Writing: Obstacles

these little stupid stumbling blocks in storytelling
    they are why 'execution'...connects to execution post
    she needs a good reason to go from point a to point b
    whatever we'll think of it [not that crazy; ppl go from point a to point b]
    but if you can't _execute_ on a _good_ reason, meaning build the scene and motivation etc., then you do in fact wind up with a nonsense of running around
or
more analytically
a thing where the machinery of genre and expectation and external tell are evident and driving, rather than any internally motivated story

BUT

obstacles fuck you up

BUT

[and this reverse gets you to body, here:]

don't leapfrog problems your characters have
in fact, check to see if you've leapfrogged any

meaning!

famous scene in Independence Day ==> virus, so dumb ha-ha
   but, 'worse' than that
   made movie about nonsense of running around

vs. Arrival
   problem of basic basic communication

Writing: Execution

the specificity of language; execution

"it"
waving hands --> jesse kellerman

all that matters is what works
literally, that is all that matters...not rhetorically "if you go for 'what works' you'll capture blah blah"
that is ALL THAT MATTERS

pitching broken because it's about LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE

first time it happened: Maisy on the bridge

now you may point out, "Hey, Slim -- that's subjective! 'What works'. What if you think something works and other people don't?"
Well...in a sense that's a good point. That's a big part of what learning to take feedback is about. You ask yourself: is this criticism coming from a place of someone who gets/is into fundamentally what the piece is about, and whom I as the writer have failed in some way? Or maybe they just don't like the whole thing? Or maybe actually it does kind of 'work' for them, and that's the precise reason they've pointed it out, because there's really just some small aspect of it that doesn't work so I better be careful not to break anything 'fixing' it, or--
"No, no. Slim you're not hearing me. I'm saying your whole frame is solipsistic and subject. 'What works'. You're placing yourself ultimately as an arbiter at the center of all this: a non-objective skewed perspective--your own--and elevating that above everything. You're saying it over and over: 'what works' is all that matters; and your whole 'how it felt' with that scene on the bridge. It's just all about you and your instincts and responses."
Well. Okay. Presumably I share some of those instincts and responses with other humans, though. Right? I'm extremely not-unique.
"Yeah but why not base it on something more external or objective?"
Like what? Crowdsourcing? Sales numbers?
"I don't know...sure why not. Either of those."
Because that's bullshit. That's pretty much exactly how bullshit gets made. There are consensual processes of group work that have great outcomes, but if the artist relinquishes her own sensibility...or if the creator isn't yet an 'artist' at all because she has no sense of her own sensibility...yeah, you get shit.
"What if I think your 'what works' is shit?"
Like, you think that what I think 'works' is shit?
"Yeah."
...dunno. Sorry?

Writing: Aim, aim...???????

learning something: am i an aim, aim FIRE writer

or an aim, aim...aim, aim writer
there is real evidence for the latter
former...we'll see!

Writing: Dolphins, Clarity (right?)

I joke about how no one really reads this blog because that's a liberating true fact (and thank you for reading, you! you!). But I do try to be at least clear; I always try to be clear, at least, in my writing. Although I know I often fall short on that -- in fiction, despite time and best efforts, because my ambition continually outstrips my abilities (I don't think I'm going to change that; I'm just going to keep trying to level up my abilities), and here in the blog because the sprawl of thought is often kind of a mess, even if y'know you do read it over a coupla times.

This is a long-winded preamble preemptive apology for the fact that I'm going to start posting more, but the narrative thread through the posts may be...well, I don't know. If you follow the labels (I think they appear at the BOTTOM of the posts, on the interface), that might be the best guide to track thematic throughlines. A desperate thread in a sea of slimthoughts.

This post, for example, is about writing.  As you can tell from the label! A bunch of upcoming posts will be.

I'm also gonna try to keep posts short, both for me and for you. And then we can chortle together as you stop reading the latest "short" post two-thousand overwrought words in.

No but seriously I think I can keep this one pretty short. It's about process.

So I've been InstaStorying about how the last couple months with Erra's Throne have been high-level. What I mean by that is that January and February I was doing a lot of traveling to TA; I was able to carve out hours to write because I wake up very early but I wasn't able to get any high-level sense of structure, story, sweep, theme -- life was too distracting and my sleep schedule was screwed up and I was in all these different time zones etc. What I could manage, mentally, was diving deep into prose for a few hours each day, hammering at words / sentences / paragraphs, working through chapters to make sure they're written as well as can be (as well as I can).

