"The Tower," a World of Darkness faerie tale

I used to play Whitewolf pen & paper games with my friends (almost entirely the new World of Darkness, with few exceptions), and one of my favorites was Changeling: The Lost.  I wrote this story as a background for my character about five years ago (it's also the "first appearance" of the name "Samantha Rose," which I re-used over and over because I liked it and am bad at naming things); I just dug it up to provide some "mood lighting," since the setting for my new book is Definitely Not Whitewolf.  Ugh, that needs unpacking to not sound even stupider than my last book idea.

During one of our Mage:  The Awakening campaigns, we had a Rules Lawyer in the group who was famous for arguing with the Storyteller ("Dungeon Master") about what certain antagonists could do and whether something made sense given the rules.  For Mage, since we had all read the whole book to decide who we wanted to be (and to not need the rather complex mythos explained to us at every plot point), our Storyteller hit upon a rather ingenious idea:  "The source book is simply what mages think they know about the world.  When something comes up that disagrees with the book, surprise:  the book is wrong."  The Rules Lawyer, unsurprisingly, didn't enjoy being in a world where he couldn't at least have an Out-of-Character handle on everything that was going on.  I, by stark contrast, loved the idea of being in a world with flexible rules that was driven by creative inspiration rather than conforming to a spreadsheet.  But then, I'm not a Rules Lawyer...

That's rather what I'll be doing with this next book:  I'm adapting elements from various World of Darkness settings just to have some starting material, keeping and renaming what I like, and discarding what doesn't fit or is just ugly/silly/stupid.  I'm also doing some amateur mythopoeia of my own, which I tried to avoid for the sake of simplicity, but turned out was inevitable when I found myself drawing up a chart to align certain characters by zodiac affinity.  Keep in mind, the zodiac isn't what matters - it's just a mechanic I used to get things arbitrarily started.  After that, the way those alliances all play out and the things the characters do within their context, that's the actual interesting part.

Anyway.  That should all be very reassuring, I hope.  :)  Here's the actual freakin' story.  Enjoy!

The Tower

Samantha opened her eyes.

She was in a large room, dimly lit by candles, laying on a cot.  She didn't know why she was there.. she didn't know where "there" was... she didn't know who she was... she didn't know anything...

Suddenly alert, she stood up to figure out what was going on.  Her clothes were ragged and torn, her joints a bit stiff.  Looking around, she saw that she was in a circular room with one door.  Moonlight fell in through one of several small windows, separated by large bookcases.  Each window held a lamp, and there were two on the large oak table in the center of the room.  At the table was a single chair, and upon the table was a single book, open, with pen and inkwell beside it.  She tried the door; locked.  The windows were too high to look through, too small to climb through, too narrow to gain a firm grip; she could reach only the lamps hanging just before them.  At the foot of the cot was a small chest of drawers.  One drawer was full of neatly arranged inkwells, another held bottles of what she assumed was lamp oil, and the last was full of empty bottles and inkwells.  Underneath the pillow, she found a golden key.  She picked it up, intending to -

Samantha recoiled in horror as the flood of memories washed over her.  She remembered her life - growing up in Anaheim - her parents - junior high softball - boyfriends - high school gymnastics - college studies - visiting her uncle - catching bugs - and thorns...

Thoughts on "The Stand"

I finished reading The Stand a couple days ago, which along with Lucifer's Hammer was part of my crash course in apocalyptic literature.  I linked to the TV Tropes pages for those books because I'm going to be discussing The Stand primarily in terms of storytelling mechanics, so really, that's what's most useful here.  Also, beware that I'll be linking to the pages for a lot of the tropes I mention (because that makes it easier on you, Dear Reader, if you don't already know the lingo), but that means you'll have to be vigilant against wiki-walks (because TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life).

OK, that paragraph up there, it took me over an hour to write.  Not because I was trying to decide on word choice or whatever, but because I fuckin' clicked on my own damn links and then got sucked into mini-wiki-walks of my own ("Bellisario's Maxim?  What's that?  'Contrast to Moff's Law'... what's that?").  So I'm being serious here:  there will be a lot of links, so you should only click on something if you don't know what it means.  (Really, everything should be fairly apparent through context - but if it's not, here's a link.)  And even then, you should make sure to read only until you understand the trope I'm talking about, then close that tab.  Capisce?

