Showing posts with label Worldbuilding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Worldbuilding. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 09, 2021

Reviews 62 - Battle Ground by Jim Butcher - Dresden Files #17

Reviews 62

Battle Ground

Dresden Files #17

by

Jim Butcher 


Reviews haven't been indexed yet.

Here are a few previous posts discussing Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series and worldbuilding with theme.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/02/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/02/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/06/theme-character-integration-part-1-what.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/09/theme-character-integration-part-14.html

Battle Ground is like part of a book, or the middle of a long book. 

It starts with a night time approach to Chicago with dread in the air, gives a quick (nice and smooth) reminder of where we are in the long-long Dresden saga, then plunges right into magical battle preparations, explosions, destruction, blood-blood-blood, David-vs-Goliath battles, squad actions, cooperative attacks and defenses, followed by more and more and more strategy, tactics, execution, collective injuries, and deaths.

It ends with several issues and affairs yet to be settled, but the initial problem is resolved (mostly).

Remember that Harry Dresden himself was dead and a ghost for a good, long, adventurous stretch of time when Jim Butcher colored in the details of how Dresden's multiverse differs from ours, or what we think ours is.  

So though some characters we remember clearly from previous books die, we're not so sure they won't be back.

There are a lot of characters, and most of them we remember from Dresden's previous adventures.  They are given introductions that remind you of them, but don't explain who they are to Dresden.

This is all very well done -- but the craftsmanship won't be apparent unless you've read the previous  books.  

I don't recommend starting to read The Dresden Files with this entry - but I do recommend the Series very highly. It is not Romance, but has Love Story and Relationship dynamics driving the plot and the character motivations, interspersed with whopping good magical combat scenes, and plenty of not-so-magical brute force combat.

Dresden is a Hero - old school style, with guts, determination driven by the love of people, and particular persons more than others. But mostly he is a Champion, a defender of humanity - which is always under attack by other-dimensional Beings and magic users from our every day reality.  Then there are the simple crooks to be thwarted. Like Sherlock Holmes, Dresden - as Chicago's only professional Wizard - is hired to solve cases for people  who desperately need help. He just can't resist a plea for help.

So now, when he needs help to save all of Chicago, those he's helped rally round, and even take over. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, February 09, 2021

Worldbuilding For Multiple Alternate Universes Part 4 How To Make Ghosts Vampires and Demons Real

Worldbuilding For Multiple Alternate Universes

Part 4

How To Make Ghosts, Vampires, and Demons Real 


Previous parts in this series are:

Part 1 - Star Trek Fan Fiction

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/01/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate.html

Part 2  - Find Some Crazy Ideas

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/01/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate_19.html

Part 3 - What Makes and Idea Too Crazy

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/02/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate.html

Here is an article from 2020, targeting the Halloween readership -- about ghosts, and the scientific explanations for what people are "really" seeing or feeling but interpreting as "supernatural."  You've read a lot of these, I'm sure.

https://www.grunge.com/162385/why-people-see-ghosts-according-to-science/

The multiple universe worldbuilding for very long series of very long novels is usually done "on the fly" by authors who accidentally write the first book in a series thinking it is a stand-alone -- only to have it sell so well that the editor asks for another book.

This has happened to me. It's REAL.  

It happened to me also on submission.  Here's one story:

My Agent told me I needed to establish another byline, so I thought about it, and found I could write one of the action-action-action novels such as we discussed in Part 3 of Worldbuilding For Multiple Alternate Universes.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/02/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate.html

So I submitted a very short novel to my Agent which he said was too short for the market he had in mind, and I should make it longer.  So I added more action scenes - combat, unarmed combat, space-battle, but that didn't satisfy my standards for story.  So I added more story, more Relationship and Character to bring it up to the length he wanted.  He liked it, and submitted it. 

My Agent called me back shortly thereafter with good news and bad news.  He had an offer from a Mass Market paperback original editor, but they wanted a sequel.

There was a chance for even more books in the series, so I needed to add more worldbuilding - creating a sprawling galactic war backdrop that could support many sequels if needed.  

