Ideas

My idea for Nirvana Cat came from an advertisement that I saw on John Joseph Adams' blog. Adams advertised an issue of the magazine Shimmer that would contain steampunk fables involving animals.

For those who do not know, steampunk takes a pre-electrified 1800's setting and adds technologies or fantasy elements to it that were not originally there. For instance, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling tell the story of an 1800's mechanical (nonelectric) computer confronted by a primitive netrunner with the first virus--The Difference Engine.

I love nineteenth century fiction. Mostly I read mysteries and historical fiction set in that era. However, I did not like Shimmer's word count restrictions or compensation, so I decided that I would likely not submit. But I still wanted to write a story.

I started with John Stuart Mill, the economist who founded modern libertarian thought--the idea that if someone does an activity that does not materially harm anyone else, that he should be allowed to do the activity even if 99% of voters do not like the activity. I thought I build a moral conflict around this idea.

I researched Mill and found, to my surprise, that he was the Indian Correspondent for the British East India Company, the head policy maker for the company's rule of India. The British East India Company was a 250 years old! It ruled a country. This was cyberpunk, brought to life, in 1857.

In looking at some interesting years in Mill's life, I found that the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 in India ended the Mughal Empire and practically ended the company. Also, Mill's wife died shortly after this time. The only other piece that I wanted to find was a branch of science to exploit as a device to drive the story.

Wasn't Gregor Mendel doing research at about this time? Maybe he could produce a genetically engineered animal to wreak havoc. I found another excellent result. In 1857 Gregor Mendel was two years into his experimental breeding program on peas.

The stars were aligned.

Those are the pieces of the story. Picking these elements and deciding how they might be used took quite some time.

This was where the story came from. But this was just the place where the real research started!

Atmosphere, Point of View, Keeping the Plot Moving: A Modern Example

The problem that I referred to yesterday regarding atmosphere and point of view may be illustrated by considering what you would omit from your diary entries. Consider how someone who is not familiar with our modern world would interpret a typical day. Let's have someone from the Roman Empire read a line from your journal.

I woke up at 7:00 so I could drive to school for my first class.

How many things would you have to explain to give a full picture of this line to your Roman reader? Instead of a full narrative, just make a list. Any list I make will have holes in it, but here are a few things. Some of these concepts would have rough analogies, but would need further explanation. You might be able to picture the Roman reader asking one question after another, leading to the various concepts.

Modern reckoning of time
Alarm clocks
Electricity (the physics/chemistry)
Electric wiring of houses
Electric power generation using fossil fuels
Drilling for oil
Oil pipelines
Oil refining
Nuclear power
Solar power and alternative fuels (and current marketplace irrelevance)
Electric power wiring infrastructure of cities
The modern corporation
Public utility price regulation
Speed of automobiles
Combustion engine
Driver's licenses
Photography
Modern police
Assembly line techniques
Traffic system
Modern university education is specialized
Modern university education is for nearly everyone, not just a small percentage of extremely wealthy individuals
Mixed public/private financing of education
Modern social structure
Modern views of gender
Human capital theory. That is, most university education is sought in order to increase the individual's expected future income (it was not always this way)

I will stop there. You would not think to explain all these concepts in your journal. In fact, I could not competently explain them all. If you did take time out to explain them to your Roman reader, it would be clear that you were not telling a story as you would naturally tell it.

How would you explain any of these concepts? Some of the concepts have analogous concepts for our Roman reader--some don't. An automobile is like a big chariot, which uses a device to give it power (opening up all those questions). Electric wiring of houses and cities is like the aqueducts and public water distribution systems that some major Roman cities had--only for electrons (eesh!).

In fact, you may not understand many of these concepts. I do not have enough familiarity with physics to feel comfortable explaining how spinning a magnet inside a coil of wires generates electric power. Any physicist reading my last sentence is probably banging her head on her computer screen.

I feel more confident about explaining human capital theory vs. screening theory in education. That is, (human capital) does the university actually teach you things that make you more productive on the job? Or (screening) does the university just provide a difficult challenge that requires intellect, problem solving ability, and perseverance, so that students who can and will navigate the university maze and get a degree has shown that they will be good employees (though they learned nothing useful in the maze).

You can see that your Roman reader would need a great deal of explanation to get a full picture of what was really happening in your sentence. And if you provide these details, you won't tell much of a story. But if you change the time to "shortly after dawn" and change "drive" to "went," your Roman reader might have a clear (and terribly unrealistic) picture of what transpired and you can get on with your story.

Authors must satisfy themselves that they know enough about their world to tell others about it. Then they must tell enough so that the reader can understand the world without getting bogged down in the details. And the author's narrator (depending on the point of view that the author uses) must relate the important aspects of the world in a natural fashion.

My pet peeve involves modern writers who feel they have to describe every mundane traffic route from one location to another. "I took the 101 to the Santa Bozo Freeway until I was nearly to Plotzville. Then I drove west on highway 42 for five miles and took a dirt road until I saw a man standing beside the road with a sign that said, "Shut up. We don't care how you drive to work."

