November HI update

October was a bad month.

The short version is, I wrote very little and almost every word of it has since been shitcanned (more precisely, cut out of the manuscript and pasted into a file called "Deleted Scenes", where it will languish between times when I loot it for a clever sentence here and there). The long version is, there was simply no way to wrap everything up in one chapter, and even if I could, the pacing problems which plagued the first draft would still be there. Worse, the stuff I was writing was garbage. Dead prose, dull scenes, characters acting like they'd just come down with Idiot Plot. So it got axed.

Where does that leave me now? Well, after about a week scribbling in an old notebook, I worked out a better plan for the last third of the novel. Draft 2 "Sky King Star" remains unchanged, the ending chapter incorporates all of Draft 1 "Fever Dreams" and about half of D1 "Ice and Ashes". A new chapter containing the mutiny (that damn mutiny has been my problem since I first thought of it) will immediately precede Sky King Star.

Also added is a prologue (about half the length of a normal chapter), set in Philadelphia the day the Dominion arrives. I wrote it expressly to tie the main story to the Toliman ending (shh! Don't tell Metatwaddle what that means!). Between that and the Spirit of Halifax plot ending before "Sky King Star", that takes care of my ending problem.

Will I make 23 November? Probably not. I'm aiming for 1 December. There's still an outside chance, but it's already the 10th and I have a lot of work left to do.

Now to respond to a couple comments. First, from Da Rev (the inimitable RevPrez, I presume; just for the record, I was opposed to his banning and remain opposed to it):

BTW, not a bad job on Humanist. Finally finished reading it. A bit heavy-handed and disingenuous about Christian Reconstructionism, but all in all a solid demonstration that hard sf and space opera are not mutually exclusive. I look forward to reading more of your work.

I think you're dead on about the heavy-handedness (also the stuff about how awesome it is, but we'll stick to the criticisms for now). Quite a lot of that ended up getting cut--Alvin's whole walk through Washington, for starters. Besides the fact it was about as subtle as a rain of anvils, it dragged on the plot.

My conception of the Dominion was never intended to be 100% faithful to contemporary Reconstructionsim (though I do think the contemporary version is vile). It began as a thought exercise before I ever conceived of HI--I wondered what an American Khmer Rouge would look like, and got a cross between Fred Phelps, David Duke, and Huey Long. Later when I thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat to write a sci-fi story that tried to stay realistic?", the Dominion idea popped back into my head, and suddenly I had what I thought was a short novella.

Basically, the Dominion is what I think you might get when you plunge the entire south into hopeless poverty for a generation, put almost everyone to work as a sharecropper, add a ten year drought (thanks to Global Warming) which is threatening to tip the entire region into starvation, remove any effective Federal authority, and add a little deranged Christian fundamentalism to taste. A lot of that is only alluded to in HI--Crash and Interregnum will go into quite a bit more detail.

And now, a comment from Surlethe:

Hey, since I don't feel like waiting for the November update: if you're interested I'll have some free time over Christmas break I could use to read over and tear apart Draft II.

Thank you for saving me the trouble of asking. Yes, I'd very much appreciate a few test readers who have the time and inclination to give me comments. Metatwaddle's input has been priceless, but I'd love to hear other perspectives (and, I admit, having spent so much time on this damn thing, I'd like to actually have readers; I miss the instant feedback from the board).

This concludes this public service announcement.

UD ResLife program

Some of you may have heard about the controversial Residential Life education program at the University of Delaware, where I go to school. According to media accounts, chanel handbags students were made to undergo diversity training sessions - some call it indoctrination; others simply called it education - regarding things like white privilege and heterosexism. There are some articles on the issue here and here. Students were taught about systematic racism, and the

Now, I never had to put up with any of this crap. There have been a few building meetings on my floor, and I haven't gone to any of them, because in RI's words, "Can they do anything to you if you don't go? No? Then it's not actually mandatory."

But it's plain from media accounts that the program was executed in a breathtakingly stupid way.

The trouble with SDN

For many months, during my self-imposed exile, I've had the feeling that something has gone wrong over at SDN, and furthermore, it went wrong a while ago. My original plan was to stay exiled for 90 days, and come back 1 September. It is the middle of October now and I'm still not back. Admittedly, I haven't finished HI yet, but I hadn't expected to get it done in 90 days, either. I really haven't been in any particular hurry to get back. There just seems to be something off about the place, and I haven't been able to articulate what it is.

