicitly describe a racially ambiguous character - so yes, therein lies most of my problem.
It happens organically when it happens organically, so what do I do when the story just meanders around it without my noticing? It's one of those "there's something that remained in your mind without making it to the page" things, but one that's more difficult to pick upon for, say, a beta reader (if I had anyone beta reading this thing), than things like plot holes are. How do I train myself to notice, and how do I divert the flow of the story to hit upon the necessary notes to get the point across, without derailing it? (Please ignore the mixed metaphors in the previous sentence.)

Current pondering: I now headcanon Corran Horn as basically looking like the German-Turkish actor Erdogan Atalay (just with eyes on the green side of hazel). There's this image of Corran, Corran is short, a former cop and a bit of a cocky pilot, and Atalay is short and plays a cocky Autobahn cop in a long-running TV series; it's one of those "can't unsee" things.

So, depending on how you look at it, my headcanon Corran is also a POC. The thing is, personally I probably actually don't really look at it that way? Make of that what you will. How do I make my readers see him more or less like I do without clumsily hitting them over the head with some stupid stereotypical descriptors, dangling a "look, a POC to feed your need for POC" before them? This is the Galaxy Far Far Away, it's just the way he looks, no big deal.

Before you start yelling at me: Don't worry, I think I've already found the correct POV character for pointing it out organically.

I'm wondering whether I should or shouldn't add the "Character(s) of Color" tag to the story currently in progress. They are there. Several of them are listed in the character tags anyway, so is that worth pointing out separately?

Just... I wanted to share this whole thought process, and maybe ask, how do you deal with it?

Also, oops, I wanted to finish the next chapter in the story but my thought processes and writing got once again derailed, by this. But I think it was worth addressing, if only because it's one of those things that should help me make the story better.

(Second oops, the post break got broken, but it's too late to think now, I'll fix it later.)

I've just unsubscribed from a story that's actually quite good.
But I have not read the past I'm not sure how many chapters, and when I saw the alert for another one in my inbox, I just felt tired, and like "not another one"; not in the least excited to read it.
I realised, as I impulsively headed over to unsubscribe, that it's because the ongoing story isn't what I signed up for when I started reading. I started reading what the description still says: the story of a friendship between two characters (ETA: With languages! I forgot that part, but that was the main thing that pulled me in.). Instead, what the writer is now posting is a multicharacter multichapter prequel to canon.
Which is no doubt a good thing in its own right, but it's not what I signed up for. I think I have only a limited number of space in my life for long ongoing stories, and I guess a large portion of it is occupied by my own... and among those of other writers, those that do interesting worldbuilding things get precedence.
(I'm currently, among other things, subscribed to Deliver Us by Bittodeath, a Star Wars AU in which Obi Wan is raising Force-sensitive Clones and becomes Mandalorian and... while I'm not sure everything in it is entirely my cup of tea it absolutely does do interesting worldbuilding things. ETA 03/2021: Unsubscribed from that as well for a while now because the things that are not my cup of tea started outweighing the ones that are, and one really does not have much filtering ability left these days.)

ETA: Also considering unsubscribing from another Mandalorian Obi-Wan AU series now that the author put all members of a found family (Obi-Wan/Jango + Boba + Luke) in gay relationships.
That train of thought, of course, gave me pause. Analysing my thoughts on the matter, I conclude it's not the gay relationships as such, it's because they make it boring. It makes for a less diverse set of characters. Not just because of the sexuality as such - frankly I'm not overly invested in the shipping side of fandom so if that remains mostly a well-written relationship in the background of a story that actually makes me invested in the relationship (which the Obi-Wan/Jango side of things does) / just part of the whole scene, I would not mind that much either way; and vice versa, if a straight relationship took over too much I would also mind.
What bothers me about the reveal of two more gay relationships in close succession is actually because they come in the tracks of killing off (or at least seemingly killing off) a major female character (Ahsoka). So suddenly a fascinating alien female cast member left and a new human male I have no particular interest in entered the scene, and it's boring.
*shrug*


Mostly writing this down as warnings to myself as a writer.
(It's a good thing I went into The Peridan Chronicles already knowing it was going to be a long haul. I'd hate to do a bait and switch like that to my readers. Generally I refuse to start publishing a story without having at least an approximate idea where it's going; it has the added benefit that even when I end up stuck - which I often do - knowing where I want to go with it means that despite appearances, I don't abandon stories.)

Although I'm also the sort of creative person who badly needs inspiration, so I do not want to be too nasty to it.

Even when it's being nasty to me.

Case in point: I had a little idea for the further fortunes of Kameen from A Butterfly With Its Wings. Today, I was inspired to open a Word document and write it down (with actual words to put it in) quickly before I went to sleep relatively early. (I'm ill, and I need the sleep.) The idea, the idea that had always been there, was that - Aravis had to learn the secrets of sleeping potions somewhere. The idea now was of a short but poignant one-shot that showed how Kameen continued to play a small but important role.

Yeah. Famous last words and all that. My inspiration decided it would not stop there.

Before I knew it, I had the beginnings of a much larger story, a story in which Kameen Akrima and Lasaraleen Tarkheena start Calormen's first Abolitionist movement and the Narnian world's equivalent to the Underground Railroad.

Oh, and also it would involve Corin's Calormene misfortunes from Syrena_of_the_lake's story Pack Rat (and by natural inclusion, from my Packing for the Journey).

Unfortunately, it also involves elements of the larger story which make it unpublishable until I get to MUCH LATER in The Peridan Chronicles (which, you may have noticed, is still stuck in a colossal hiatus), because Spoilers.

And here I am, after 1 of the AM, with five pages of text that barely scratch the surface.

AARGH.

Had to get it out of the system immediately, without doing that out loud.

In case you were wondering what happened to Kameen: that. That's what happened to Kameen.

The one good thing about all this is, I'm liking the Abolitionist sprawl of the story much, much more than the original idea, in the grand scheme of things.