Writing again, despite fatigue and lack of time!

I've been going nuts for months now with inspiration for new stories and ideas for the WiPs (mainly the third Raud Grima book, tentatively titled Masks in the Glow). And up until the winter break I just couldn't find the time or the energy, except for occasionally rereading already written passages of Masks and tinkering with them. Then over winter break we got me a new laptop (the kids smashed the old one) and I carved out two chunks of time for writing. Since then, I've managed to write several more times, mainly in the evenings while dinner's cooking and for a little while after. Historically evenings have never been my writing time. Too tired out by the day for any kind of good concentration. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

So I'm very slowly making progress on Masks, which may end up not being called Masks because it's looking like it's going to be upwards of 200K words and therefore will have to be split into two. If that's how it works out (I'm not sure because I devised a way to shortcut the story and I haven't decided whether I want to go that route or not) then probably the fourth and last book will get the Masks title and book three will have to go by something else.

This series is definitely shaking out to be weird in a lot of ways. First just going with the dystopian decopunk angle, which you don't run into very much. And certainly not often with the Fritz Lang inspiration so central. So there's that, to begin with. I mean from the start I've run into people who just scratch their heads at the whole concept of robots in an art deco city.

I chose from the beginning to challenge myself to write scenes that make me uncomfortable. I address one of my greatest fears in the book--the loss of a child--which probably doesn't weird anyone out. But I also pushed myself to write sex scenes, which is not something I'm generally comfortable with. And I wanted them to be real, with heat and in some cases disturbing elements. So yeah, that has certainly colored both The City Darkens and After the Fall and based on the few reviews I've gotten, people either appreciate what I was trying to do or are really put off by all the sex.

Then, in After the Fall, I switch narrators. I knew that was unconventional and would probably put people off. It's not like it's never been done before or anything, but it's a risky thing to do. I did it because I couldn't figure out what to do with Myadar. I wanted to keep talking about this city that's going through a revolution and there was no good reason for Myadar to get in the middle of that. At least, not right away. So I thought about what I wanted to talk about--I wanted to have the books progress a bit like the decades that comprise dieselpunk--City was the 1920s, Fall was the 1930s (sort of--certainly with a look towards what was happening in China at the time), and Masks would be the 40s. In no way am I trying to tell a history of America or even Earth, though. I just want parts of the setting, the events, the things people do, to resonate, like, "Oh, I see what she's doing there!" Anyway, so Fall was going to be about survival, first and foremost. How does an ordinary person survive a cataclysm in her city? What would that survival look like? Who threatens it? I thought of my graduate professor of African history talking about the role of young men, packs of violent young men, in unstable environments. And since I was also reading about grimdark at the time, and the ways people were (perhaps) mishandling violence in fiction, particularly sexual violence, I wanted to try my hand at that, and see if I could pull it off in a way I could live with. And I allowed Ginna to embody my own struggle with the necessity of violence. To top it off, I believe that the second installment in a trilogy (which is what I intended this series to be) should end badly. So the result was a novel that's really not very satisfying to some readers.

And now, Masks will be different yet again. For one thing, it has four POVs. For another, so far, no sex. And in it I'm trying to resolve both my conflicted feelings about using violence in fiction and Ginna's conflicted feelings about using violence to win the war. I am also really focused on characters that are not inherently good (Ginna is, though). Plus my original idea was to go very dark and flirt with atompunk, and though I may still have an element of that (inspired, perhaps, by Akira), the aesthetics of light decopunk like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are still really appealing to me. So I've revisited what one of the big threats will be and I've reimagined it, and it's probably going to strike people as even weirder than robots in a deco city. I guess we'll see.

Masks is already 100K words and even if I do the shortcut I mentioned, I'm probably looking at at least another 40K. So I'm leaning towards writing the long version, seeing how many words it is, and deciding based on that whether to split it.

If you were reading a series, would you rather that the last book be very long, or that what you thought would be the last book ends in a cliff hanger and you have to read yet another book to finally get the resolution?