Then this morning, I looked in Off Topic, and discovered Kanastrous did it for me.

Hey, fucktard, are y'all such total obnoxious asswipes that your pleasure in life is calling people names when they ask a simple (or what ought to be a simple) question?

Searching a board for the meaning of an acronym is a waste of time, at least, if I'm going out on a limb and thinking that just maybe people around here aren't such a pack of assholes-for-the-sake-of-being-assholes that they can't even bring themselves to answer a pig-fucking simple question.

You must be one incredible fucking coward in real life, if you have to build yourself up and get off on pointless rudeness to total strangers who are too far away to smash your fucking teeth in, just for daring to ask a simple question.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn't your mother pay you enough attention, when you were young?!

The background: Kanastrous asked the meaning of the word "RAR!", assuming it was an acronym. DPDarkPrimus responded "It's a board meme", a magnificently unhelpful response to which Kanastrous replied, "Thanks. That's magnificently unhelpful."

At this point, Fleet Admiral JD replied thusly:

Hey, fucktard, why don't you take a look at previous posts and figure it out? It's not a hard thing to grasp unless your skull is as thick as a frigging tree trunk. Then again, judging by some of your posting behavior, maybe the truth is that simple concepts are beyond your comprehension.

Kanastrous then opened fire with both barrels, which I quoted above.

The thing that has been bothering me (and, I suspect, more than a few other people) is not acrimonious debate. That topic was brought up on the board a little while ago, and while I do believe the issue of civility in debate is not limited to the binary choice of "Miss Manners" or "Everybody is an asshole all the time", I think, in the balance, most people get exactly what they deserve in board debates, and at any rate, I would not trade honesty for civility.

(I do think that a good general rule would be to give any poster at least one civil reply, to see if he's debating honestly; if he's not, then call down the napalm).

But this incident didn't happen in a debate; it was just a question, one that would have been easy to answer. I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Fleet Admiral JD here (I don't hold any grudge, or indeed, much of an opinion at all on him), but he DID act like an asshole and, so far as I can tell, for no better reason than because he could. I suppose you could argue that Kanastrous's snippy reply to DPDarkPrimus warranted a hostile response, but really, DP should have answered the question fully (or not said anything at all), it wasn't DP who responded, and really, JD's response still would have been massive overkill if it had come from DP.

In real life, only an epic prick would act like JD did in the thread, and that epic prick would have to be pretty certain he could win the fight that he'd likely start by acting like that. Yet acting like that has become completely acceptable on SDN (one reply to Kanastrous was "Overreact much?").

Somehow, on SDN, the idea that any level of hostility is acceptable in a debate has mutated into "any level of hostility is acceptable, all the time". Especially, I suspect, when it is directed against newbies or unpopular posters. I'm absolutely positive I'm guilty of this too (I didn't bother doing a search of my own posts, in part because I need to do a Google search to find them, and in part because I really didn't want to see them), but that doesn't mean I was right. Part of why Kanastrous's response resonated with me was because he pinned down some of my own motivations for acting like an asshole in the past. I could try to justify it by saying I have had to sit and take shit from bosses, students, parents, etc. in the real world and so my hostility on SDN is driven by a desire to unload what I can't unload on them, but really, it's not much of an excuse. It's still acting like a giant prick because I'm unafraid of retaliation.

So what to do about this? Well, speaking as a Senator and a member of the administration...not very much. There's no practical way to enforce "Don't be an asshole" without A) forcing moderators to make value judgments on what's "too nasty", which they will undoubtedly get wrong often and will be accused of getting wrong oftener, or B) writing a great hairy clot of rules regulating posting behavior that will annoy everyone, accidentally force people to be nice to dishonest jerkoffs in debates, and allow people to act like pricks anyway once all the loopholes have been found. The best way to change the culture on the board to something more civil, without turning it into Miss Manners, is to do exactly what Kanastrous did: when someone acts like a big dildo because he thinks he can get away with it, flame the living shit out of him.

Combat hostility with hostility. It's the SDN way.

