Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 30
November 29, 2019
November Newsletter: The Lightning Tree
(There’s a real short story in this newsletter! Scroll down to the *** to read it)
So there I was, dropping my older daughter off at school. The weather was fine, I had at least three hours of uninterrupted writing time ahead of me, there was a very nice statue of a horse right there, but it felt like the end of the day instead of the beginning.
Every Friday I take a break from the novel and spend the morning writing something new. I’d already written a very good short story about general relativity, the first chapter in a collaborative novel set in the Fellow Tetrapod Universe, and one of these newsletters. But what about today? Could I do it again? I was running out of time before my deadline? What if today the words didn’t come?
“I feel like a shaman,” I said. “Every week you walk out onto the taiga and shake your rattles and you hope that lightning will strike again.”
“What’s a shaman?” asked my daughter. So Pavlina and I explained as we dragged that unicorn-donut wheelie backpack along the narrow sidewalk that leads to school.
We got the little girl into the building and stumbled back to the car. “That’s a very passive way to think about what you do,” Pavlina told me. “You’re not just waiting for the lightning to strike. You’re making it happen.”
Willow leaves tumble
Until they find a surface.
Water from a spring.
I thought about that as I walked to Starbucks. By the time I got there, I had an idea for a character who might feel the same way I did. And I thought about a discussion I’d been having with Simon Roy, Artyom Trakhanov , and Jason Wordie about a possible sequel to our comic, Protector.
I got my black tea and a brownie as a special treat and I meditated. I imagined myself floating in a great empty space, curled around my chest, which was burning from the inside out. Was that an espresso brownie I’d eaten?
I tore into my backpack and grabbed my notebook. I wrote diagrams. Triads of characters. The Antiquities Collector, the Archaeologist, the priest of the Inquisition! And locking into that triad, their foils! Yes. YES! The Corrupt Official, the Disgraced Warrior, the Shaman! Who would be searching for an ancient artifact of power? Who would be sent to retrieve it? I visualized the plot beats for the first scene of “Protector,” and I superimposed them over – full disclosure – the opening scene in Disney’s “Aladdin.”
Then I put Mika’s “Underwater” on repeat, and I wrote this:
***
The raft rocks on the blood-warm swell of the Cannibal Sea.
Behind the raft looms the sacred timbers of a Bequa caravel, its sails reefed against totem-carved masts. Behind that: the cracked and sun-glazed dome of ancient Mayami. Trapped hurricanes pile like volcanoes on the horizon.
Plonjadò A stands on the edge, his eyes closed, palms pressed to his hips, breathing his prayer.
He is an old man, hair and beard stubble white against very black skin, and he wears only a belt of weights. In the water at his feet bobs a white buoy, marked with the green and gold microchip of House Komèsan.
“What’s he waiting for?” Grumbles the mercenary on the deck of the caravel.
Plonjadò cannot hear her. He curls his toes around the hot sea-bamboo of his raft, barrel chest rising, falling, waiting for God to breathe into him.
When he was a boy and still had his eardrums, Plonjadò A could wait a year for a real breath. As an apprentice, he might spend days fasting and praying, then dive barely 50 meters. Now, inspiration comes to him every day, and still they demand more. Still he will give it.
“They call it ‘Opening the Lungs of God.'” Lady Sardodj Komèsan Nan looks down on the little black figure on the pale raft. Sardodj’s parasol is finest plastic, painted silver and dangling with microchips. “A sacred ritual of my people.”
Her plumed mantel rises about her shoulders as she turns, hands on hips, grinning at her bodyguard. “I think it’s a rather fitting way to begin a war with heaven.”
“Whatever you say, Komèsan.” The mercenary is leaning against the railing on the ship’s far side, face hidden under the shadow cast by her hat. She caresses the barrel of her rifle and spits tobacco juice into the red brine. “Just tell me when to shoot the shaman.”
The breath comes to Plonjadò, and he opens his eyes. He knows the merchant princess plans to kill him. Only now, though, with the breath of God in his chest, does he know why he should not let her. More is demanded of him.
His arms rise and his breath gusts out. Plonjadò dives.
The Cannibal Sea is as warm and red as blood, teaming with jellyfish.
Stings slide off his oiled skin as Plonjadò reaches out. His fingers find the rope that depends from the buoy and thread themselves around it. as he sinks.
The water embraces him. Pain rises in his jaw, a dim memory of the pressure that took his hearing. Soft algae brush his cheeks.
Plonjadò feels the seabed and grips the buoy’s rope to slow his dive. In the red blackness, he sweeps out his arms, fingers splayed to feel for the treasure that the Komèsan princess says must be here.
Blind now, as well as deaf, Plonjadò forms a picture with his fingertips. There is the anchor of the buoy, buried in the fine blanket of dead algae. There is a long, smooth curve – the carbon fiber hull of an ancient ship. Another curve is a skull. There is the jaw, and there the fence posts of ribs. A long, smooth bone…
And the water lights up.
It looks like a heart, beating with light, nested within counter-rotating loops of black chain. Plonjadò squints against it, the blood pounding around his eyes. He reaches past the orbiting chains, touches the heart again, and for the first time in thirty years, he hears a voice.
“Greetings, master. What do you wish of me?”
