NaNo projects
Oct. 30th, 2011 02:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaSo, I appear to be writing three things for NaNo, because I can't really see them as very long projects. They're somewhere in the realm of 10k - 15k stories, and actually, a couple of them are more like, music concept albums in my brain ala Interstellar 9999, so I really don't expect to get a whole lot of them in terms of text, when I'm kind of thinking in terms of lyrics and actual sound. But I have no musical skills beyond theory I learnt as a kid, so as a musical project, the stories are useless to me.
Story #1 Lilian Memoria is a genius inventrix who has pulled her family out of poverty on her own through providing wealthy clientele with amusing automata. Her frivolous life is disturbed when she meets Darren Hayward, a schoolteacher with a fatal condition.
I've been meaning to write a short of this for a while. A lot of it comes from the desire to twist the lyrics of "Her Clockwork Heart". I think because at the time, I was also encountering a lot of stories of the "doctor tries to save dying (female) lover" variety, and the song kind of made no sense to me, like, I'm sorry, the narrator is a woman, and why the fuck couldn't it have been about an inventrix who tries to save her husband's life? Is this way too alternate for alt-history? Given the issues surrounding androids replacing sex workers, women as literal dolls, and science gendered male, I just didn't like the song as it was. Even when I hear it in my head, I always replace the lyrics to his clockwork heart instead.
Also, rocks fall, everybody dies. I think. I haven't really decided what direction to take with the ending yet.
Story #2 Ashn's lover has been kidnapped from their sea home, and Ashn has to travel as a human across a dry desert landscape, navigating dangers and the bewildering gender norms of humanity, to get Mryn back.
I made up that name on the spot. I wanted to write a lesbian-ish mermaid story that sort of talks about gender performance and appearance and reading gender on bodies.
There will be a love triangle thing, where Ashn is read as male by a human woman who resembles her lover and she is kind of sort of falling in love but can't help but remember "You're not her" (this was going to be a drawn out painful sad love duet) (because Ashn's language does not have a gender binary, I think I will use "she" by default based on Ashn's flawed understanding on how biology and gender are tied in this human world). Also, might have a kind of Wild West feel, not sure yet what kind of world this is.
Story #3 Where labourers are never taught of their city's name, only that they must work, two slaves find each other in the darkness.
Again, another musical concept. I was at the Clockwork Dolls' concert, right? And Helene has a lovely voice, but I guess I was still thinking about my "subculture is not an escape" article, so in one of the songs, the chorus goes "Fly away with me" and I was going all like "HALE NO the fuck do I want to fly away for? shit is real down here and it not gonna do anybody favours to just, you know, LEAVE. And who gets to just fly away, anyway?"
Also was reading Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, and one of the privileged characters falls in love with a working-class character, and I was thinking through class differences, and how that separates people, and what does it mean for the privileged to help the disenfranchised, using that privilege to do so? And what does it mean to live in a space you can't escape, and you have so many social ties you wouldn't want to escape it because that means leaving behind important loved ones? How do you transform this space?
Although, really started with wanting to write a song about fucking in engine rooms hiding in the darkness and the noise.
And then there's the dragon porn![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moniquill told me to write so I better get on that too.
Story #1 Lilian Memoria is a genius inventrix who has pulled her family out of poverty on her own through providing wealthy clientele with amusing automata. Her frivolous life is disturbed when she meets Darren Hayward, a schoolteacher with a fatal condition.
I've been meaning to write a short of this for a while. A lot of it comes from the desire to twist the lyrics of "Her Clockwork Heart". I think because at the time, I was also encountering a lot of stories of the "doctor tries to save dying (female) lover" variety, and the song kind of made no sense to me, like, I'm sorry, the narrator is a woman, and why the fuck couldn't it have been about an inventrix who tries to save her husband's life? Is this way too alternate for alt-history? Given the issues surrounding androids replacing sex workers, women as literal dolls, and science gendered male, I just didn't like the song as it was. Even when I hear it in my head, I always replace the lyrics to his clockwork heart instead.
Also, rocks fall, everybody dies. I think. I haven't really decided what direction to take with the ending yet.
Story #2 Ashn's lover has been kidnapped from their sea home, and Ashn has to travel as a human across a dry desert landscape, navigating dangers and the bewildering gender norms of humanity, to get Mryn back.
I made up that name on the spot. I wanted to write a lesbian-ish mermaid story that sort of talks about gender performance and appearance and reading gender on bodies.