As it turned out, the publisher and editors all shifted jobs (as happens constantly in Manhattan Publishing) and the third book was never sold, but the two hit the stands and sold very well.  I retrieved the rights, and posted Hero and Border Dispute,  on Amazon Kindle as a single volume because they are very short novels by today's standards.  You can read free on Kindle Unlimited.

https://www.amazon.com/Hero-Border-Dispute-Jacqueline-Lichtenberg-ebook/dp/B002WYJG0W/

By expanding the world building behind the story of HERO I  learned a lot about how the Setting and the Story interact with the Plot of a novel, or a Series.

Hero and Border Dispute both occur in a single level of reality, no alternate universes, no "supernatural."  But those elements are in there, behind everything, hidden, and easily to be revealed if necessary.

The structural integrity of the world building behind the Setting bespeaks the author's intentions, values, understanding of Real Reality, and scope of Imagination.  

The world you build reveals more about you than what you wear, how you speak, what makes you smile, or whether you believe in God.

And most of the time, as you write, as you cast the outline of a story into a sketch, you have no idea just how much you reveal.

Are you precise, organized and goal directed?  Are you helter-skelter, mess churning, haphazard, and amateurish?  Are you an artist or an artisan?

Are you able to see the paranormal dimension in your own everyday reality?  And if you can see it, can you explain it? Do you understand it? Have you studied it? Are you master of the state-of-the-art material all humanity has generated over centuries of study of the Paranormal?

The answers to those questions are the bare bones of any fictional world you build to tell a story against.

Who are you? 

That is the essence of Worldbuilding -- building a world broad enough, strong enough, coherent enough, deep enough, and variegated enough to support a long series of long novels -- or a series of long stories broken into shorter novels, shorter books, books designed to fit into any publishing environment.

I like to depict "Aliens" -- people who maybe aren't very human, but have enough in common with Earth's humans to be recognizably people.

The question that generated the premise behind the novel HERO -- was simply, "What if an Alien species, allied to humanity to fight a vicious war, regarded heroism as a horrendous crime against their species?"  

What if heroism was a stigma?  

What if well meaning, big hearted, humans awarded such an Alien some supreme accolade for heroism? And what if he/she/it then went home?  

That's the story.

What's the plot?  Well, there has to be a common enemy and it has to be righteous and proper to slaughter them, maybe even to the point of genocide.  And there has to be a reason it's not easy.

What traits in an alien species could qualify them to be exterminated?  (Yeah, I know, so I'm a Star Trek Fan with a lot of Doctor Who included.)

So in this case, the book idea started with a Character feeling horribly embarrassed about something the reader would regard as an Honor.

And the plot, and the world (and other Characters) unfolded from that overwhelming embarrassment.

But if you look closer, you'll see that the World (the galactic war situation) these characters live in make a thematic statement you find you most of my other work -- what if what you think you see isn't actually there?  

What if you think you see ghosts -- but actually they're just real people living in another dimension?

What if Vampires (complete with blood lust and apparently magical powers) are just Aliens from another Planet stranded on Earth and struggling to get home?  

I wrote that as THOSE OF MY BLOOD and the

parallel novel DREAMSPY, and was pleased with the hardcover editions, except for the covers. The subsequent publishers took a little of my advice, and I ended up with these covers, that at least show it's a Relationship Story.   

https://www.amazon.com/Those-My-Blood-Tales-Luren-ebook/dp/B00A7WQUIW/


https://www.amazon.com/Dreamspy-Tales-Luren-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00BFGG1RO/

What if Demons are REAL???  What if a Vampire's human friend was haunted (and viciously targeted) by a demon?  I have a series of Vampire short stories about a human/Vampire pair who have demon problems -- reprinted here:

https://www.amazon.com/Through-Vampirism-Jacqueline-Lichtenberg-Collected-ebook/dp/B004MPRUZM/

I've rarely used the "demon" character in my own work even though I have followed with rapt attention the way other writers, especially Romance genre writers, have developed the common, ordinary, symbol of pure Evil, the threat to the humanity of a human, into a varied and unpredictably almost-good-sometimes Plot Moving Character (i.e. a point of view Character).