Atmosphere vs. Point of View in Fiction

Nirvana Cat, set in the year 1857, is told from the viewpoint of Vincent, a naïve Augustinian monk. Vincent lives in a relatively large city and, thus has an excellent understanding of city life in his time. He is accustomed to the fact that the streets are worse than stables, with horse and human waste deposited there day after day. He is accustomed to coal smoke from industry and from consumer use.

As author, I seek to transport the reader to Europe in 1857 to enjoy Vincent’s experiences as he tries to thwart a steampunk Muslim bioterror attack on the west. But I am limited by Vincent. He will not tell you, the reader, about many things that he considers to be commonplace. And, of course, he cannot tell you about things that he does not know or understand.

This tension between establishing an atmosphere and creating a viewpoint exists when fiction involves a world with which the reader is not familiar. Some atmospheric details can be slipped in quietly, but others are more difficult. The author has to be reconciled to the fact that the reader will not be able to learn everything about the setting and characters that the author knows.

Some of the many odds and ends about the setting and characters that were not revealed in the story follow.

1. A pickelhaub is the Prussian military helmet with the spike on top.
2. Most of India’s Mughal Emperors were extremely religiously tolerant. They were Muslims, but tolerated Hindus. The last Mughal Emperor even took part in Hindu ceremonies when it was permitted and entertained Hindu philosophers at court.
3. There was tension between the Mughal Emperor and a class of Muslims in India, who felt that the emperor’s religious toleration was not in accordance with the Koran.
4. John Stuart Mill, the most prominent economist of the era, formulated our modern conception of libertarianism. That is, I should be allowed to take actions that do not materially harm anyone, even if 99% of voters think my actions are “bad.”
5. Some scholars suspect that Gregor Mendel, the monk revered as the father of modern genetics, fudged his experimental results so as to obtain the precise results that he thought were correct. This takes nothing away from Mendel’s conclusions.
6. Brunn, Austria was eventually to become Brno, Czechoslovakia.
7. Children were often born and raised by mothers housed in London’s Newgate prison.
8. By the time the Mughal Empire ended, when the British crushed the Sepoy rebellion, the emperor only ruled one large compound of buildings in India.
9. The Brunn monestary in 1857 was the only Augustinian abbey; the rest were priories.
10. The British East India Company was created in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. Good luck, Bill Gates.

Evil in Fiction

I was prepared to write the end of Furnace Angel. I had a general idea of how to I wanted to resolve the plot. But as I looked at the story and considered the resolution, I realized that the ending was not going to deliver a modern horror story. People with subscriptions to horror magazines demand a resolution that is unsettling--one that makes me queasy.

So I twisted the ending into one that made me queasy. The ending was EVIL.

It was so evil that I did not know if I could live with it. That presented me with the question, "Will John Arkwright write horror?" I thought about it quite a bit. I could try to change the ending. There might be even more horrific endings that I could live with. I contemplated other endings.

My problem was resolved in Sunday school. Some verses in Isaiah discuss "calling good, 'evil' and calling evil, 'good.'" I mentioned my story ending in class. Before I knew it, I put forth a point from an Orson Scott Card essay.

Evil enters fiction in three ways.

Fiction can depict evil. The scriptures depict plenty of evil. And a great deal of conflict in fiction portrays someone who is a bad guy. In order to see good triumph, we must see evil. In order to teach someone how to behave, one often has to also teach them how not to behave.

Fiction can advocate evil. Not only does evil happen in the story, but the evil outcome is the "right" outcome from the writer's point of view.

Fiction can enact evil. Child erotica is evil on its face.

That gave me a good standard for the horror story. Furnace Angel certainly does not enact evil. I have to make sure that Furnace Angel does not advocate evil. I may change the ending. I may not. I have more thinking to do. But now I have my standard. Thank you, Uncle Orson.

Furnace Angel

Cameraman Dan Held plans to quit his job after one last taping. The pay and workload are fine, but watching as Barrett Feldhaus glibly exposes the worst in humanity has worn Dan down.

Then one of the show's targets arrives early. The crew knew the emaciated hick only as his chatroom persona, Furnace Angel. Before long, Dan is unsure if he will survive the night.

-- “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire. There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” --Matthew 13: 49-50

My new short story

My Writing Group

My writing group met today for the first time. The members have different needs and skills. One of the members of my subgroup is a technology goddess at the university. Through her, have access to excellent recording equipment and software, as well as the ability to post audio feeds. I want to record audiobook short stories.

The highlight of the meeting was when B. J., our fearless leader, said, "I know people have been introducing themselves, but I'd like everybody to introduce themselves in order because I'm anal."

To which another group member replied, "I thought you were B. J."

There is a joke in that somewhere.

Killing Words (Excerpt)

Many were faint yellow, a few were black, some were green, but the dark blue ones were the freshest. After she shed her nightclothes, Riva inspected her bruises in the dawning light of her cell. This morning there was a scrape where her breasts were beginning to form. Soon her second winter in the Order of Jair would begin and the cold would hurt when she opened the shutters to examine her wounds.

A fist pounded on the door and Lehr said, “Riva, bring steel today. You’re battling another apprentice.”