There will be a love triangle thing, where Ashn is read as male by a human woman who resembles her lover and she is kind of sort of falling in love but can't help but remember "You're not her" (this was going to be a drawn out painful sad love duet) (because Ashn's language does not have a gender binary, I think I will use "she" by default based on Ashn's flawed understanding on how biology and gender are tied in this human world). Also, might have a kind of Wild West feel, not sure yet what kind of world this is.
Story #3 Where labourers are never taught of their city's name, only that they must work, two slaves find each other in the darkness.
Again, another musical concept. I was at the Clockwork Dolls' concert, right? And Helene has a lovely voice, but I guess I was still thinking about my "subculture is not an escape" article, so in one of the songs, the chorus goes "Fly away with me" and I was going all like "HALE NO the fuck do I want to fly away for? shit is real down here and it not gonna do anybody favours to just, you know, LEAVE. And who gets to just fly away, anyway?"
Also was reading Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, and one of the privileged characters falls in love with a working-class character, and I was thinking through class differences, and how that separates people, and what does it mean for the privileged to help the disenfranchised, using that privilege to do so? And what does it mean to live in a space you can't escape, and you have so many social ties you wouldn't want to escape it because that means leaving behind important loved ones? How do you transform this space?
Although, really started with wanting to write a song about fucking in engine rooms hiding in the darkness and the noise.
And then there's the dragon porn
moniquill told me to write so I better get on that too.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 09:43 am (UTC)[Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat is observed to don his North Carolina Prosthetic Index Fingers (tm) and to take up a piece of pale yellow CHALK and approach a BLACKBOARD (which has for dark reasons of its own chosen this particular moment to descend into our midst on two cunningly-designed pulleys from the ceiling far, far above the intrepid duo and the remaining denizens of what to the uninformed observer might seem to be some parodic reincarnation of Mike Callahan's Crosstime Saloon). Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat's faithful amanuensis and general factotum, who has witnessed (and, worse, heard -- those North Carolina Prosthetic Index Fingers (tm), when combined with Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat's own claws and carelessness, are capable of generating the most Godawful teeth-numbing sound you would ever cross a continent, board a spacecraft, and get up to where vacuum can shield your hearing to avoid --) Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat when these mad moods of explication and elucidation strike him, is observed to stick index fingers into both ears (his own, we hasten to add -- not Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat's), and to begin chanting "La la la la..." during the entire subsequent session of (yech!) explication and elucidation... a Patron at the Back of the Bar (tm) suggests that the administration of a means of sedation might be to everyone's advantage...]
"E.g.: Story #1 Lilian Memoria is a genius inventrix who has pulled her family out of poverty on her own through providing wealthy clientele with amusing automata. Her frivolous life is disturbed when she meets Darren Hayward, a schoolteacher with a fatal condition.
Story #1A Durwood Hale Bruin IV is a slightly shopworn socialite Peter Pan who has pushed his once-wealthy WASP family into poverty all on his own through his hopeless attempts to purvey his clumsy clockwork bibelots to a New York public that's seen it all before. His purr-poseful life is eu-turbed when he encounters (carefully avoiding bumping his head (either one of them) on the cash register while doing so) Florian Pamyat, a willing and very well-hung student with a positive outlook on life who is working his way through college at a local Tim Horton's..."
[Shocked, disgusted silence, broken by a wistful suggestion emanating from the Back of the Bar (tm) that purr-haps the stage direction "Rocks fall, everybody dies" might be most advantageously applied to Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat and those in his immediate company...]
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 01:17 pm (UTC)I'm also writing a mermaid story (very different, though) and having to stop myself from "gender-neutral are actually male-default" words is surprisingly more difficult than I thought. So I am loving "she" as gender-neutral. And being seen as male. I want to read that so much ♥
Given the issues surrounding androids replacing sex workers, women as literal dolls, and science gendered male
And yeees. Those themes always turn me off when I read them, largely because they're so common as to be completely unconsidered, but putting it into wife -> android -> sex worker added some extra squidgy. I've never even heard the song and I am =/
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 05:51 pm (UTC)But anyway, the song is beautiful! I like it a lot, I like the band, and I respect the founder of the band a lot (he provides an intellectual backbone to what comprises the steampunk community; I'd have given up on steampunk a long time ago if it weren't for people like him). I just think I could do better in terms of theme and creating a new story. So here I am. The song itself deals with a kind of post-humanist theme of how wanting to preserve also leads into changing that which one is trying to preserve which is interesting, but I just think a gender change would help a lot.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 02:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 05:51 pm (UTC)