And in the series we looked at in Part 3, the Cassie Palmer series about a time traveling guardian of the timeline titled a Pythia, we have a fully rounded depiction of demons, gods, half-breed god/demon and human/demon and god/human mixes as people trying to just live "normal" lives, and having to morph into Heroes.

The Demon, Ghost or Vampire -- the Evil One -- as the best of the Good in humanity, is actually what Science Fiction and Romance are really about.

You will find that in all my novels -- the world building is predicated on the assumption that the universe is rooted in the Fountain of Love in such a way that LOVE DOES CONQUER ALL.  

The essence of solving any problem humanity might encounter will always be the emotional bond between one human and another -- no matter the details of the species each human belongs to.

In other words, the essence of my worldbuilding is a philosophical idea about the nature of reality -- that all the universe we call "real" is fabricated from the musical note of Love.  

But to solve problems, we have to figure out what is really happening, and ride the wave of reality by understanding what is "right" and what is "wrong" in the situation we are in -- do righteously, and Love will bring an optimum solution to the problem.

So that science article about Ghosts cited above is in hot pursuit of the solution to some problems.  It poses the question gnawing at most of us -- if Science can't analyze it, then is it actually Real?  Or put another way, "What exactly is Reality?"

When you build a world to house multiple alternate Universes where the same Characters live through different plots - becoming different people because of their choices and the results of their actions - you, the writer, must know what is "right" and what is "wrong" in each of the universes and why that is so.

What property of each of your alternate universes (pocket realities, or whatever) determines the laws and rules of righteousness?

The answer to that will depend on your take on what property of our everyday reality determines what the laws of morality and ethics are.

For example: if God is real, and has revealed his Rules of Order in the Bible, then the rules of this Earth's reality are known to most of your readers (or they can Google it).

If your world uses different Rules - how does God manifest in that Reality? 

Whether the Characters know it or not, there has to be a "scientific" explanation that you know for the existence of these various orders of beings in your various alternate universes - Magic Users, gods, demons, vampires, ghosts, hostile and friendly -- for reasons.  Everything that shows on the surface of your narrative has to be consistent with those premises.  Just as in Mystery Genre, you must play fair with the reader and be sure there is a way for them to figure out what the "reality" is even if the Characters don't know it (well, especially if the Characters are clueless.)  

If God is not Real, and was just made up by bossy humans who wanted control over others, then who made up the Rules of your well built world?  What would the Rules of morality be in a world created by "Demons?" 

What do the peoples of your built world think sets the Rules, and what Rules do they argue over? (very hot wars can ensue from such a premise).

As a writer, you don't need to know the answers to these questions consciously. Most of the synthesis of all these variables will be done by your subconscious - but the resulting novels will be incoherent and incomprehensible to readers if you don't train your subconscious and fill it with the Collective Wisdom of Humanity.

You can find a whole lot of different Collective Wisdoms recorded throughout History (and pre-History) and around the Globe.  Set them against one another and you have Conflicts vast enough to support a long series of long novels.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com




Tuesday, December 08, 2020

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 15 So What Exactly Is Reality

Worldbuilding From Reality
Part 15
So What Exactly Is Reality?

Previous parts in Worldbuiilding From Reality are indexed at:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

Lots of people regard "Reality" as hard, fast, cold, unfeeling, what just plain is, and you can't do anything about it.

Others see "Reality" as ever morphing, subjective, a matter of opinion, and different for everyone.

Then there are people who mix and match these two concepts as it suits them, in different situations and maybe morphing from one to the other at different stages of life.

Those 3 takes on the nature of reality embrace your target readership for a Romance - mixed with anything from Paranormal, Science Fiction, myth-based Fantasy, and just plain made-up fantasy worlds.

The young Romance reader often looks for a whopping "If Only ..." novel about how even the worst circumstances can turn around to a blazing beacon of perfection, the Happily Ever After.

Most fiction readers, even those just wanting to "escape" for a few hours, are looking for a new and different way to view their own life situation.  Psychologically, the best way to "reset" your view of your own life's issues is to STOP thinking about them, STOP feeling about them, and just plain STOP.