As a "final starting note," I feel I should point out that this is not a review of The Stand, it's criticism.  I liked The Stand, even if it took me about 700 pages to "really" get into it (I read the monster 1,141-page uncut edition).  I also recognize that it's one of King's earlier works, and that it's over 35 years old.  None of these exempts it from criticism, of course; but please realize that none of this is done in anger.  The fact is, though, that I casually mentioned one day that I prefer King's later works - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon remains one of my favorite books of any kind to this day - and someone said The Stand would change my mind.  It most definitely did not.  This post is about why.  THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-nine: Silk

I have an endless fascination with macroscopic properties that are explicable in terms of microscopic properties, dating back to high school when I learned why the structure of water makes it a universal solvent, why the alignment of iron can result in magnetic fields, and where pH comes from.  (When I asked my chemistry teacher, "What does pH mean, though - like, what's the thing that number's based on," she responded in a monotone, "Negative log of the hydronium ion concentration."  After about ten seconds of goggle-eyed musing, I understood exactly what that meant and have never forgotten it.)  It's also what caused electricity to be irreducibly magical to me, until I came to see voltage as a kind of "electrical pressure" - then, like, a million phenomena and failed experiments all clicked into place and I felt like a dummy... but an enlightened dummy!

So it should come as no surprise that one of my favorite books of all time is Napoleon's Buttons:  17 Molecules that Changed History, by Penny LeCouteur and Jay Burreson (well here's an interesting tidbit:  my copy has this cover design, but that subtitle).  The sixth chapter is on silk and nylon, nylon being developed for the purpose of being an artificial silk.  Other interesting tidbit:  in technical chemistry terms, "artificial" and "synthetic" mean two different things; "synthetic" means "laboratory-produced but chemically identical," whereas "artificial" means "not the same thing but has the desired properties" regardless of its method of production.  So "artificial sweeteners" are "fake sugar"; they're not really sugar, they just do the thing we want sugar for; whereas "synthetic vitamin C" is the genuine article, real ascorbic acid that happens to have been synthesized in a lab instead of being derived from a plant.  (This difference is articulated somewhere in the book, but at least four of the seventeen chapters deal with the difference and I refuse to track it down.  I've been procrastinating long enough and only need some pictures, anyway, because the rest of the important information is just in my head.)

Anyway.

Cross-post: Adventures in Taxonomy!

One of the unwritten problems with Tabula Rasa was that I kept wanting to interject little bits of the supernatural, but the whole blessed point was that the world was completely mundane.  So I sloughed them off to another story I had been thinking of which was legitimately about the supernatural.  Eventually, I had so many fragments and ideas shoved over there, it started becoming a story in its own right.  I know a story's good when characters I give placeholder names get names of their own - I'm famously bad at naming things, you see - and now I've got so much that I can't not write it.

First, though, I have a bit to write about silk for 101 Interesting Things.  And before that, I've got this humorous little bit that I pulled off from my Playskool blog.  The bit about the Wheel of Death waxes fantastical, but the rest of this is a real conversation that I really had in real life.  No joke, it's almost literally word-for-word, because I wrote it all down right after it happened (and, when I went wiki-walking, even jotted down notes on the story so far).  Anyway, enjoy!

"There are only three things in the sea:  fish, amphibians, and mammals.  OK, maybe a couple plants."

On Bullets, and the Biting Thereof

I can't do this right now.  I thought I could, and if I just jumped in feet-first then I could power my way through it and clean it up in post; but no.  Tabula Rasa is officially scrapped for now (again), because as I try to iron out how I want everything to go, I'm realizing that it's just not workable in its current iteration.  Reasons below the cut (they're all spoilers, so beware - it's mainly a list of reminders to myself of "Problems I Need to Fix Before I Can Actually Write This Shit").

How to Imagine a Billion

Carp on a tarp, who would've thought a book about how we know things could be so research-intensive to write?  The problem I'm running into now is that every time I'm like, "Wait a minute, I should look this up," I end up going on a wiki walk where I kinda-sorta get my question answered but find way more interesting things along the way.  So, OK, now I know how ejection seats work, and I have a reasonable guess as to where the USS Eisenhower was in the spring of 2000, but I'm also finding out all kinds of things I don't really need like stuff about the new robot we put on Mars and how plots of various movies could have been solved in minutes (or would have been solved if the main characters did nothing).

Anyway.

I was talking about space & stuff with a friend, and we were going on and on about how so many people have a really poor grasp of just how astronomically large astronomical distances are.  At one point, it was alleged that humans can't even conceive of a million, let alone the billions and trillions required to understand space.  I thought about that for a while, and as it turns out, yes I can so too imagine a billion - and so can you!  Here, let me teach you how.

