Health

Been a while since my last posting here, I’ll go through updates on various things.

Kim getting better

Wife Kim (https://string-or-nothing.com) continues to get stronger and have an easier time doing day to day tasks. In-home PT visits have ended, and now she does out-patient PT. Included in her daily routine are things like clamshells, between-the-knees ball squeeze, step-ups, and 1000s of cane-aided walking steps.

BTW, Kim’s cane, a carbon-fiber and molded composite affair, like all legendary tokens, has a name: Ichabod. Yes, you heard it right.

We’re soon to start the (hopefully!) last therapeutic process of the year. From the last week of August to end of October, Kim will be receiving proton beam radiation five days a week. We have yet to learn the details but it seems likely this will be a stereotactic method, where CAT-scans are used to aim the proton beams with very high precision. The point of all this is to reduce the chance of the original cancer recurring by zapping the specific precursor cells.

Can‘t I have just a little peril?

The peril at Castle Anthrax isn’t exactly what I mean here … I mean real live, big stakes, life-the-universe-and-everything peril. No, I’m not contemplating a new identity as an Evel Knievel or Felix Baumgartner. It’s just that I’m writing a new SF novel, FORLORN TOYS, and like all genre fiction, there has to be peril to get readers interested.

Of course most readers know this, at some level at least. The peril in Lord of the Rings is violent subjugation of an entire world. The threat of that peril is what gets Frodo out of the Shire, what gets the Fellowship on the road, and what drives Sam to stick things out to the bitter end.

Simple, right? Not really. LoTR puts forth many layers of peril, such as the peril of losing innocence, or the peril of losing an ancient culture. In an important exchange, Sam tells Faramir that “Boromir brought his peril with him” into Lórien, but thinks he has said too much. Faramir replies:

‘But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. Sit at peace! And be comforted, Samwise. If you seem to have stumbled, think that it was fated to be so. Your heart is shrewd as well as faithful, and saw clearer than your eyes.’

In the best stories, the peril comes at you from multiple directions, at multiple levels.

Violent and imperialistic overthrow of an existing order or population is the overwhelmingly most used peril in SF and Fantasy. The peril in War of the Worlds was pretty one-dimensional: Technologically advanced aliens from Mars are attacking with an intent to dominate White European culture (reverse-colonialization story!) The galaxy being ruled by the sadistic Harkonens is the main peril in Dune and, being a pretty good book, there’s a secondary peril in that being ruled by Paul Atreides might be worse. There’s too many similar examples to count. All of these were motivated in large part by the advent of 20^th century large-scale mechanized warfare, followed by nuclear weapons. These were things that a great many people worried about, so stories that take those possibilities and show the what-ifs – mostly with the good guys living through it – make complete sense.

But is apocalyptic war the only peril that readers want to read about? Well, no. The most common peril in mystery stories is Justice defeated or avoided – a murderer goes uncaught. No one wants that, because we want to think better of the world and that evil-doers will pay for their crimes. Often that gets paired with a psychological peril on the part of the detective: Will I fail to prove myself? Will I fail someone I care about? A top favorite of mine in mysteries is Nero Wolfe who, aided by man-of-action Archie Goodwin, solves a wide range of murders. The peril in these stories is always, Will Nero Wolfe lose self-esteem and not live up to his reputation as a genius. This is a great example of how peril can be personal and small in scale yet still be fun to read.

Romance stories also have peril: Will I live my life alone? or some form of that. The universality of that peril is a major reason romance so strongly outsells SFF.

Back to SF, a class of peril that took root in the 80s, along with Cyberpunk, I call corporate peril. In these stories, a company is typically seeking unbreakable economic power, as a prelude to political power. Think The Tyrell Corp in BladeRunner/DADOES, or evil CEO L. Bob Rife in SnowCrash. Like total-war was the go-to peril for the boomer generation, corporate peril was the same for Gen X.

The details of storytelling peril come and go every decade, but there are some things that are constant:

The peril can be beat. Wouldn’t do much good to write a story with a problem that has no solution – “Jack tried to trick the Giant, but he just got killed” is not bestseller material. Sauron is vulnerable to the destruction of the Ring, the Harkonens are mystified by the weirding way, and the Hindu god pretenders of Lord of Light are unable to counter Buddhism.

The victory has to be credible. Of course we want our heroes to beat the bad guys, but they have to do it the right way. If the enemy is overcome too easily, or if some unexpected help arrives at the very last second, or if the enemy dialogs their plans telling the hero their secret weakness – all of those are weak. We need our heroes to believably suffer for their victories.

The clock is ticking … Almost all genre story climaxes have a time-limited aspect. James Bond defusing an atomic bomb is a cliche (but fun) example. In LoTR as Frodo and Sam approach Mount Doom, the armies of Sauron are close to overrunning the forces of the West; if Aragorn and Gondor are lost, destroying the ring would be a Pyrrhic victory. What you will see in story after story is, there comes a point where the heroes can’t fall back and regroup – that have to win now or all is lost. This keeps the reader engaged until – hopefully! – your unexpected way of succeeding kicks in, just in time.

Knee Deep In Peril

Why, you might ask, am I delving so deep into these perilous waters? It’s because at 79,000 words, my draft of FORLORN TOYS is now at the climactic ending chapters. While I have shown a lot of peril all through the story so far, the heroes don’t yet understand the full origins or extent of their enemy. That’s a good thing. LoTR was able to give a detailed picture of the threat of Sauron right in chapter 2, but that only worked because of the astounding worldbuilding that Tolkien had done – we know from the start the whole world is in peril, but only after 3 books do we really understand enough about that world to feel the real extent of that. So, not having that option, I have to more slowly unfold the details of the peril, which builds tension chapter by chapter, and makes for some – again, hopefully! – cool reveals in the climax.

Here’s an outline of my method:

• Something I set down some time back was a high-level description of the bad guys’ capabilities: where they come from, and what they can  do.
• Based on that I had to do some thinking on what weaknesses were implied in that description.
• I then set down 5 different options on how the good guys could prevail.
• For each one I listed strengths and weaknesses, mainly using the rubric above, things like: How is the approach time-limited? Is it cliché or deus ex machina?
• An additional factor to consider: future books in the series. In genre fiction, once a strategy has been used, it’s not expected to work again. So the strategy for book 1 has to succeed, but not leave the door open to just rinse-and-repeat in subsequent books.
• Then, with some comments from Kim, I pick one out of the 5 and we’re off to the chapter races.

I’m happy with the result. Now, just 4 fairly short chapters to go; I’m aiming for a total of 90,000 words or less.

I’ll leave you with a bit from the draft. The heroine, Irá Norlander, is explaining to spaceship captain Judd Maddox something about information theory. Judd’s spaceship is named the Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander:

“What do you think about information Judd?” she asked.

“Me? You mean, facts? Like, what facts do I know?”

“No, no – how would you define ‘information’, in general?”

Judd sat on Irá’s bunk and thought a moment. “Well, it would be facts, I suppose. Facts about things.”

“And then, are things that are not facts therefore not information?”

Judd thought once again.

“Tricky,” he said. “Maybe, I’m not sure.”

“I’m going to tell you something, Judd. Pay attention,” she said. Judd sat up straight and she continued.

“‘The Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander is a little tweeting bird, chirping in a meadow.’ There, was that information?”

This is one of the more blatant easter eggs in the book, but I like it.

Till next time …