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WIP: No Clue What the Title Is Yet

Photograph of a diagram showing the different kinds of starting points for a story.
A story in very rough form.
Working on a far future space story that is getting very complicated with its gender stuff. This is one of the things that annoys me sometimes about future space stuff — that it superimposes early 21st century (sometimes earlier) gender patterns in a way that I know is hard to avoid but which infuriates me when it’s unquestioned. I just reread The Pride of Chanur (OMG how is that out of print in hardcopy??) yesterday and love the way Cherryh handles the question.

Hence this story of two cultures clashing, and both the gender norms and the norms around the sex act are getting tangled up in interesting ways.

Anyhow, this is currently the story’s beginning (and is a good candidate to remain the beginning):

“It can’t be avoided, Tom,” Gayathri said to her spouse. “I know it’s Age-Come for Suzette and Bit, but they must deal with an outsider visiting. To keep Grace, they must be taken in by one of the Lines, and everyone else is dealing with emergencies right now. i can’t create a diplomatic incident over the feelings of two family members. They must learn to adapt.”

“It’s not the quarters that’s a problem,” they grumbled. “Since Bethany and Besa moved over to their new Line, we’ve had extra. But Gaya, this means adjusting all my meal planning.”

“A few more servings here and there”¦”

“Individualized cakes with names on them for the party, for one,” they said. “And the centerpiece was a fondant scene of the family. Now how will I incorporate them?”

“I’ll send you a couple of images from her press kit. Dress her in scarlet, that’s the Corps color for women.”

They frowned at her. “They dress in different colors? What do they do about in-betweeners or asexuals?”

“The Corps doesn’t allow them.”

They rolled their eyes. “One of those.” They eyed her. Her own insistence on keeping the same gender without ever attempting other forms or sexualities was a sore point in the relationship. While not unknown, it was eccentric enough that Tom found it embarrassing.

“A wealthy one of those, with money to invest on the behalf of her coalition. You will be nice.”

In the end the tiny fondant image of the Gräfin was easy enough. A little twiddling let Tom print a sugar face, which they affixed with a dab of icing. They’d been working on faces for the family members for a month: seven generations would be represented, which they privately thought a poor showing, but Gaya’s family was so much newer than the one they’d married out of. And cooking for that family on such an occasion had been making food for several hundred. Tom might have had more help in their family of origin, but there would have been considerably more work.

Still, the loss of Bethany, the most interested in kitchen work, had grated on them. Bethany had known how to help, how to clean up after Tom as they moved through the kitchen as well as how to supply whatever it was that was needed, prepping the mutual mise en place to perfection. And the pair known each other’s depth of perception, could tease each other with tastes, ask advice on building a sauce that reached past acid and sweet to take on other notes and textures.

They tapped air bubbles out and tamped the face down with a toothpick, then set it in the diorama to one side, clearly an onlooker. They relented and moved it a few inches further in. The poor woman couldn’t help it that she came at an odd time.

The diorama sprawled, a meter in diameter, on the kitchen’s center counter. They circled it, looking it over in the lime-tinted sunlight cast through the rear windows that overlooked slopes of garden leading down to the lake, an expanse that would have swallowed the massive house entire without a thought, its surface glutted with water-lilies.

In a week the swollen cream-colored heads would burst into blossoms, soft explosions that would happen as dusk settled, while the nightbirds sang, and the children would have an Age-Come that let them step into new roles and responsibilities if they chose. Sometimes children decided they did not want it yet and retreated. Tom didn’t think Bi would. They had borne the baby, carried it within their body till birthing time, and that gave the two of them a special knowledge of each other. Suzette had come into the family as a baby when one of their parents had married in, and the affection Tom held for them was the same as that towards most of the two dozen children: pride and affection, but perhaps not to the same fierce degree they experienced when teaching Bit “” not cooking skills, to their chagrin, since the child expressed no interest, but other basics, like how to tie a knot or do daily chores.

Tom had been expecting them for a while, but they came late to breakfast and inspected the diorama dutifully, without focus or remark, before sitting down.

Turning from the heat counter, Tom slid a plate of pancakes in front of the child, who inspected it with the same lack of interest the diorama had evoked.

Jitters. “Having second thoughts? Should I move your figure to the sidelines? You wouldn’t be the first.”

A headshake in reply. You try not to press them, let them grow at their own pace, but they do it to themselves. “It’s only one change, one of plenty in your life. Take it at your own pace, however you like.”

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6 Responses

  1. Cat, this seems more like Lois McMaster Bujold than C.J. Cherryh (faves of mine either way). But I’m about to reread PRIDE OF CHANUR myself, more for how she keeps that intense narrative drive going than for gender issues. But I’ll have to read for both now.

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Social Networking: How Much Is Not Enough?

Sculpture detail
Social networking - is it all just navel-gazing and blogging about blogging? Or are we actually building connections that will matter?
So one of my resolutions, post-Confusion, was to be better about social networking and spreading word of my projects. Towards that end I’ve been posting scraps of the WIP on a daily basis (and plan to do so until it’s done or someone buys it), doing more writing for the SFWA blog (just finished up a review, and I’ve got interviews scheduled with authors Myke Cole and Jason Heller) as well as a series I proposed on Thomas Burnett Swann for the Tor.com blog, and — in keeping with my belief that one of the best ways to promote yourself is to promote other people — trying to mention interesting stuff on various social networks.

So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.

I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.

Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.

One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?

And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.

Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.

What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?

Enjoy this advice about social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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If you're interested in writing F&SF, flash fiction, or editing

If you're interested in the writing F&SF, flash fiction, or editing class – there are some slots still open (only 2 in F&SF).

http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2012/01/04/online-classes-and-workshops-for-2012/

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