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Feb. 11th, 2011 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseI noticed that I never did blog about the event two weeks ago. Not that it’s likely of much interest to anyone else, and it feels too late now. It was low-key but good – I missed more of it than I’d have liked.
Still working – they keep extending my hours one week at a time, while they look for a permanent receptionist. I am NOT minding much at all.
I had another plot kernel pop the other day.
I’ve been trying to figure out a basic problem in the Labyrinth story. Heather is bisexual; she goes into the maze to save her estranged wife. The problem is, the character she gets help from, and ends up attracted to, is male.
Happens in real life, of course – but in fiction, it’s very easy to make this feel like it’s saying “She’s not really bi, she just played a bit in college”, or other attitudes that similarly trivialize alternate sexualities. The fact that she cared enough to marry this person didn’t feel like enough, since they’re already pretty broken up by the start of the story.
And, of course, since the wife was stuck in a tower in the middle of the maze. I had been thinking she couldn’t do terribly much to protag, or to show up at all until late. Which meant that if I wanted to establish the relationship as just as real and just as valid, I had begun to think I’d need to do flashbacks to Damina-Earth instead of the broken world of the maze, because even Heather thinking so wasn’t quite holding up its end. (It also seemed to me to be really unfair to have a living breathing person act as a macguffin, with no part to play in her own fate and no actual need for a personality – it’s the thing I dislike abut Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, that Aurora is an object, not a person, and the plot is ABOUT Prince Phillip and the Fairies.)
Until it finally twigged: it’s a maze of illusions. The spouse might be effectively trapped in a tower. But does she know that?
Turns out, she doesn’t. I thought abut this a while, trying to figure out what she could possibly be doing that wasn’t either a near-identical run through the maze, or otherwise unrelated and effectively useless?
About a week ago, I went digging through my LJ archives to find the place I’d first summarized the plot for the Labyrinth story, back when Heather’s rescue was her sister, not her spouse. Alas, it wasn’t on the tag I first thought it was under, so I had to search more intensely. In the process of skimming through several possible files, I tripped over one of my old dream-records. And of course, I just *made* a new, if brief, such dream commentary, which also brought the older ones back to mind.
And while I was thinking, this came to mind – and – BANG! Plot Kernel exploded. And triggered two more nasty-dream recollections to join in, as for the first time, I had a way to string them together into an actual coherent storyline. I’ve scribbled down enough notes – and then some – to be sure it works. And it does link up with Heather’s after a while. And works to not make this new protagonist an object, as well as to detrivialize their relationship.
It showed up just in time, too. I don’t actually know the next couple of things that happen to Heather once I finish the current scene (Even though I have already written part of what happens to her in a few more days – since she loses and regains a companion, I can’t *quite* just skip the in between.) So I can go back and start lacing in the other character.
Lots and lots of writing to come. Yay!
Still working – they keep extending my hours one week at a time, while they look for a permanent receptionist. I am NOT minding much at all.
I had another plot kernel pop the other day.
I’ve been trying to figure out a basic problem in the Labyrinth story. Heather is bisexual; she goes into the maze to save her estranged wife. The problem is, the character she gets help from, and ends up attracted to, is male.
Happens in real life, of course – but in fiction, it’s very easy to make this feel like it’s saying “She’s not really bi, she just played a bit in college”, or other attitudes that similarly trivialize alternate sexualities. The fact that she cared enough to marry this person didn’t feel like enough, since they’re already pretty broken up by the start of the story.
And, of course, since the wife was stuck in a tower in the middle of the maze. I had been thinking she couldn’t do terribly much to protag, or to show up at all until late. Which meant that if I wanted to establish the relationship as just as real and just as valid, I had begun to think I’d need to do flashbacks to Damina-Earth instead of the broken world of the maze, because even Heather thinking so wasn’t quite holding up its end. (It also seemed to me to be really unfair to have a living breathing person act as a macguffin, with no part to play in her own fate and no actual need for a personality – it’s the thing I dislike abut Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, that Aurora is an object, not a person, and the plot is ABOUT Prince Phillip and the Fairies.)
Until it finally twigged: it’s a maze of illusions. The spouse might be effectively trapped in a tower. But does she know that?
Turns out, she doesn’t. I thought abut this a while, trying to figure out what she could possibly be doing that wasn’t either a near-identical run through the maze, or otherwise unrelated and effectively useless?
About a week ago, I went digging through my LJ archives to find the place I’d first summarized the plot for the Labyrinth story, back when Heather’s rescue was her sister, not her spouse. Alas, it wasn’t on the tag I first thought it was under, so I had to search more intensely. In the process of skimming through several possible files, I tripped over one of my old dream-records. And of course, I just *made* a new, if brief, such dream commentary, which also brought the older ones back to mind.
And while I was thinking, this came to mind – and – BANG! Plot Kernel exploded. And triggered two more nasty-dream recollections to join in, as for the first time, I had a way to string them together into an actual coherent storyline. I’ve scribbled down enough notes – and then some – to be sure it works. And it does link up with Heather’s after a while. And works to not make this new protagonist an object, as well as to detrivialize their relationship.
It showed up just in time, too. I don’t actually know the next couple of things that happen to Heather once I finish the current scene (Even though I have already written part of what happens to her in a few more days – since she loses and regains a companion, I can’t *quite* just skip the in between.) So I can go back and start lacing in the other character.
Lots and lots of writing to come. Yay!