Does it bother you when books in a series have different POVs?

Would you be frustrated if the first books had several sex scenes and the last had few to none?

What do you think of violence in fiction?

What is Dieselpunk?

After my recent blog post on Captain America: The First Avenger, I got a couple of questions about the terms "dieselpunk" and "decopunk." There's a pretty nice description of dieselpunk here, but I thought I'd talk a little about what it means to me.

I've come across a forum post where someone described dieselpunk as a scene rather than a genre, mainly, if I understand correctly, because of the dirth of actual dieselpunk fiction out there. I'll grant you that there aren't as many movies and TV shows with the elements that make up dieselpunk than there are capitalizing on the popularity of steampunk, but I think it's incorrect to say there aren't very many. In the last few months I've watched eight movies and two anime tv shows (notably Last Exile, which perhaps due to the fact that I watch it at 3am when I'm giving the baby his bottle and I have the sound turned almost all the way down, has come to a point where it is incomprehensible to me, unfortunately. I still really enjoy the soundtrack, though)--and of those eight movies, none were in the Indiana Jones series. There are also quite a few books that qualify, at least according to my definition.

So I should probably get to that.

To me, dieselpunk is fiction genre (or, more broadly, a scene) that draws on sci fi from the 1920s-1940s. Dieselpunk differs from steampunk in that its machines have internal combustion engines. You don't see airplanes in steampunk--at least, not unless they are some sort of steam-powered clockwork. You do see airplanes in dieselpunk--prominently so. But you also see other, weirder vehicles like the vanships in Last Exile. Also, very often you see robots. The idea with dieselpunk is that the tech is retro-futuristic (a combination that I find delightful). Lots of dials, knobs, gauges, levers, and grease, but I could see a story where these old-fashioned machines allow for (minor) space travel or teleportation--much like Telsa's inventions in The Prestige are steampunk yet futuristic.

The time period encompasses the decades of history I find most interesting to study--the 1920s, especially in the U.S. due to Prohibition, are fascinating because they represent the moment when westerners entered the modern age. Probably because of that, much of the pulp fiction of the time involved exploration of nonwestern parts of the world--the exotic, mysterious places most threatened by extinction in the modern age. More on that in a moment, as it raises a rather thorny problem.

The 1930s provides the concept of noir--film noir, detective stories, and the rise of fascism in several locations around the world.

And the 1940s gave us World War II--a terrible time, of course, but also a time people remember as a golden age of victory gardens, radio programs, and shared purpose. In our memories, everyone was in agreement in the 1940s--the Allies were working together to oppose the evils of the Axis Powers, who in turn were working together to destroy everything good in the world. Through a simple lens, World War II is the most ethically accessible war, because there are such clear bad guys, especially in Europe. (Please understand, I'm saying this as a writer, not as a historian. As a historian, this sort of thing does not fly.)

So dieselpunk has a rich playground to run around in. Add to that all of the bright optimism and faith in science that preceded the dropping of the atomic bombs and the discovery of the death camps. Think of the excitement of the World's Fairs. And to top it off, dieselpunk has its own artistic style: art deco. In fact, a subgenre of dieselpunk (itself a subgenre of steampunk, of course) is decopunk--basically everything dieselpunk is without such an interest in the machines.

But back to the exotic lands, for a moment, and the problem they pose.

I may eventually devote an entire post to this minefield, because it's a doozy, and it's one I'm particularly concerned with because I'm liable to get caught in the middle of it one of these days. Orientalism.

What, you ask, is orientalism, and what does it have to do with dieselpunk?