First, a teaching tool.  Did you ever use these little yellow blocks to count when you were in gradeschool?  I did, at least in the fifth and sixth grades (I went to different schools every year before that, so I don't know how far back they use these).

WARNING:  Product contains small parts.  Not for children under 3 yrs.

Wait, you mean tiny yellow cubes a centimeter on a side are chokeable?

Tabula Rasa, Chapter One

<<(Prologue, part one)  <(Prologue, part two)

Chapter One

Friday, May 5^th, 2000.  8:15 AM, Eastern Time.

Samantha opens her eyes.

She blinks spastically, disoriented by the light.  Incoherent shapes and unfamiliar colors cloud her vision.  Noise fills her ears, her skin prickles, and her breath comes in awkward gasps.  After a few moments of abject confusion, she recognizes the color dominating her vision:  white.  A few moments more, and she grasps the purpose of that white shape:  ceiling.  Her head jerks about to take in her surroundings:  she is in a room, laying upon a bed.  So far, so good.  She takes a moment to breathe and collect herself.

Samantha sits up, rubs her eyes, rolls her head around on her neck and then stretches her arms upwards, interlocking her fingers and popping her knuckles, elbows, shoulders.  She lowers her arms and breathes deep, smelling dust and something herbal-oily and a little bit of sweat. The noise in her ears gradually resolves into birdsong and the occasional breeze rustling through the trees outside.  Her right knee feels funny, a little loose, like it needs to be adjusted.  She flexes her leg back and forth, back and forth, hears a muted pop and feels a brief pang followed by relief.  The walls around her are covered in brightly colored patterns, but near the ceiling is a procession of strange shapes in black and white, wrapping around the whole room.  Samantha looks at them carefully:  they are at once intensely familiar, yet utterly alien.  Names for the shapes slowly well up from she knows not where: Aa Bb Cc Dd...

Painfully slow, Samantha recites the alphabet in her head with the aid of the childish frieze.  Sounds for the letters tug at her mind, though they are many and varied.  She is dimly aware that the words “white”, “ceiling”, “window”, and “birdsong” now have spellings and are no longer floating abstractions in her stream of consciousness.  As she repeats the alphabet in her mind, she hums a simple tune, and the tune makes her think of the night sky, twinkling and jeweled.  She looks around at the objects in the room, not quite sure what to make of them.  One shape stands out to her:  a rectangle, with smaller rectangles running lengthwise across it, and little circles at each end.  Samantha has no word for it, but it's got clothes in it, and she is suddenly aware that she is wearing a white tank top.  She pulls back the blanket from across her knees and sees that she is wearing pajama pants with a splotchy pattern of greens, browns, and near-blacks.  Blaze orange letters run across the amorphous shapes, and Samantha slowly sounds out the words:  “YOU CAN'T SEE ME.” She reads the words again, uncomprehending – she most certainly can see them!

Tabula Rasa

Friday, May 5^th, 2000.  6:54 AM, Central Time.

Glory’s left arm twitches, once, twice.  She immediately leans left toward a chair at the dining table, falling roughly into it as her eyelids begin to flutter.  She knows what’s coming next.

Her legs hang crooked to her right, her arms splayed out across the table.  As she stares out at the world, mute and paralyzed, Glory is surprised to see that her few remaining party guests are having troubles of their own.  Clutching their heads and staggering, Len and Hannah lean on each other behind the island in the open kitchen; the lights flicker, and Keith takes a knee in the middle of the rug.  Someone on the couch, at the edge of Glory’s vision, has her head between her knees.

It passes.

Glory rubs a clammy palm over her forehead, absently straightens her hair.  That was short, thank the stars.  She sets her feet in front of her to stand, sets her hands on the table, and rises to her feet.  Her left arm trembles again, and it’s back – staring at the table now, she can’t see her surroundings.  The lights are suddenly much brighter to her, she hears the microwave running, the ceiling fan’s motor whum-whum-whums in a quickening crescendo.  Seconds go by, and it eases enough for her to sit in her chair, but does not pass.  The lights dim, everything’s quiet, someone gasps.  As Glory raises her head, it comes on again in a slow wave, brightening the lights once more.  She can definitely hear the microwave running.  That’s not right.  It’s never like this.  Alarms sound, the shrill beeps of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.  A dull thump as someone falls to the ground.  One by one, lights begin to pop and flare, her stereo screams a burst of static and dies, the detectors drop out, and Glory registers one brief moment of silence as she slips away.