That's why, traditionally, doctors used to administer a "sedative" to a suddenly bereaved widow, make her sleep rather than scream, cry, throw things, get mad enough to attack whatever had stolen her mate.

After you stop and reboot your brain, ideas can occur to you that wouldn't otherwise appear at all.

As a writer, sometimes you want your Hero or Main Character to ignore all the ifs, ands, and buts, the more sensible alternatives, the accepted thing to do, the polite thing to do -- and just bull ahead and "get the girl."

A few times in life, that is what anyone must do.

Doing it only at those times, and not at inappropriate or counter-productive moments, is called being Wise.

As far as I know, no writer has portrayed Wisdom as coming in surging attacks, like anger, rage, or Love.

Wisdom creeps up and swamps the aged.  It doesn't wham into the life of the young and rip them off their intended course, as Romance often does.

Wisdom dawns on you -- as a newborn baby slowly but eventually opens her eyes and takes a while to focus on Mom's face, to recognize.  Wisdom is like the opening of yet another set of eyes, a slow learning to focus and interpret.

But what if that's not true for your Aliens?  What if Wisdom is more like a lightning strike, a flash-bang leaving a conflagration in its wake.

Or maybe Wisdom bursts through cracks in your mental walls (which protect your inner Reality from external influences), and sweep your decision making to new, if temporary, heights of efficacy.

Wisdom might be defined as the Art of being correct about the Nature of Reality -- if not in the objective sense then perhaps only in the sense of the natural order of things in your personal subjective reality.

The Romance writer attempting to portray a non-human culture needs to adopt and define the human culture of the human Main Character to create and highlight where the two cultures conflict -- and how exactly Love Conquers the gap between them.

The summer of 2020 saw a publicity (money) driven eruption of provocative articles on race relations, and even the nature of race itself.  And just think, all the sides of this question currently involve ONLY HUMANS!!! Not a single Martian in the mix, never mind someone from another solar system.

"Race" (in 2020 that's Black vs White) is not the same as "Species."  Think about that. If one human culture differs from another so starkly there can be no peace without one or the other dominating and eradicating the other, how can Love Conquer the difference with another Species (Alien from Outer Space).

Yet even today, we have living examples of people of different races falling in love, raising kids, partnering in business.  It's very common in this century -- not so much historically.

But still there is a problem.

So academics are studying the whole race-relations problem in America (probably worldwide, maybe excluding North Korea that's so into purity) and are coming right down into the core of it.

Wisdom has not (yet) struck like lightening to transform all humanity into a single peaceful community.

But it might, and Wisdom might strike (maybe via a Romance novel or film or Streaming Series) into the hearts of humanity very soon now.

What if Wisdom strikes - what would it change?

What has to be changed in human nature to make us fit to join (or create) an interstellar civilization with a multitude of different species of people?

Star Trek postulated a war with genetically manipulated mutants, a "superior" race the rest of humanity had to conquer, destroy and exile to the stars. After that war, the rest of humanity became more prosperous and less prone to just killing one another.  Gene Roddenberry often said he was trying to portray humanity as having become "Wise."

What Historic Event does your Earth History need to prompt the shift into an interstellar civilization?  Or what has happened to your Main Character in their subjective reality to open them to Wisdom?

The Romance theme of Love Conquers All has to have an "All" for the Main Couple to conquer - a gap they must bridge to reach their HEA.

The writer must invent that "All" from the reader's Reality and build that future imaginary world to showcase the Main Couple effecting change because of their Love. (capital L Love! The archetype of all bonds.)

Even if you're bored and tired of the whole race discussion going on in 2020, it could be well worth your while to study the different points of view on this topic.

Transpose the topic "race" into "culture."  The academics are now identifying "White Culture" as the culprit in social disruption.

Newsweek carried an item on the July disruptor.

 https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333

--------quote------
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture recently unveiled guidelines for talking about race. A graphic displayed in the guidelines, entitled "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States," declares that rational thinking and hard work, among others, are white values.

