Retreat, Day 6

This is the YA SF novella (?) I’m working on.

Synopsis: Stella’s life is on the unusual side, but whose isn’t nowadays, half a century after the Fall that led to this ruined landscape with its mesh of mythology and machinery? Still, being brought up as part of a troupe of circus performers wandering along the coast of the Inner Sea, going from small village to small village, sets her apart from many.

Even more alienating is the fact that she doesn’t know who her parents were. The others in the troupe deny any knowledge of them, and so Stella feels herself a stranger among them, particularly as adulthood draws near and she must figure out what her role with the circus will be.

When one of the circus elders reveal that Stella’s mother was, in fact, a circus performer, Stella must navigate feelings of betrayal, new responsibilities, and her mother’s legacy of magic-enhancing technology. When she fails to control her temper and half the circus burns down as a result, she’s ejected from the only family she’s ever known.

Accompanied by a village girl named Abacus (Abbie), the two strike inland, hoping to find the city that Stella’s father was rumored to come from. Their ingenuity and bravery are put to the test as they battle minotaurs, mutants, and other perils created by the crumbling technology of a long-gone scientific age.

When they finally come to the city, they find it deserted, much to their despair. But that night they are seized and taken to find Stella’s father, who lives far above on the space station. Abbie is slated to be the human sacrifice who will “pay” for Stella’s admission to the station, but when they find out they manage to (with great peril and suspense) flee to an abandoned lunar colony, where they come face to face with the greatest challenge of all: the aliens who created the Fall.

From the first chapter:

I’m practicing juggling again, because it’s raining outside, big fat bloodwarm drops drumming on the tent’s waxed canvas. In an hour, as the day’s light vanishes, the circus’s light will begin to flicker and shine, powered by the ancient turbine/treadmill pulled by three ponies and a servobot. Townsfolk will wander through the maze of entrance gates and aisles, hesitant and eager all at once, pockets full of silver slugs and other tradeable metal.

They’ll wander through the booths, looking at the freakshows and trying their luck at the games, winding their way towards the bigtop, ready to make their way up the creaking bleachers and sit to watch marvels unfold.

This time we’re within earshot of the ocean, a jungle-hugged glade near two different villages.

I drop a beanbag and curse. I’ve worked my way up to four at a time, but keeping five aloft continues to elude me.

Roto the Tiger Boy sticks his head in the flap in time to catch the last words. His whiskers twitch. He holds out a tin silently and I take it, gesture at him to sit on the floor. He does, closing his eyes as I start to apply the orange greasepaint that colors his dun fur, turning him from an ordinary cat-man to something more exotic.

What can I apply to myself, what will turn me into the exotic thing the circus just hasn’t realized it needs yet?

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In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.

I see her first while the Mexicana 747 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

The title plays off nearly every line: “I see her first,” (who? is it one of the women from the title?) “a double female blur,” “the near blur,” “the younger blur, “registering nothing,” finishing up with “I never would have looked at them or thought of them again,” at which point the reader is screaming why? why don’t you see them? The answer to that question is crucial to the story.

Here’s another Tiptree beginning, this time of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which uses the strategy of referring to a memory to reveal the conflict. The memory is connected to gender and embarrassment, which will also turn out to be crucial to the story.

Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly — or was he pushed? –into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is Tiptree at her best, examining gender norms and conventions with a ruthless, scathingly honest eye. Somehow that first moment of embarrassment, that moment of being in “the strange toilet” encapsulates so much of what that story is about and how alien the sexes can be to each other as well as how strange their container, the norms that make them up, which constitute the walls of “the can” itself, are. Look at how the center of his masculinity is framed visually: the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. There is so much going on in that first paragraph, including sensory details like the twitch of his insides, the blare of a giggle, the pattern and threat of a zipper, that it’s worth copying out, pulling apart sentence by sentence to figure out how it’s working.

Let’s finish up with Tiptree in a moment that puts everything up front, in the short story “We Who Stole the Dream”:

The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.

Woah. We don’t know what’s going on precisely, but we know crucial details. We have a deadline and it is only twelve minims. While we don’t know how long a minim is, we know it’s not much time because of that “only”. Plus, there’s an auditory echo of “minute” that makes us think they’re of similar length.

What’s at stake? This lives of children, for pete’s sake. Not just child, but children, multiple. And we know how they’ll die: suffocation. It would be hard to write a tauter, more dire beginning.

Writing exercise: write three first lines. They can state the stakes, as in the third example, or refer to some memory or object that encapsulates the conflict, as with the example from “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Include two titles for each, one that plays off the beginning and one that does not.

For bonus points, read “The Women Men Don’t See” and use that as your inspiration.

Feel free to post some of your best first lines on here, I’d love to see some!