S.K. Dunstall's Blog, page 15

Bad writing

OMG is the only possible reaction for some deleted scenes

Deleted scenes

We’re searching old manuscripts for deleted scenes for our July newsletter.

Some of these scenes we liked, but we deleted because they
didn’t fit the story any more.  Others were
deleted simply because they were just bad.

When you’re writing early drafts you allow your writing to be bad.  That’s what editing is for.  But oh, my goodness, they can be embarrassing to re-read.  Especially when you’re planning on putting them into a newsletter.

Some deleted scenes really should stay deleted.

What we’ve been doing

The Handmaid’s Sisters panel. From left to right: Margaret Morgan, Simone Corletto, Melissa Ferguson



Continuum 15

I spent the week before last off work sick. I recovered just
in time for our local speculative fiction convention here in Melbourne,
Continuum. It was good, and I was over the bug, but everything passed in a
haze.

I was so exhausted post-bug, post-convention that I couldn’t
even get the energy to post a late blog.

Standouts that I remember include keynote addresses by both
guests of honour, Kate Elliot and Ken Tan. Some interesting deep dives—Sherylyn
especially liked Stephanie Lai’s deep dive into sand (Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of
Sand).

The Regency SFF panel chaired by Kathleen Jennings was a lot
of fun and an affectionate look at Georgette Heyer and her impact on speculative
fiction and the whole genre of regency romance. Did you know that once Heyer
realised people were imitating her work she started to make up facts for her
novels? People imitated that, so she’s one of two people in spec fic (and in
romance) who has made up a world. The other is Tolkien.

One panel I enjoyed a lot, which I wasn’t truly expecting
to, was The Handmaid’s Sisters, with Melissa Ferguson, Simone Corletto and
Margaret Morgan. It was at 9:00pm on Saturday night, and to be honest, I only
went because Sherylyn had volunteered to do desk duty then, but I don’t love dystopia,
and the Handmaid’s Tale and stories of their ilk are a little too factual right
now to be anything but downright scary. There were only four of us in the audience
(one left early, but they packed the desk up early so Sherylyn made a second
fourth). It was a good panel. Very enjoyable.

Copyedits

We received the copy edits for Stars Beyond on Thursday. We
have two weeks to get them back to the publisher.

Sherylyn does this part, so I’m relaxing by writing a new
book.

I must say, a copy editor’s style guide is a beautiful thing
for a writer. It’s the kind of document you want about two, three, edits before
the final one you send off to the editor. So you can make the story consistent.
It has a list of words and how they’re spelt, proper nouns, descriptions of characters,
and so on. Everything you put in your book is in the copy editor’s style guide.
Including, if it’s part of a series, everything you put in the prior books,
too.

Love it.

I just wish we could do the same thing about four drafts before.

Worldcon

We booked our tickets for CoNZealand, Worldcon 2020. If any
of you are coming, see you there.

Fun fact, did you know Melbourne and Sydney are closer to cities
in New Zealand, than they are to Perth, Australia?

This dinosaur has succumbed to the inevitable

Yesterday I bought myself a new phone.

I can’t say I even wanted to upgrade.  I loved my little Microsoft Windows phone.  It’s easy to use, and synched in with my Microsoft
account, so that anything on it went back to my laptop and my home PC. Very
convenient.  Yes, you can do this with
other ecosystems, but we’re Microsoft users, and it was so easy.  Log in with your Microsoft account and things
just worked. 

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows phones some years ago. I
don’t use many apps, and my phone has served me well for years, so it wasn’t an
issue. Or hasn’t been to date.

So why did I change?

Work.

Whiteboards, for example. 
Remember when the ultimate in whiteboards was to have one that printed what
you wrote on it?  That old heat sensitive
paper that faded, so that you had to photocopy it straight away?

Maybe not?  It was a
long time ago.

Nowadays, you take a photo of the whiteboard on your mobile
phone.  Likewise, draw a diagram on
butcher’s paper, or put some Post-It notes around the wall.  How do you share them?  You take a picture on your mobile phone, then
you share the image.

It’s all Bluetooth, but Microsoft phones (or my phone,
anyway), only shares with other Microsoft phones.  It certainly won’t talk to any of the Macs we
use at work.

Or take speakers. We do conference calls.  A lot of big companies do.  But the sound quality is so bad our team
invested in a bluetooth speaker. Which works beautifully but guess whose phone
didn’t talk to the Bluetooth speaker. 
That means when I’m taking the call, I can’t use the speaker.

The deciding factor was when we chose to use What’sApp to
communicate within the team.  It was even
in the Microsoft store.  I installed it,
but do you think it would let me join the work group?

No. 

So, I finally caved in and upgraded my phone.

So long, little Microsoft phone.  You were good to me.

Slave driver

We found this rather addictive app on the iPad called Merge
Dragons.  It’s a game that allows you do
exactly what it says.  Merge dragons.

They have occasional weekend special games, where you get
nice prizes if you go on and do the special event. The trick is to collect
enough points to collect all the prizes. 
The dragons harvest various seeds and you combine them to make something
worth more points.