More Southern justice

From the AP:

Guards Acquitted in Boot Camp Case

By MELISSA NELSON – 1 hour ago

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — Eight former boot camp workers were acquitted of manslaughter Friday in the death of a 14-year-old boy who was videotaped being punched and kicked. The scene sparked outrage and changes in the juvenile system, but it jurors took just 90 minutes to decide it was not a crime.

So:

Southern state? Check.
All-white jury? Check.
Black victim? Check.
White perp? Check (to be fair, some of the guards were black or Asian; the jury probably just couldn't figure out how to convict them but not the white guards)
Incontrovertible evidence? Check.
Acquittal? Check.

The AP article describes the county in which the crime took place as being conservative, with a great respect for law and order, which apparently translates to "Anything any goon in a uniform does to a minority or a poor kid is just aces with us".

I have no doubt when the apologists come crawling out of the woodwork (and they always do), they will claim that since the victim, Martin Lee Anderson, was in the juvenile justice system, he was obviously a troublemaker, was probably mouthing off to the guards, et cetera, and deserved what was coming to him (this same reasoning was used to justify sentencing Mychal Bell to decades in prison for a cafeteria fight, even after the circumstances of the Jena 6 case came to light). Two responses: first, I'm coming around to the idea that "He's a troublemaker/thug/criminal" has become the 21st century equivalent of "He was winking at a white woman". Second, Martin Lee Anderson's heinous crime was...joyriding.

No further comment is necessary, I think.

October HI update and more

Let's get right down to the meat of this: Chapter IX is finished and Chapter X is underway. X is going to be a little troublesome, because I need to combine elements of old chapters VIII, IX, and X, PLUS add some new material to tie up some loose ends, AND make it all flow so that "Check Please" is the natural last line. On the upside, once this chapter is finished, the main story is finished as well. Halloween is looking unlikely now as a completion date, but I should make 23 November.

Also, Metatwaddle wore Space Shuttle earrings yesterday because she knows I like rockets.

My girlfriend is awesome.

This concludes this public service announcement.

September HI update

Just a brief update: VI, VII, and VIII are done. At this point, the book is starting to look substantially different from the first draft.

VI, as discussed before, takes place entirely on Earth, with David Bonfante (now a corporal in the Royal Guard) and Adrienne (still a New Orleans...erm, sex worker) as viewpoint characters. Both get to witness major developments in the war that have plot implications later.

VII is old chapter VI (X-Ray Blues) and looks more or less the same (I've changed some of the technobabble and upped the stakes for Pennai--in this version, she outright lies to Allen to buy time to keep conducting the computer simulations).

VIII is a patchwork of new material and the first half of old Chapter XI. A major problem I had with the first draft was that the Battle of Uranus was effectively the book's climax, and then once it was over, I followed it up with a very long chapter on Spirit of Halifax. So that stuff has been split. The mutiny still happens after the battle; I couldn't figure out how to make it happen otherwise, but we go more or less directly from the battle to the mutiny. The events of old Chapter VIII will be split up--it's certain the book will end with "Check please", which if you haven't read the novel makes no sense to you, but trust me: it's the best line of the whole damn book.

Oh, and bonus! The destruction of Mao Station is now experienced through the POV of a viewpoint character.

IX is "Sky King Star" and that's underway now. There are some alterations that have been forced upon it by previous revisions, but it should escape largely unchanged. I now have a tentative date for completing the second draft: Wednesday, November 23.

Why that specific date? I have my reasons.

This concludes this public service announcement.

Dispatches from Gloucester City

I'm kind of a shitty blogger.

I don't know how the guys who put up good stuff every few days (or even daily) do it. I haven't even managed to change the date on the spamcatcher two weeks into August. I do have a partial excuse: I just moved into a new apartment a week and a half ago, and between the general chaos of moving and the fact the Comcast man installed my Internet only about ten minutes ago, I just haven't had the opportunity to post (this will be of no interest to anyone except me and Metatwaddle, but I also have digital cable now. Woo. Now instead of watching about four channels and ignoring the other 60 or so, I'll be watching five channels and ignoring the other 300. Truly, we live in a golden age.)

(The fifth channel is the Science Channel. I don't know how I lived without Survivorman in my life.)