So starting in March, when I got home from TA'ing, I've been doing this high-level thing where I step back--force myself to step back--from the prose; because that's the drug, that's the pleasure. You can spend forever (literally) making it better. But I'm forcing myself to not do that and to look at the arc of key plot threads and story elements, and how they manifest in the story. I'm using words like "manifest" but we are talking about very simple mechanical things: what are the sound effects for things that happen in the game and happen in real life, and how/can should these sound effects align to capture what is happening to Emmy's world(s)? what are the threads that the reader can trace through elements of in-game lore and actual myth--as the characters experience them: things they read; things they do; things they say--that can knit together and tighten as the story proceeds?

I'm doing this for a simple reason: to make sure the story is awesome and clear. Because--frankly--the story is not yet clear enough. It's clear enough for some people; it's not not clear enough for enough people. The most useful, best, and worst part of releasing Erra serially has been hearing back from readers. And learning how f#*cking much people have been missing. I've a few times been corresponding with someone who proactively reached out cuz they liked it and we're pinging back and forth and we'll stumble upon some misunderstanding of some fundamental part of the story which I though could never be misunderstood by an attentive reader. And I learn, again, of a reader who is not only attentive but liking the book who has missed it.

So that is my fault. And that has to be better.

It has to be better because: that sucks; not being clear sucks. Seriously: I am explicitly asking people for their money (a tiny bit), but mostly their time and attention. In fact, tbh, I demand it: Erra is not a passive read; it's not a f*#cking blog post. And if I can't even reward that with clarity then...oof. Fuck that guy.

It also has to be better for a bigger reason: there's no way for the climax to be awesome (and it will be) if it's not clear. Because:
(a) nothing can be awesome to a reader who's having a hard time following along, and
(b) More subtly/importantly:

there's "get"
  and there's get
    and there's GET --

there's "oh, okay...okay sure yeah I get it: he threw a brick. Got it."
  and there's oh I see it! a brick! look:sailing through air! 
    and there's OW MYHEAD WUT--OH MY GOSH. HOLY...FUCKING BRICK. AMAZING.

The point is I want Erra to be clear and be awesome; that's all I want everything else can go burn. So I've been doing this "high-level" look at structure, at how these threads thread, etc., for about 7 weeks now.

switching back and forth: sound
transitional

is this a big leap forward? maaaybe!

Protasis

This happened to me;
it happened
just like this.

I promise.

First I need to tell you about divination.

In grammar, a protasis is the "subordinate clause of a conditional sentence"; i.e. it's the "if" in an if-then statement.

In divination--whichever method you practice!--the 'protasis' is the omen you observe or elicit (depending, again, on your method). So say we have an omen like this:

If an ewe gives birth to a lion but with the mouth of a bull,¹ 
that's the protasis; "if you see this crazy thing..."

So now you can guess what an apodosis is:
...[then] famine will ensue.²

(ouch)

So: unlike this guy, who knows lots about divination and is responsible for getting me interested in it, I'm not expert in this stuff.

But I've been reading about it for the last couple of years. Specifically, the divinatory forms of the Ancient Near East and how I might scavenge from that rich and--to me--bizarre tradition to embellish and, in some cases, drive action in Erra's Throne.

I'll spare the writing thoughts for elsewhere; angst, hope, words, dogfood.

The point is: with that context: here's the actual thing, happened to me.

Well actually, couple more fast divs things first.

There are lots of omens, whole categories, about the behavior of birds. Especially birds of prey. Lots of stuff like this:

[If the king...] gathered his army and went to undertake a campaign in the land of his enemy (and) a hawk went hunting and crossed from the right of the king to the left of the king — the king will achieve victory wherever he goes.
(Moren, Sally M. The Omen Series "Summa Alu": A Preliminary Investigation. University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. 1978.)

The way it notes the direction of movement (from the right to the left): that's standard. In these ANE forms, and also in Homeric bird divination, per our good man Duane Smith, "bird flight patterns, particularly birds flying to the right or the left of observers, and 2) birds carrying or dropping animals" is a frequent motif. [In this particular quote, Smith is making this claim re: Homeric bird divination. I am asserting that this motif extends to--or rather, given how the timing works out, possibly derives from or is at least found antecedently in--the ominous forms of the Ancient Near East. (Smith thinks so, too). If you have beef with that assertion: come at me, bro.]

So 

I'm running up Sullivan Canyon towards Sullivan Ridge.

This is a great run; it's about 3.5 miles along the basin of a lush, verdant canyon -- trees, vines, roots everywhere; you can jag off the fire road onto the single track, to hop-skip amongst them.

Then it starts to tilt up, until there's about six-tenths of a mile at the end that's like FUQ,
then you're on the ridge.
If you turn around there it's a bit shy of 9 miles, round trip.