The higher level the plant is that the dragons click on, the better the harvest, and the more points

There are a lot of plants on the board, and only a small
number of high-level plants. (It takes time to set them up.)  But you can force the dragons to harvest the
plants you want.

I have two dragons. But these poor little creatures. All they want to do is collect hearts, and mean old me keeps double-clicking on the big old tree I want them to harvest.  If I give them time in between, off they fly to collect some more hearts, which is slow, and doesn’t get you many prizes.

So the only way to keep these little creatures on track is
to double-click on the appropriate fruit tree immediately after they have
harvested.

This is cracking the whip.  This is slavery.

I feel really bad.

So bad, I’m losing any stomach for finishing the game.

One Saturday in May

When you can’t see the poles.

Saturday was election day in Australia.

I have to admit to being disappointed with the result. Not
just because I was hoping for a government that would take climate change more
seriously, but mostly because the winning party indulged in a scare campaign that
worked. All they seemed to do was tell you how much more badly off you will be
if you vote for the other parties. There was a lot of dishonesty with it, too.
Advertising made to look as if it came from the AEC (Australian Electoral
Commission), and so on.

Sadly, other parties will see now that it worked. Sigh. It’s
the Tragedy of the Commons.

In contrast, the Eurovision Song contest was an affirmative
statement of ‘be who you are’.

Saturday was also Eurovision grand final.

Because we write, we don’t get a lot of time to watch
television, but the one thing we do watch is the Eurovision final. Three years
ago we switched from cable television to internet-based TV. Loved the cable,
incidentally, it just worked; all the time, with no problems. Sadly, the phone
company discontinued the service. We bought a smart TV to work with the new
internet connection.

But every time we turn the television on now, we have to
relearn how to use it.

That means that the first half hour of the Eurovision is
spent by us trying to get the TV to work and trying to get a channel. We don’t
have free-to-air any more, we have to rely on SBS On-Demand to see the show,
and we always forget how to set it up.

I have no idea why it takes so long. Well, I do, because
we’ve never really learned to use the television. In the end, we gave up and put
it on Sherylyn’s laptop.

We missed the first two entries, but we heard the rest.

I liked most of the songs, and many of them were about
acceptance, or being yourself. Australia’s entry, for example, was about post-post-natal
depression. (We know, Australia, Eurovision. Don’t ask. We have no idea why,
either.)

Actually, I was more impressed with Kate Heidke Miller’s (Australia)
entry than I expected to be. I like the song, but the poles got to me. Three
people swaying around on poles seemed a weird thing. But in the end, when they
put the effects of the earth and the stars together with it, it was amazing.

The poles are still weird when you see them, though.

You have to watch it to see what I mean.

So politics is getting dirtier, but there’s hope if people can still sing about positive affirmative things. I’ll leave you with my favourite Eurovision song. It didn’t win (I did like the Netherlands song, which won) but I really liked Norway’s song. This one is about the northern Aurora, and has a really catchy chorus.

A reader question about the lines

A reader asks:

When Gruen comes aboard her ship luckily all went fine.

But what if Ean hadn’t said, “Don’t kill,” through the lines and she had not listened to humans and killed Radko and Ean?

How would the Gruen lines feel with Ean dead, especially line eight which could have saved him, but did not want to contradict its Ship? How would the other lines feel with Ean dead? Or would the other eights save him?  After all they are not captain Gruen bound as is the Gruen.

We know how important the captain is, but how important is one of their lines? Line nine did not care about Ean’s panic in the void, all that mattered was Kari Wang.

Just curious. Ean would never hurt the lines, but what if Gruen had killed him (if Ean had forgotten to tell her no shoot through the lines)?

We thought this would be easy to answer, until we started to
think about it, and it generated a lot of discussion in our writing household.

Instinctively, we felt the lines would save line twelve.  But they wouldn’t. 

As our reader pointed out, in the void the Eleven listened to Kari Wang over Ean,
and we know that if Wendell wanted his ship to do something against Ean’s
wishes, Wendell would win out, for certain.

We digress here to note that Kari Wang and the Eleven bonded very quickly.  We think that’s because Kari Wang had been on
a ship (with a good relationship to it) not long before and was already open to
the lines.  Both were grieving their lost
crews, both were used to and ready for a ship/’ship’ relationship.

So yes, after a point, the captain’s commands would win out
over Ean’s if the meld between ship and ‘ship’ was strong enough.

But how would the lines cope with a conflict between captain
and line twelve?  Especially if they
killed Ean.  It would create a
conflict.  They don’t want to destroy
line twelve.  Other ships don’t want them
to destroy line twelve.

One crazy ship in the making.

Continuing on from last week’s theme on automation

This is not a washing machine, or even a dryer, but when I was looking for clip art for this post I got pictures of cats in dryers. I know cats love dryers, because they’re warm and soft. The pictures are cute but call me paranoid—I didn’t want a picture like that. Too scary. So instead, I chose another cat laundry picture. Mum’s cat, Mercedes, used to love our laundry basket when we took the warm clothes out of the dryer. (Of course, our laundry wasn’t neatly folded like this.