In the section, Smithsonian declares that "objective, rational, linear thinking," "quantitative emphasis," "hard work before play," and various other values are aspects and assumptions of whiteness.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture had no comment for Newsweek. They referred to the website's page titled "Whiteness" when asked for additional comment. The graphic was later removed from the page.

-------end quote--------

They also posted a large, readable version of the following infographic the Smithsonian later removed.

The Miami Herald also carried the story (as I said, publicists do this public outcry attention getting, and get paid for their skills even when they believe in the cause.)

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article244309587.html

TV and other outlets, YouTube commentators etc all echo-chamber repeated this story, and it found several audiences.  It's a good story, with a solid description of a culture (some call it "White Culture" others "American Culture" and others Biblical, etc.).  Or maybe just human, or Earth Culture unfit for galactic exposure?  An Earth Indigenous Culture?


The Smithsonian museum apologized and removed the infographic -- but note closely what exactly they apologized FOR.

--------quote------
A Smithsonian museum apologized for a chart listing hard work and rational thought as traits of white culture.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture said in a statement Friday that it was wrong to include the graphic in an online portal about race and racism in America.

“It is important for us as a country to talk about race. We thank those who shared concerns about our ‘Talking About Race” online portal. We need these types of frank and respectful interchanges as we as a country grapple with how we talk about race and its impact on our lives,” the statement said. “We erred in including the chart. We have removed it, and we apologize.”

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article244309587.html#storylink=cpy

--------end quote--------

Including the chart was an error? Not the content of the Chart?  Organizing what is believed in order to communicate it clearly to others is an "error?"  I like infographics for sorting out a wall-of-print listing of data.

I'm sure you see immediately how this "error" can make up into an "All" for your Main Couple to conquer with Love.

Now consider this description of the cultural problem and the suggested solutions -- be aware you are looking at a wondrous compilation of "Alls" for your Couples to Conquer, a whole long series of novels, maybe multigenerational saga.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001

https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html

That page uses bullet points instead of an infographic, and presents the other side of that infographic's points.  It's from a website (obviously well funded, optimized to show up at the top of a Google Search for that infographic) called Showing Up For Racial Justice.

The link at the bottom of the page says "Back to White Supremacy Culture page" but it's not a "life" link.

The page itself is brilliant, well written, clean and clear -- and there's hardly anything there that would (taken alone) create an "All" for a couple to conquer with Love.

But take this page as a whole, juxtapose it with the infographic -- and look at the whole composition as a portrait of a World.

When you finish building a Fantasy or Futuristic (or Paranormal) World, you have to end up with BOTH the infographic and this wall-of-print bullet-pointed page.  '

Taken together, they describe what a "built" world, a completed world, contains in the compartment labeled, "Cultures."

And most of your plot conflicts will be sparked by two Cultures rubbing together.  What is set on fire by those sparks is the substance of your Story - the inner-life of the Characters in conflict.

Your World has to be big enough to contain those two cultures, and hint at vistas of others, past, present, and maybe future.

If you build something with this shape (infographic + page), it will have verisimilitude for your modern readers no matter what the content you invent for it.

Readers need just the outline, the shape of everyday Reality, in order to feel familiar enough with the material that it isn't hard work to read the novel.  But the point of reading entertainment is to occupy the part of the mind that normally gnaws on our mundane problems with a starkly different content.

The part of our mind that works out everyday problems in everyday life needs to keep working, but not on the same everyday problem.

Give your readers grist for the mill of the mind that is different, but easy to understand.  Take them into a different Reality that seems real because it has the same shape and nuanced depths as everyday life, but show the way for Love to Conquer All.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

















Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Fictional Science or Scientific Fiction Part 2 - The Art of the Parable

Fictional Science or Scientific Fiction
Part 2
The Art of the Parable

Part 1 of Fictional Science or Scientific Fiction is:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/11/fictional-science-or-scientific-fiction.html

One "fictional science" that a writer can use to generate Science Fiction Romance is psychology.  It intersects with religion and culture.

If you are building an Alien for your Main Character to fall in love with, you need to consider the core questions "What Does She See In Him" (and vice versa).