A blade of fear ran though her stomach. “I’m near ready.” She was nowhere near ready.

She dressed quickly, barely remembering to loop the thick chain over her head and center the iron key on her chainmail tunic, where she had once worn the doll made from rabbit skin on the tether that her father made.When she opened the door Lehr must have sensed something wrong. He said, “Guardian Zan said you’ve used steel all week.”

“Just against him, and he won’t cut me.”

“Don’t worry.” That was what Lehr always said; fourteen year-olds thought they knew everything.

She whispered, “Please, you have to tell how not to get hurt.”“You know I can’t. Guardian Zan and the other priests won’t let me. There is a reason.”

“Lehr, please.” Riva hated to beg.

Lehr lowered his voice so the apprentices in the hallway would not hear. “Little sister, it’s just like I’ve told you with wooden swords; land more blows and you won’t take many. Think about cutting, not about being cut.”

When he called her “little sister” it made her heart ache--in a good way because she wished he was her brother, but in a bad way because he was not really her brother. But Lehr did not have a family anywhere, so she would never tell him to stop calling her “sister.”

Riva trudged along with Lehr on the way to breakfast and morning prayers.


Riva’s knees shook inside her chain mail leggings as she looked across the training room at the grinning apprentice. This room was too bright, though only lamps illuminated the plain square chamber, ten steps for a girl, corner to corner. Were the brown rust floor and lower walls dyed by blood? Tears formed in her eyes as she told Lehr, “I can’t do it.” Lehr looked at Riva just like Ma used to when Ma said stuff like, “I’m so proud of ya’ girl.” Wanting Ma made Riva feel even more like a baby.

Lehr said calmly, “You will do it. You’re twelve. You’re ready for steel. You’ve trained with steel against Zan.”

Riva whispered, “It was just practice. This is real. I’m going to bleed.”

“Training, Riva. Cut! You’re just an apprentice, but you have more of the God’s strength than any adept I’ve fought.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true! Focus.”

“Oh, my prayers,” she said, ashamed that she had forgot. When she breathed deeply, gripped her key, and said the prayer to call the God’s strength, she felt the warmth flow through her fingers and hands, tingle up her wrists and arms, and then spread across her chest and down to every part of her, enlivening muscle, bone, and sinew. Jair’s strength would not keep her from getting cut, though, so her knees kept shaking.

She blessed her sword and fumbled it back into the scabbard. Last of all, she prayed for focus, but focus did not come. She would have to be calm--neither angry, nor heartbroken, nor laughing--for the God to give her the focus which would make her sword as quick as her thoughts. She would die here and it would hurt.

Her opponent, Bartol, and his adept mentor stood at Guardian Zan’s feet and listened to the tall priest, giving short answers.

She was the only girl in the Temple of Jair. Boys were never afraid. They were too confident, like Lehr was now. Riva knew that the other adepts taunted Lehr because his trainee was a girl, but he did not seem to care. He bumped his fist against her shoulder and said, “Finish him quickly, little sister, so we can go hear the minstrel that arrived during prayers.”

Guardian Zan finished with the two boys and stepped over to Riva and Lehr. Riva tried to slow her breathing. She did not want to sob like a baby; she wanted Zan to like her. He was the kindest priest to her since he brought her to the temple two years ago. He was her father’s friend; but unlike her father, he would not tell her stories about when he was a tanner’s son or joke with her about how many children she would one day have or tickle her.

Zan put his mailed glove on her shoulder. “Are you prepared, Apprentice Riva?” His old voice sounded sweet as always.

“I’m not ready,” she whispered.

Lehr murmured, “She’s ready, Guardian.”

Riva shook her head and said, “I’m scared. I don’t have the focus.”

Zan knelt in front of her. She really wanted a hug. The priest said, “What would help you prepare?”

“I don’t know. Nothing would.”

Zan said, “If nothing would help you prepare, then you are as prepared as you will ever be. This is a lesson in combat. This is a lesson in pain. This is a lesson in death.”

Cool tears dried on her face. “If I die, how can I serve the God?”Zan smiled. “That lesson will come later.”

She clenched her jaw so that her face would not contort into hopeless crying. “You don’t care. The God doesn’t care.” Her opponent had probably heard her that time.

Zan stood and said, “Jair guard you.”

“And you,” she squeaked back automatically.

Zan walked to an empty corner and stood against the stone wall. He chided, “Adepts. We will stand here.”

She barely heard Lehr say, “Sorry,” as they walked over to Zan. She swallowed and looked over at Bartol, the boy she would battle. He was in ready stance with his glove resting on the hilt of his sword. Her knees shook less than before. It would happen. She closed her eyes and repeated the prayer of focus. She felt a little of the God’s influence meld her mind to her body; but she did not feel the certainty that came from true focus. When she opened her eyes Bartol grinned at her. He was laughing inside. A tickle of anger started in the back of her skull. But no. She must not give in to anger and lose whatever focus the God had given her.

She hoped that Guardian Zan would take some time to teach them a lesson before the battle, but he just said, “Begin.”