prompted by nagasvoice

[taennyn]

here because i figured it'd eat the comment. >.>

what she said: I've wondered what prompted you to write, how you came to adopt imagery that avoids stereotypic/iconic sf & f tropes, and how you came to work out the interrelations and family structures you've built for your stories.

To which I can reply flippantly that I was always the story-teller/worldbuilder for the games, among my groups of friends growing up, and that I grew up reading authors like Anthony, Azimov, Niven & Pournelle, Heinlein, McCaffrey, Bradley and James Schmitz.

But that doesn't really explain it, I suppose. That set-up, by rights, should make me most comfortable among the archetypes developed by the forerunners of the genre, and I'm rather obviously not.

I can add that I grew up under a very large metaphorical Cultural Rock (my musical influences until I hit fifteen or so and started attending a local open mike show were comprised almost entirely of artists like Meg Davis and genres that the local Oldies station played, to give one example. I didn't hit public schooling until community college, so my exposure to pop culture was a bit . . . lacking. I'm only barely joking when I say that I first encountered Bugs Bunny when I was seventeen.) And that my parents didn't bother raising me in a religion of any real sort--and within that my mother's expectation of absolute equality with her male coworkers or acquaintences. Both parents always encouraged me to think--about what I was reading, about what I was seeing in the group dynamics around me, whatever.*

My opinions on the culture I'm living in, and the definite traces of Grecophilia and Christianity on that culture, are formed largely on my observation, instead of through interaction. I'm certainly not an unbiased observer, and I also certainly have my own blind spots, but I'd like to think they don't entirely line up.

In one sense, I've always been building my own frame of reference, and that affects my writing and worldbuilding significantly. It also tickles my fancy to reinterpret archetypes--I like not quite fitting expectations, personally or authorally.



:* It is possible that a direct line could be drawn from this tendency to think with my dissatisfaction with the vast majority of modern fiction, pretty much across the whole spectrum of genres. Also my own determination to figure out how a family group would change and evolve over the course of a very long time, or how mythology would shift in response to cultural stimuli--how cultures blur at the edges and become something new. The idea of a static culture makes me yank on my hair a bit--look at history. Things have shifted how much over the course of the last hundred years, let alone the last thousand?

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, very nice! And you're probably right, a comment-space is probably not nearly enough to answer properly like this. I appreciate it, thank you!
Speaking as another one who grew up under a rock-ish when it comes to immersion in pop culture, yes. I do know how quickly one realizes how much some fellow creatures are fish completely unaware that is water around them shaping and pushing them in certain directions.

[taennyn]

Comment spaces can be surprisingly accomodating, but it would've eaten the rest of the points or response, so.

It's amazing, what people don't see/think about. Me included--it took me the longest time to figure out what I was doing to attract the attention of badly washed geeks at conventions (boils down to I paid attention to them, and actually conversed. Cue instant geek hormones).


Somewhat randomly--I accidentally sacrificed my copy of Teot's War to a localish bookstore owner, as an example of good storytelling in a developed non-earth setting.

[coastal-physics.livejournal.com]

Comment spaces can be surprisingly accomodating

4500 characters-ish, I accidently quoted a massive piece of text once, and LJ was grumpy with me.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, a civilized human being at an unwashed convention! I guess we need to get you to some of the more civilized conventions.
Some of the small readercon types are extremely nice, although they don't make you feel like they've "earned their keep back" by giving you the chance to talk on panels so as to present you, as a newly-published author, to a whole lot of new readers.
Truth be told, many conventions aren't really that good for that anyway. It's a steady presence that lets you become known to the regional community.
I can promise you some very interesting folks on panels for Potlatch, which is coming up soon. Don't know if that's anywhere convenient or practical for you. I don't have enough $ or leave time saved to go this year, which is a shame.
http://www.potlatch-sf.org/

And thank you very much for passing along the book to someone, I do very much appreciate the good word! In the later stuff I've been working on, I've been trying to follow up some of the odder, more alien threads in the world-building so far. Which mean trusting what the characters told me--which is pretty much like following the details of tall tales or folk tales or fairytales, it can lead off into all kinds of odd stuff. FOr that matter, the things that arre still relatively earth-like are very odd in themselves too--why should they remain stable and familiar, anyway?
Well, a heavily-grazed landscape will always lack young tree seedlings and tender underbrush, for instance.

[taennyn]

I was usually working a weapons table in the dealers' room, which didn't help much.

Hmn. I'm roughly a state north of there--Seattle area in WA, as opposed to Portland area in OR, but I'll keep that in mind for next year. Maybe we could arrange to meet up or something--I'm more than willing to come bearing canadian tea. :)

yay alien threads! And oh, interesting parallel, in following out from the folk tales. Neat.

(One thing that was interesting but I kind of felt weakened bloodstorm in contrast to teot's war were the lyric headers for the chapters. Instead of being able to imagine the sort of music he's producing, there's actually something to compare it too. Downplayed the 'not from my world' effect a bit? (but then, I never much cared for the lyric headers in things like Anne McCaffery's earlier pern books, either, for all I made up tunes for them.) So tha' can be taken with a grain of salt.)

yep, I think so too

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Yay for Canadian tea!
I think you're right about the verses in Bloodstorm.
In very early drafts of 3rd & now 4th books, I tried it & changed my mind, decided that it slowed things down. (It's what I was doing & excited about then, on the second one.)

[lukecuddy.livejournal.com]

I deffinatly understand the culture shock of having to intergrate with society. As the only American child for 40 miles in Germany, I distinctly remember being on the waiting list for Oreos. I had my own computer when I was eight, but absolutely no clue what Simpsons, Saved by the bell, or one of a million other 'normal' things were when I finally came stateside. I blaim my lack of sports and musical knowledge, as well as poor spelling on Germany. ::firm nod::

[apacenyo.livejournal.com]

I had never thought of myself as having lived under a cultural rock, but I think lukecuddy makes an excellent point, kids who grew up abroad are at an extreme disadvantage (american) culturally even in the best of situations. After 5 years in france, i felt like a complete loon when i came back; I had no clue what was popular or "in"
but I think it is that very cluelessness that makes overseas kids that much more interesting (to toot my own horn); we see america from the outside and can pick and choose what parts of this enormous culture we want to get involved in and what we want to leave well enough alone. I think you have a similar point of view Kelly, because you were never really immersed in it in the first place, you are in an excellent position to shape it how you wish and use what you want to shape an incredibly unique universe.
your response was very well put ^_^

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

A very good set of points here, I like!
Having the perspective to *choose* what you will use and avoid the things you don't like is something that the sf & f community actually claims to like, in admiring "the Other". The outsider can see the strengths as well as the faults. It leads to interesting cultural fusions, too.
The odd part is that I don't actually see of lot of convincing sf & f books
showing the Other actually critiquing the dominant paradyme in any way that sdignificantly impacts or improves the situation in that fictional universe. (Maybe I'm just not reading enough of it, or the right ones.) I usually see a hurried explanation of how the Outsider learns to fit in, shut up, and sit down, before somebody flattens them down. As a suggestion to isolated young adults just trying to survive in the hostile environment of jr high and high school (in the US), this is not a bad thing. Taken for serious literature, that alone is not nearly challenging enough.

Another Real Life problem can be that, when you first arrive, you simply don't know enough to make an informed choices. You constantly wonder if you're missing something you might really like, if you only knew what was going on.