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

The answer to that question is equal to the reason the reader would be interested in this novel -- that is, the answer to "What Does She See In Him?" is THE THEME of your novel -- subset under the master theme of the genre, "Love Conquers All."

All genres have a master theme, but the best editors sort novels into genres not by what they contain, but rather by what they do not contain.  People often read fiction to avoid thinking about something -- love being one of the somethings.

But Science Fiction readers tend to choose novels to read by what they do contain -- Aliens, Strange Cultures, and above all, ideas about what errors there might be in our current solemnly believed science.

So what errors might there be in our definition of "human?"

We currently study "human" as a variety of Great Ape, and science is probing brain structure and brain activity to attempt to account for all human experiences, especially experience of God, the Soul, Life after Death, and even the sense of "self."

What if that approach (NOTE THE "WHAT IF...") turns out to be counter-productive once we meet up with Aliens who have a civilization, interstellar travel, but despite physical differences, have Souls that Mate with human Souls?

The "Science" ingredient in such a Science Fiction Romance would be what we currently call "Anthropology" - which science fiction traditionally expands to become "xenology" or the study of aliens.

What if your Aliens typically have memories that extend back before birth (or hatching, or something else).  What if their entire culture is based on those long-memories?

What if they can't deal with humans because we don't have such memories?

What if they are telepathic and determine that humans do have such memories but refuse to acknowledge them?

Whole cultures and vast matrixes of belief systems (some conflicting with others based on the same text) are often derived from Parables.

A Parable is a "show don't tell" of serious drama stripped down to bare essentials to reveal an underlying "truth" that appears across many cultural  barriers.

Here is a Parable that came to me anonymously via a WhatsApp contact who got it from someone who didn't know where it came from.  A meme.

--------quote----------

A PARABLE

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:
“Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “ Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “ She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

-------end quote-------

The "science" fictionalized here is what we call Religion - or the belief system that includes Soul.

Your writing exercise is to fictionalize some science you know something about and write the Parable most often quoted by your Alien Hunk's primary culture as the reason or motive behind their behavior -- as we point to Soul Mates as the reason for Love At First Sight.

Then write the dialogue where he/she explains the meaning of the Alien parable to a human (pick an Earth culture for your human).

See what they think of each other after that conversation.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thursday, May 07, 2020

Urban Flight, Epidemics, and Demographic Change

In recent weeks, many people who can afford to do so have fled the congestion of cities for suburban, rural, or resort areas. Some such prized destinations have taken aggressive action to exclude non-residents:

Second Homes

It's being speculated that the flight from cities may lead to a permanent shift from urban to suburban living, for those who have the luxury of choice. The work-at-home trend may continue and accelerate after the present crisis ends. One commentator (see "Great American Migration" below) says, “You’ll still have urban centers. But they’ll be less intense and more dispersed. You’ll no longer have to choose between unaffordable, overcrowded cities and incredibly boring countryside. There will be a more attractive middle ground.”

Great American Migration

Other observers point out that the 1918 flu pandemic didn't cause the downfall of cities, and predictions that people would retreat from large urban centers after 9-11 didn't materialize. In fact, most cities have continued to gain population regardless of these and similar crises. Cities may have to adapt, but they aren't likely to empty:

Will the Pandemic Empty the Cities?

During the plagues of the past, people frightened of disease have often tried to escape the lethal overcrowding of cities. Boccaccio's 14th-century DECAMERON introduces a group of young, wealthy gentlemen and ladies who flee from the Black Death to a villa outside Florence. In antebellum New Orleans, upper-class families annually retreated from the city to country homes during "fever season." Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" portrays the gruesome fate of a prince who barricades himself and his cronies in his palace for a nonstop orgy while taking refuge from the titular epidemic.