Back from the brink of death!

Ugh.  Martian Death Flu is no fun.

The first & second of August, I thought I was just having my seasonal allergy attack rather later than normal. But then I was full-on sick, and even had to take a couple days off of work.  I'm also reading The Stand, so I couldn't shake the irrational thought that Captain Trips was coming for me.  The next few days I was possibly too sick to work, but definitely too poor to not work, so I toughed it out.  I seemed to get better like three days ago, but then had mad allergy symptoms once again that came to a peak last night.

And now I'm perfectly fine!

So I guess I'm officially caught up on my quota of illness for the last two years.  I was missing some, you see.  This would be a perfect time to dust off that bit I've been saving up on the immune system... but I don't feel like writing about the immune system.  In fact, all I wanna do now is write Tabula Rasa.  Somewhere along the line, the plans for Tabula Rasa got mixed up with my plans to re-write Rendezvous into Breath to Breath, so I think I'll just go with it because it seems like a good idea (mainly because it takes elements from a story I like and transposes them from a setting I no longer like [horror] into a better one [adventure]).  It's also been marinating for over a year, which is a good indication that it's a worthwhile idea and not going anywhere.

In all honesty, I never really tried to set it down, it just kinda slipped through my fingers and fell to the wayside.  But I have been working through the major issues I had with it - mainly how to get from one plot point to another, since it was conceived (like all my stories) as a flotilla of vignettes and not a single coherent narrative - and I think it's in a state where I can drop all of Chekov's Guns without needing to backtrack preposterously through a bunch of established story.  I've also been reading apocalyptic fiction (I mentioned Lucifer's Hammer and The Stand) to give me some grounding in the genre and see what else is out there.  Mainly what I've noticed is that authors can get away with quite a bit of stereotyping as long as there's sufficient characterization to balance it out, and that Stephen King's editor needs a finer-toothed comb.  I mean, I can't tell Stephen King what to do, but when I read something like, "He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky" (p. 439 in my edition), I can't help but think, "You don't need the word 'fire' twice in such close proximity.  Use 'flame' the first time, or 'blaze' the second, or fucking anything else."

Anyway, that's that.  I've got some stuff written up already, just not the first part, so I'm gonna finish that.  But I open tomorrow, so I need to get to bed at a reasonable hour, and I doubt I'll get through it all tonight.  So that's tomorrow, and then I've got the next part written already, and then it's just a matter of putting the vignettes in place and stitching them together with something approaching skill and aplomb (I'd sure like to write it all in order, but even so, I'll probably end up with Un-Deleted Scenes like in The Quantum Mechanic).  Wish me luck!

Stupid Rhinovirus...

I am super-ill.  :p

Can't breathe.  Can't think.  Can't sleep.  Just so everybody knows.

101 Interesting Things, part forty-eight: Pyura chilensis

Let's have ourselves a little climb up the family tree.  In the kingdom Animalia, phylum Chordata, you'll find the class Ascidiacea.  Ascidians are the sea squirts, immobile filter feeders who sit in one place and just process whatever floats by.  You know your sea squirts, right?

You've got your ravers...

Your psychedelics...

How Can Science Be Objective?

This is a paper I wrote in my philosophy of science class.  The instructor told us that the class would be "one long argument," and at this late point in the course, our task was to summarize and synthesize the material presented thus far, and evaluate it.  The question was, "Can science be objective?  And if so, how?"  We were given six pages to answer (my bibliography was page seven).  This is another paper that I'm pretty proud of, so here it is for your enjoyment.  Links to the cited articles are given at the end, except for two which I couldn't track down (I'm not counting Locke, I only used him for a money quote at the end).  They're all good reads, so feel free to take a walk on the web if you're unclear on a point and want it in the author's own words.

Much ink has been spilled in the attempt to characterize science, both its process and its products, in a way that both is accurate and preserves at least some of our notions of what science is “supposed” to be about. Logical positivism has been rendered untenable by the ubiquity of underdetermination and the nature of observation as fundamentally theory-laden. Is there any way for science to be objective in this light, or is it just a highly political free-for-all? This depends on what we mean by “objective,” for some definitions of the term shall certainly fail. Yet there is an important way in which science can be seen as objective, and in a satisfyingly progressive way.