The voice is high and sweet. A child playing make-believe.
Plonjadò takes up the heart and holds it against his chest. The chains break like smoke and reform around him. Wider, they orbit faster.
My child, he thinks, my only wish is to keep you safe.
The caravel rocks in a sudden upwelling of water. Sardodj grips the rail and narrows her eyes at the blood-colored water. At the contrail of bubbles speeding north, away from her. She glances at the compass, which is now also pointing north. Five minutes ago, it wasn’t.
“Well, shit,” she says.
***
I was worried about whether Simon, Artyom, and Jason would like it. But they did. We’ve had more good ideas since then. Protector 1 comes out in January followed by four more, one per month, until July, when the omnibus will come out. If you are friends with a comic book store owner, please request Protector. That will make it easier to publish that sequel 
November 26, 2019
The Story of Protector
Protector is an idea that can’t be pinned down to any one brain. Simon took the first step when he made a project about godlike aliens assisting in a post-apocalypse archaeological dig. I asked Simon questions about the world, which started a conversation that also included the speculative shaman-king C.M. Kosemen. Between us, we started evolving a story. Aliens dig up an ancient human war-cyborg. No! The “aliens” are actually post-humans, and some normal humans want to be freed from post-human tyranny! These slaves worship the cyborg…and…better yet, it was one of these slaves who stumbled across that ancient war-machine and awakened it with her blood.
Simon sketched that scene out, and it floated around on the internet until Artyom Trakhanov got a hold of it and blasted it into the next dimension. I doubt anything would have come of Protector without Artyom’s portentus woodprint-like chunks of black and white. There’s this image of “the slave girl” (we didn’t know her name at that point) riding on this awful cyborg cyclops as it claws its way out of the ruins of the old world…we knew we had to finish this story.
Simon and I spent six years on and off working on it. I was trying to get a novel (any novel!) published at the time, and I was reading a lot of books on writing. So I’d come back with these tools to test out on our story. Why can’t the protagonist get what they want? What change will the protagonist have to make within themselves in order to achieve their goals? What should happen at the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 marks? How can we treat our characters with compassion? How can our story help people?
Telling a story usually means juggling a whole bunch of things at once. There’s character and plot and also all these fiddly details. How long does it take to get from point A to point B? We said the moon was full in these scene, so what shape should it be in that scene? What do the geese look like? But now we had three people working on these questions, and the answers flowed like water.
Things started getting serious. Simon pitched the idea to Image and was told (or so he says), “sure, dude!” We got Jason Wordie involved, and suddenly Simon’s naturalistic forms and Artyom’s brutal shadows got all these delicate gradations of sunset colors. It was amazing. We would pass this ball back and forth and with each volley it got bigger and more splendid. It didn’t feel like work at all. It felt like watching something take root and bloom.
And now Protector will be a thing in the world, and what a lovely thing it is. I couldn’t be prouder of my first collaborative project, and I can’t wait for the next one.
November 25, 2019
Interchange Beta is done!
Lois McMaster Bujold and Terry Pratchett both talk about writing as a hike through a misty valley between mountain peaks. Back in July, I wrote the mountain peaks. Then, from the beginning of September to the end of November, I carefully laid trail between one peak and another. I had to kill some darlings, but I took it from a bunch of dis-connected inspiration-driven set-pieces to a full story, with all the bits about how the characters get from point A to B to C.
Begun at 10:00am Sep 1st 2019 in my office on ul. Gurko.
First line: “Bamboo-grass crunched and the mist curled away, revealing the bear.”
Finished at 3:15pm Nov 25th 2019.
Last line: “The Nightbow spun above them, filled with mountains.”
Length (beta): 80,351 words
It’s still very much half-baked. 80K words instead of 100K. The emotional arcs have a few kinks in them. The ancillary characters might not appear at all for a whole bunch of chapters. Plot-holes galore. And there still aren’t as many aliens as I want. But now I’m going to print the manuscript out, give it to my wife to read, and let it rest until January. Then I’ll start the third read-through. January, February, March…Hopefully by March I’ll something I can show to other people. You’ll let me know if you want one of those other people to be you.
December will be dedicated to fiddling some more with Centuries, and then there’s apparently some sort of winter solstice holiday? See you on the other side.
November 22, 2019
November 20, 2019
November 14, 2019
Rain, Birdsong, Voices
Rain, birdsong, voices
Drops shudder the yellow leaves
What was I doing?
November 12, 2019
A Sullen Coal
Oh, the contempt that winks within you
A sullen coal
Enslaved to the machinery that enslaves you
Although you built it.
November 6, 2019
A Tomb’s Chartreuse Dome
A tomb’s chartreuse dome
Behind leaves before the sky
I’m grateful for them
November 5, 2019
Moving Continents
Moving continents
Black and clear blue, glowing pink
An amazing sky!
November 3, 2019
Four Star Book Reviews: Semiosis
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Semiosis is less a novel than a book of short stories, each of which recounts another generation of the history of a human colony on an exoplanet. I had trouble with the beginning, but after I understood how the story was being told, I had a lot of fun.
There’s some very good speculative biology here,. The animals and plants feel very real, and lovingly developed. The philosophical heart of the book is about trust – how can mutualism develop between sapient species? With great difficulty.