As Arno Karlen explains in MAN AND MICROBES, his book on the evolution of infectious diseases from prehistory to the era of AIDS and Ebola, the phenomenon of epidemics began with the invention of agriculture and cities. Agriculture allowed the same land to support a much higher population than in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies, but with negative trade-offs. People eating a monotonous diet of mostly grain tend to be less healthy than hunter-gatherers (as archaeology confirms). The resultant overall decline in health impairs the immune system. Moreover, by living in close quarters with domestic animals, they fall victim to animal diseases that mutate to prey on human hosts. With the growth of cities, for the first time in human history enough people lived together in a congested environment for epidemic diseases to flourish. Before modern sanitation and medicine, cities were deathtraps compared to the countryside (for the poor and working class at least).

We think of our contemporary world as being dominated by urbanization. Yet rural, agricultural communities still flourish, too. Herding and hunter-gatherer societies still exist, even if pushed to the margins by industrialization. Some people enjoy cutting-edge, high-tech conveniences and comforts, including smart houses, while others don't yet have indoor plumbing. This subject reminds me of a weakness in much SF that depicts contact with extrasolar planets. Too often, the alien world seems to have only one level of cultural and technological development that's uniform all over the planet, as well as one religion, a universal language, and, sometimes, a single ecology (the ice world, the desert world, the jungle world, etc.). Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover offers an example of doing it right; we see a variety of languages, climates, landscapes, and cultural customs on Darkover. Think of what different impressions of Earth extraterrestrial explorers would get if they landed in New York, Tokyo, Yellowstone Park, central Africa, the Australian outback, or northern Alaska and didn't bother to look any farther than their initial touchdown point.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 12 - Worldbuilding Focuses Plot Options

Worldbuilding From Reality
Part 12
Worldbuilding Focuses Plot Options 

Previous entries in the Worldbuilding From Reality series are indexed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

Part 11 is about "Worldbuilding Does Not A Story Make" -- which is true.

But Theme is the foundation of Worldbuilding -- what is the substance, nature and function of "reality" -- what does it mean, "the science fiction world," "the art world," "the financial world?"

"World" seems to have both an objective and subjective component or connotation.

Our subjective "world" is focused on our major interest of the moment, on the one thing that looms largest in our perceptions, what we understand as the generator of the parameters within which the future (or at least our own lives) will flourish.

In other words, "world" means "Happily Ever After."

World defines not only what we see, but what we don't (or refuse) to see.

So the subjective perception of "the world" around us does not make the story of our lives, but rather defines the options for actions that will generate the conflicts which, when resolved, reveal what the Story of Our Lives is really about.

One of the definitive points in the life/story/plot of a generation is the War of the Times.

We talk about World War I and World War II, which have generated many movies, many Romances.  Romance flourishes during War because life-or-death-risks are so very primal.

We talk about the Korean War, especially these days with the North Korea vs South Korea conflict in play, with North Korea still allied with (or under the thumb of) China.  We talk about Vietnam, still in living memory of adults now putting their children through college.  Vietnam War is of special interest to today's young audiences because the US politics of the time fractured under the stressful question of whether the USA should be involved at all, while at the same time we still had the Draft which attempted to force young men to go fight.

Every generation has had young men (and now women) blooded in combat, and those who have fought aver that it changed them, opened a gulf between them and those who did not get deployed into real explosive danger.

While you're up to your ass in alligators, it is hard to remember your objective was to drain the swamp.

Our objective, as writers, is to explain how, in everyday reality, a reader can act in order to achieve an actual, Happily Ever After expanse of decades of life.

Right now, in 2020, the HEA as a real life achievement seems to be an idiotic idea.

But in Science Fiction Romance, in Paranormal Romance, you can find not only hope, but a workable plan.

There still exist aspects of everyday life that respond to your personal actions and decisions.  Finding them is one thing, and then presenting those options to your readers is yet another hurdle to leap over.

Here is the principle behind using fiction to convince a reader that they have such options, and the personal ability, fortitude, heroism, and luck to be able to implement that option - make it real in everyday life.

People don't believe what they are told.

People believe what they figure out for themselves.

The harder they have to work at figuring, the more convinced they become of the ultimate truth behind their discovery.

The writing principle is SHOW DON'T TELL.

Once the reader SEES, they figure out for themselves what it means.