(Yes, I know Survivorman was also on Discovery, but it was on Friday night at eight, and fuck me if I'm going to watch TV on Friday night at eight.)

Then on top of that, I had to read The Grapple and The World Without Us. The Grapple I sort of endured more than I enjoyed it; Turtledove had to turn backflips to get what should have been a novella's worth of story into a long novel, and the last fifty pages were just excruciating (I might have a full review later). The World Without Us, on the other hand, has been a joy--I recommend it so much, here's the Amazon link.

Now an HI update: IV and V are done. IV went in with just minor tweaks, but V got a more substantial rewrite. I had a few reasons for this, and I think the chapter is markedly improved. The fallball scene got a good working-over to make the action clearer (I had Laney give everyone on the Black Gang short, distinct, insulting nicknames, so instead of "the enlisted engineer who was not the captain and not the lesbian passed the ball to the other enlisted engineer who was not the captain and not the lesbian and not himself, either", I have "Tiny passed the ball to Taint". I think it works better, and I like that Laney has a talent for nicknames now). Then I rewrote much of what came after the battle scene. Laney doesn't forgive Nick so easily, and the idea for the marijuana business becomes hers. Laney's talent for logistics and business is shown in this chapter, rather than told later. And finally, and I believe most important, Laney doesn't end up self-identifying as an engineer (in spirit if not in training), even though the engineers are willing to accept her as an honorary member of the black gang; instead, she points out that the crew and the passengers have been fucked just as hard. This is setting up something later; the mutiny will not be the anemic, engineers-only affair it was in the first draft.

Chapter VI is not the Chapter VI everyone knows and loves (the namesake of this blog). Chapter VI is, instead, all new material, featuring two viewpoint characters, set on Earth. The first viewpoint character is David, fighting on the Baikal Front against the Chinese hordes (somebody tell Darth Raptor he got his wish). The second is Adrienne, back home in New Orleans (there are not, unfortunately, any scenes involving her in her professional capacity). The purpose of adding a new chapter was threefold: first, Chapter XII is going to get pared down to a short epilogue (I don't know what I'm going to do with the original epilogue), and so I felt I needed something to replace it. Oh noes, filler! But it's not! The events of new Chapter VI will directly impact what happens later in the climax. That's the second purpose of the chapter: to take some important events on Earth which had been told in the form of throwaway lines from characters or news broadcasts and show them happening up close. The third purpose is to contrast civilian life in the middle of the war to civilian life at the beginning, using a character the reader has already met in an established setting--hence Adrienne, who incidentally is a TON of fun to write. As you might imagine, it got worse.

I intend to be done VI tonight or tomorrow. VII will take some heavy lifting, and on top of that, I'm going to be out of town all weekend, so I have no idea when that will be done. I hate to say next Friday, but probably next Friday. I might get this done before Christmas, but the end of the summer simply is not happening.

Now, to reply to a comment made by Phongn in my long-ago previous post:

Huh, I had no idea you were blogging again! The news on HI is quite welcome, though. If you publish, any way I can get a signed copy?

I have no idea how many author's copies a first-time novelist gets, but after my family, the people who helped me get this done are on the list to get them--signed by the author, of course (am I getting ahead of myself here or what? It's not as bad as me having practice interviews with myself, though--incidentally, I do a pretty fair impression of Terry Gross's speech, if not her voice). So yes, Phongn, you will get a signed copy. Everyone who helped will also be in the acknowledgments (this includes Winchell Chung and Stuart Slade, neither of whom interacted with me directly while I was writing, but whose contributions were critical for this thing to bear any resemblance to hard science fiction). I've already decided to split the dedication: Metatwaddle (obviously), and Chris Szitovszky, with something along the lines of "Wrongfully convicted, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, March 2007" underneath. Who the hell knows--maybe the book will be a runaway bestseller and it will draw enough attention to his case to get him out of the hole into which a lying prosecutor and 12 Victorian imbeciles put him.

One final note: my self-imposed exile from SDN ends on 1 September, but I don't know if I'm coming back. It depends entirely on my self-discipline. I may come back for a few weeks, then go into exile for another three months if it's eating too much of my time.

This concludes this public service announcement.