I'm down in the canyon; it's super-great, it looks like this.

I'm about three miles into the run, in the trees, canyon steeping up either side of me.

Let me also please remind you--I think remind is correct, given that if you're reading this you almost certainly know me--that I don't verbalize it much, but pretty much the fact of my cosseted life for the last ~2 years has been an obsession with Erra's Throne; it's the work that a day well-made hinges on, it's the grist and the mill and the apparatus of how my time and thought are structured, blah blah blah yeah you get it. It is the thing and will be till it's done.

And a lot of work on it, lately and in general, has been about the divination stuff.

So I'm running and I JUMP BACK
because a big scary shadow
flickers over the ground;

I look up just in time
to see the hawk fly away --
there are raptors in these mountains; it's wonderful;
I see them all the time.

But I've never seen one scoop low into the canyon like this,
and its shadow flashing big over green brush
was thrilling and scary.
I watch its red-brown plumage flash to the sky then
SKKRNCH

I leap back again
(it happened just like this -- s2g)
as something that the raptor dropped out of its claws
rakes down through the brush
to land loudly
maybe five feet before me:

A rattlesnake.

This is a pretty big one. As long as my arm? I'm not sure -- there was a lot going on.

Definitely this hawk has just dropped a rattlesnake in my path as it flew overhead.

The hawk was passing right to left; I'm not sure, at the time, what this sign could mean. I'm still not sure because a lot of the ominous stuff is highly contextual and I'm not sure how to fit myself into the social and cultural contexts given in ANE ominous tablet collections.

To give you a sense of what I mean, let's use the same text quoted above -- Sally M. Moren's 1978 dissertation on Šumma ālu, one of the canonical collections of omens from the ANE.

digression: the Internet

I'm going to include some brief notes on the author of this dissertation, with links as I encountered them because it was confusing in a way I enjoyed. This happened well before a hawk/snake duo omenized me on a run.

I was researching and looking for this omen collection itself; not like a Wikipedia entry about it, the actual series (translated, of course).

First I found this, indicating that a "S.M. Freedman" in 1998 did a thing that might have the content I was looking for. But I couldn't get at it through that site: I just kept clicking links that took me nowhere.

If you click on one of the links at the bottom of that Wikipedia entry, though, you get this -- which starts to tell some of the story.

Searching around the Internet for the text, Amazon comes up with this; either in a somewhat-incredible typo, or by somewhat incredible coincidence, a "Sally M. Freddman" apparently wrote a thing on the series once. The thing that she wrote, if you buy it on Amazon, costs seventy dollars -- so I kept searching, Freedman or Freddman or no.

Finally--of course, after all this--I find this, which both has the actual text of the series itself (or some of it, anyway) AND a clear explication by the scholar in question of what has gone on here. In 1978 Ms. Sally M. Moren  completed her doctoral dissertation in "Oriental Studies" for the University of Pennsylvania; at some later point Ms. Moren became Mrs. Freedman in a change that, despite one infelicitous typo on Amazon, transferred digitally to the attribution of work she'd done under her previous name.

I hope that she's happy and thriving. I am grateful for the work that she did.

end digression

So here are some possible explanations of what my omen might mean, according to Moren's work.

If hawks walked in the road and [...] -- [...] a wolf will die [...]

Okay what the fuck. I can't even think of a metaphorical explication of this. Also the hawk didn't walk. Also...I mean...wolves?? Forget this one.

[If the king...] gathered his army and went to undertake a campaign in the land of his enemy (and) a hawk went hunting and crossed from the right of the king to the left of the king -- the king will achieve victory wherever he goes.

Okay! Right to left: check! But the "king" thing is a stretch, even in a highly figurative understanding of myself (I'm..."king" of my life? I'm "king" of this trail? At this second??). And I'm definitely not in the land of my enemy, there in Sullivan Canyon; at worst, I'm in neutral nature-territory, and honestly it feels more like "home" (even if, or perhaps because, no one else is there).

&c.

So, back to the moment itself: the big rattlesnake is just...laying there.

I wonder if it's dead. It doesn't look torn up, but it fell a long way, and who knows what hawks do to rattlesnakes high in the air.

I kind of warily edge around it, but don't move past...I want it to move. I wonder if it's playing dead, because of my presence.

After about twenty seconds of my movement it shifts into life, rearing up and marking me with its scary A/F snake-ness...and it slithers off into the brush.

I watch as it goes. It doesn't look wounded. I decide it will live, and wonder if that conclusion has any ominous significance.

I finish my run. I don't remember if I did an out-and-back, or went a ways on the spine once I got to the top, taking a different switchback trail back down. Either way, I do know, it was good.