Beat the bots

Vacuuming the floor

Easter Monday and the Anzac day holiday were in the same
week this year, which meant that if you took three days’ leave, then you ended
up with an unbroken stretch of ten straight days of holiday.

Naturally, I took it. We both did.

Which is fine, except Monday, Wednesday and Fridays turned
into a game of beat the bot.

Housekeeping is never a fun chore, it’s just something that
has to be done.  So last Christmas we
bought bots. A vacuum robot, for cleaning the wooden floor and carpets, and a
wet mop for the wet areas.

I find that robotic floor cleaners are a lot like dishwashers.  Even though you have to do pre-work (load)
and post-work (empty), it’s faster and more convenient than having to wash
dishes by hand. Even when the hand washing can be done in half the time, and
when the dishwasher breaks down, you can’t wait until it gets fixed so you
don’t have to handwash any more.

Bots are like that.  For
the vacuum cleaner to make sure the floor doesn’t have anything around that
might trip the bot up, and that the furniture hasn’t been moved so it gets
stuck, and afterwards you have to empty the dirt tray. The wet mop is even more
manual—sweep the floor first, set up the cleaner, then wash out the wet mop after
it’s done.  Even so, housework has less of
a hassle since they’ve been around.

We named our bots. As you do, of course.  Zoomba, because it’s a Roomba, and because
Zumba (don’t ask, I’m not going to explain) and Wetta, because the mop is a
Braava Jetta and because we’d just come back from New Zealand and the Weta
factory and it made sense at the time.

The Wetta is totally manual. Set it up, press go, put it
away when it’s done.

The Zoomba is scheduled to run every Monday, Wednesday and
Friday at 9:00.  We’re out of the house
by 7:30 normally. It’s not a problem. Except this week. When we were on
holidays.

Something else you do on holidays.  Sleep in.

We could, of course, have just changed the settings, but
that would be too simple.  No.  Instead, we played beat the bot.

Nine am on the scheduled days. We’re asleep, of course, because
we stayed up late last night reading, or writing, or just talking.  The very noisy Zoomba starts up. (The Wetta
is whisper quiet.)

We fall out of bed in our respective rooms. Run out, check
the cords, check the furniture, do what we have to do to be sure the bot has a
clear path.  So tired we’re both doing
the same thing, one after the other.

By then we’re wide awake. 
“You can have first shower,” one of us says. We go through the walz of “No,
you can,” a couple of times before one of us gives in and heads for the bathroom.

The other, wide awake by now of course, turns on the
computer.

I’m sure, if you could read bot-minds, you’d hear the Zoomba
laughing.

Why does everyone have to die?

Spoilers here for Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series.  If you don’t want to know how it ends, don’t
read on.  Well, not so much how it ends, but
who survives.

Jim Butcher’s first book in the Codex Alera was on sale for US99c
(about A$1.50). I bought it, and even though my TBR pile is enormous, I started
to read it.

At 11:00pm that night, I bought the second book.

Oh, it’s a slippery slope when you start on a series you
enjoy.

I was part way through the second book when I told Sherylyn,
“All I can say is, they’d better not kill Frederic.”

They didn’t kill Frederic, much to my relief. And, in fact,
most of those who survived the first book also survived the second.

I haven’t read any further. Two books in two days. I’m stiff, I haven’t moved.  I need to walk around a bit.  But, I did jump onto Goodreads and read the synopses of the next four books.  And, let’s be honest, I read a few reviews, too.

Spoiler coming … be warned, stop here if you don’t want to
know.

I don’t know if Frederic survives to the end of the last
book. I hope he does.  He’s only a
secondary character (minor secondary, at that). 
But everyone else survived. All the main characters lived.

I read a few reviews where readers were critical of this.
They felt that some of the main characters should have died.  That it was unrealistic. 

Of course it was unrealistic, but that doesn’t mean it
couldn’t happen. Why can’t the story follow only the survivors? Why is a book only
realistic if people die?

Other reviewers were happy the characters survived, and I
confess, even though I haven’t read the other books yet, so am I. I was
dreading learning that one of my favourite characters being killed.

I’m a lot more inclined to read the other four books now.

Bad writing habits

I’m making changes to Stars Beyond, based on our editor’s
feedback.  A few changes to the first
chapter. Well, let’s be honest, more than a few. (It’s okay, not a total
rewrite, we did leave some words the same at the end of the chapter.)

Sherylyn is following along behind, unmaking half of them.

“But you’ve cut out all his thoughts, his emotions,” I
protest.

“Because he sounds exactly like Alistair.  I can’t tell who’s who.”

I never used to be conscious of how similar our characters
sounded. I don’t know if it’s because we’re becoming better writers, and thus noticing
it, or if it’s an unconscious laziness we’ve developed over time.

Either way, we have to change it.

Right now, I’m just happy Sherylyn can at least pick it up,
even if I can’t.