Category: ephemera

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I’ve started up the novel that was giving me so much trouble, again. And I did what I originally said I wasn’t going to do: I’m starting from the top, and rewriting all of the chapters that have the new POV. This is, fortunately, less that I was originally afraid of, since most of the stuff that’s in the other POV will still work, though there’s some things to be moved around.

I don’t know, though. There’s a lot of cut-and-past, and a lot of scenes being rewritten with the same dialogue but different characters. I suspect that it’s turning out a mess, though that’s what first drafts are for, nu-i asa?

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My wife is Romanian, and we speak Romanian at home as our normal language of conversation. So today I was looking up some information about historical Romanian orthography (possibly the subject of another post), and I was surprised to discover the existence of not one, but four Romanian languages:

Map of Romanian Language Distributions

I was previously dimly aware of the existence of Aromanian (shown in red above), but what most fascinated me were the Istro-Romanians. They’re two tiny dots of yellow over there in Croatia. They are the smallest ethnic group in Europe, numbering less than 1000 speakers, spread among a handful of villages and hamlets. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a website. The website is, in fact, very good, with a reasonable pronunciation guide and a variety of resources.

(No one, however, seems to be able to tell me what the phonetic value of {å} is. Based on circumstantial evidence, I’m guessing that it’s [ɒ], the low rounded back vowel.)

Fascinating stuff, here. The language is clearly close to Romanian: I can just barely make it out, though it’s quite a stretch in some places. I especially like this poem:

Ur populu
pureţ-ăl în veruge
respuliaţ-ăl
zecepiţ-li gura
şi înca-i liber.

Laieţe-li lucru
paseporetu
scåndu iuva mărânca
påtu iuva dorme,
înca ăi bogåt.

Ur populu,
vise siromah şi servu
când ăli furu limba
cara vut-a în dota dila ţåţi
şi pl’erzut-ăi za vaica.

The last stanza, as best I can guess (seeing as I don’t actually speak this language) is translated:

A people,
Dreams (siromah?) and serves (Serbs?)
When they steal their language
Which they had as a gift from their fathers
And have lost forever

I’m sure that my readership contains plenty of people who actually speak Istro-Romanian and would be happy to correct me.

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Vylar Kaftan wrote an interesting post about stories that are three sentences off. I was going to leave her a nice comment, but the server she’s hosted on ate one comment, and didn’t seem to work when I tried to post another. So instead I’m writing this post, and maybe the pingback will work. (After meeting her husband Shannon and recognizing him as a fellow Linux geek with a tiny laptop that was teh k00l, I suspect that her site is hosted on a server in their garage. Shannon: get some more CPU and/or bandwidth on that baby.)

Do you ever write a story, and have it ALMOST working–but it’s three sentences off?

Approximately three sentences, of course. Might be a few more or less. Might be sentences you need to add, delete, change, or some combination of the above. But those tiny changes make all the difference.

Yes. This happens to me all the time. However, I am lazier, or perhaps more impatient than Vy. If I get to that point and I can’t see what the fix is, I’m sorely tempted to say “What the hell”, slap it in an envelope, and send it on its way. This is a terrible idea. What I really should do is set it aside for a few days and come back to it later. That usually gives me the perspective to see what’s wrong, or (more likely) gives me the perspective to see dozens of other things that are wrong.

Although I successfully evaded that problem with my two most recent subs, as both Lights and Confession of Adrianna Belle had problems in their endings that I did eventually fix. I think I’m perfectly happy with each of them at present.

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My WIP is in trouble, and it’s all because of my protagonist.

The story, as originally conceived, alternates POV between the two main characters. I’ve written about 20K words with those two characters, and while it was going pretty well, I was having some trouble with one of my protags. He seemed to be kind of a non-entity. I had no clear idea of his personality, and my attempts to give him some character were awkward and forced. (This is the same problem that I had with the beginning of my finished novel, but fortunately I got to kill that character off and find a new one about 1/3 of the way through the book.) This was making it hard to write, particularly the chapters where he was the only one onscreen.

Then a thirteen-year-old girl dropped out of the rafters and tried to kill my other, non-problematic protag. This was completely unexpected. It was also much more interesting. A young girl who takes on full-grown men that are trying to massacre her family? Now that is a character I could write. After a bit of hesitation, I began plotting out how I would weave the story around her, and leave my original protag mostly out of it.

I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do, but I am still flummoxed by what to do with the 20K words that already exist. My rule when writing a novel is “no rewriting until the first draft is done”–otherwise the first draft will never get done, as I’ll be constantly tinkering with the first ten chapters or so. But I think I may have to tinker with the draft anyway, since I don’t think I can write any further without knowing what happened to my new protag so far.

I’ve never been a 13-year-old girl, so it might be hard to write her. And if my protag is a teenager, does that mean my work is YA?

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Sän has an interesting post about horror up at his blog. I would have commented on it earlier except, you know, I only meet Sän a few days ago.

His distinction between smart horror and dumb horror reminds me of something I got from Orson Scott Card a long time ago. This was from one of his writing books (I forget which one), and he suggested that there are three kinds of fear:

  1. Dread, which is the feeling when you know something is wrong but you don’t yet know what. Dread is the anticipation of Terror to come.
  2. Terror, which is the heart-pounding, adrenaline-fueled rush when you see the monster and (vicariously) experience immediate danger
  3. Horror, which is the revulsion and discomfort we experience in the aftermath of seeing something, er, horrible.

The strongest of these, he says, is Dread, but it’s also the hardest to sustain. Slasher films tend to deal almost entirely in Horror with snippets of Terror. OTOH, a really excellent thriller like Alien or The Ring manages to keep you in Dread for most of the movie. (In Alien, consider how rarely the monster is actually on screen, and how much time is instead spent creeping around in the shadows wondering where the monster is.)

Interestingly, Sän’s categories are almost entirely orthogonal to Card’s. You can do dumb Dread and smart Horror–in fact, some of the best stories I’ve read are best classified as smart Horror.

The last commenter mentions the Silent Hill games. Silent Hill 2 is the only game I’ve stopped playing because it was too frightening–and in gets this power almost entirely from Dread. The monsters in Silent Hill are not very frightening and you’re never in very much danger, so the Terror is pretty mild. There’s plenty of gore in some areas to provoke Horror, but they’re fairly rare. Rather, through a brilliant use of music, pacing, and lighting, the game creates a powerful atmosphere of Dread. So powerful that the game became no fun, because I dreaded putting the disk in.