In a nutshell, orientalism is the representation of nonwestern cultures (most often Middle Eastern, but it's just as valid for various Asian areas as well as any other part of the world where people are predominantly brown, in my opinion) through the filter of western ideas, desires, opinions, prejudices, etc. It's a form of racism with a long history in fiction. Probably one of the best examples of a movie that is both dieselpunk and orientalist: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One of the big problems with orientalism is that writers who fall prey to it often misrepresent cultures or conflate two or more cultures. In the case of Temple, for instance, the goddess Kali is depicted as evil and ruling the underworld, which is inaccurate. Much of the cuisine is probably closer to Chinese than Hindu, as well. The attitude in days gone by among writers and fans of orientalist fiction was to shrug and say something along the lines of, "It's all the same anyway." (In case that's your attitude, try turning it around and imagining what it would be like for a Hindu or Chinese film to depict your culture as the same or at least jumbled with some other culture--usually belonging to a historical enemy. Now imagine that happening over and over in every book and movie that depicts your culture for hundreds of years.) For more on Temple's issues specifically, go here.

Nowadays I see a deep uneasiness in movies like Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow--they so desperately want to be able to depict grand adventures like those of Allan Quatermain (a character who was originally more steampunk than dieselpunk) but they don't want to come under fire for racism. It's a pickle. I love stories of treasure hunts, dungeon crawls, scary jungles and survival in ice storms. But how do you write about exotic lands without othering those people the main characters, who by nature of being dieselpunk characters will be westerners, will encounter there? How do you portray a culture respectfully while simultaneously making it mysterious, sinister, and, in many cases, somehow mystical? What's a white writer in love with the retro-futuristic fiction of the1920s-1940s to do?

The best I've come up with is to take the story off of planet Earth altogether, and set the dungeon crawls, barroom brawls, and mystical encounters on other planets entirely (Firefly, anyone?). And don't even think about basing the alien cultures on specific (stereotyped and misrepresented) Earth cultures. Lucas did that and it's painful to watch. Of course, the real problem with that solution is that you've pretty much left dieselpunk behind once you leave Earth or at least an Earth-like setting. Yes, it's sci fi, but it's limited sci fi. Dieselpunk is not atomicpunk, and I can't see diesel engines powering even the most fun retro-futuristic space ships farther than a trip to the moon, maybe.

What do you think about dieselpunk? Do you like stories set in the 1920s-1940s?
How would you handle the orientalism problem?

Writing again...

Well, it's been nearly a year! Finding out I was pregnant pretty much stopped my creative juices from flowing in the writing direction. I spent my time cooking and knitting, instead. But I am now finally starting to work on a story again. I'm happy about this, although I really didn't sweat the months on hiatus. I figure, as long as I'm not feeling stressed out because I'm blocked, I just have to go with my creative flow.

Of course, I've done some writing for the MA program I'm in online. It's for American History. That's been good, getting back into writing papers. There's something really satisfying about putting a paper together, like finishing a puzzle.

I have yet to actually start writing the story, although I think today may be the day for scene 1. We'll see; I'm not entirely sure the idea has matured enough. I've been using Pinterest to collect images for the idea I have. I discovered dieselpunk and decopunk recently and after watching Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film, Metropolis, I became inspired by the possibilities of a 1920s/scifi setting.

Actually, it all started when I was on Netflix in the middle of the night--I've discovered that the only way I can stay awake to feed the baby is to watch movies or tv shows--and I started watching Deep Space Nine from the beginning. And the first thing I realized, is that I am craving good sci fi. The second thing I realized is that I'm really intrigued by the space station as a setting. I can't say I was overly impressed with the writing of the shows--I can only hope they gain in depth as the series progresses--but the setting is really interesting. I like Quark's gambling hall, the promenade, the way that characters can come and go due to the daily docking and departure of ships.

One thing I haven't really hammered out yet, and I may need to give more thought before I jump into writing, is the tone I want for this story. I'd like to make it quirky, in the vein of dieselpunk stories such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and make it a fun adventure, but I also just got finished reading The Hunger Games Trilogy, and I was blown away by how brutal Suzanne Collins is with her characters. It really made me realize how NOT brutal I am with mine. So... something to ponder.

How about you, how do you treat your characters? Do you like to just have fun with them, but keep it light? Or do you put them through the ringer?