Here are two series of posts about how to structure a convincing argument for the Happily Ever After ending.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/index-to-believing-in-happily-ever-after.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/02/index-to-theme-symbolism-integration.html

SYMBOLISM is how the writer SHOWS without TELLING. Master its use.

The reader, in times like these, is looking at a world boiling over, spoiling for a fight (or an additional fight), whole massive groups of people trying to force other massive groups to change their behavior.

Historians have often determined that wars are, at their root, all about economics.

We seem to be in an epoch of human history boiling over with passionate religious convictions, one of which is that it is a religious duty to force everyone to adopt your religion, forsaking all others.

But look deeper, and you may find where that same hardwired human propensity for believing is filled up with belief in things other than deities.

Some believe in socialism with the same religious passion others believe in capitalism.  A writer searching for a theme could ask questions about whether any "...ism" is healthy to believe in.

Apparently, humans must believe something.  If that mental  component of our "world" or "world view" is empty, something noxious will crawl in to inhabit it.

Whatever is hiding in the "belief" compartment of our world view will manifest in our behavior.

Behavior, both habitual and adopted (such as living on junk food vs. going on a keto diet) behaviors are plot generators because the internal conflict kicked up between what hides in "belief" and what we, ourselves, or others around us, try to stuff into that belief compartment is a War To The Death.

"War to the Death" internally generates the external behavior that matches it,  thus driving the Plot.

To be a novel, that plot (or sequence of actions) must evolve all the way to a resolution (not the resolution, but at least a resolutions) of the internal and external conflicts.

In our everyday real world, the hatred and revenge fueled wars (large and small) are not likely to be resolved in our lifetimes.  But the internal war between what we believe and what others insist we must believe (or die) can be resolved.

Once that internal conflict is resolved, the INDIVIDUAL is at peace, regardless of the video clips bombarding them from all sides.

That state of internal peace, shared by a couple, reinforced by the coupling itself, is in fact the Happily Ever After.

Here is an article which indicates a connecting link between economics (the source of war) and behavior (the source of dramatic plots).

https://www.inc.com/melina-palmer/these-5-simple-concepts-of-behavioral-economics-can-drastically-improve-your-marketing-efforts.html

Subtitled: The human brain doesn't make decisions in the way we think it "should."

The article is about how marketers use your beliefs to trick you into behaving as they want you to, even if it is against your best interests.

Find a story that goes with such conflict and plots as hinted at in that piece and you will have a novel series.

To find the story, find the Characters who live in that "world."  Their subjective world is nestled in an objective world they can't see because of a belief jammed in under the beliefs they think they espouse.

If you can create that World-within-World structure with your worldbuilding, any story you tell will be vivid with verisimilitude.

Here are two more posts discussing how all this fits together with our modern, contemporary headlines -- ugly headlines we can rip Romance out of.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/06/depiction-part-14-depicting-cultural.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/09/soul-mates-and-hea-real-or-fantasy-part.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thursday, January 02, 2020

SF Seasons

Happy New Year! The days begin to lengthen, even if imperceptibly at first, but nevertheless I have to brace myself for over two months more of early darkness and damp cold. We temperate-zone residents are used to a year divided into the conventional four seasons, recurring in a predictable annual rhythm. My family had a funny encounter many years ago at King's Dominion (an amusement park) in northern Virginia, while standing in line to check out of the hotel adjacent to the park. This happened on a day at the height of summer, and the weather was as expected in a Virginia summer, high humidity with temperatures in the eighties or low nineties. An apparently British couple in line with us asked whether "it was always this hot" all year around. Mentally (not aloud, of course) I collapsed with laughter. In this area we have four seasons just like most other locations in North America, with pleasant springs and falls and miserably cold winters. If our family's experience of living in Hawaii in the 1970s was typical, tropical regions have two basic seasons, rainy and dry, with little variation in temperature or length of daylight.

Science fiction and fantasy often feature imaginary worlds with seasons different from those familiar to us Earth dwellers, but the stories don't always take full advantage of the possibilities. The setting of the Game of Thrones saga famously suffers winters that last for years, whose timing and duration vary. Yet I don't remember noticing in either the novels or the TV series an explanation of how human civilization in Westeros survives those ordeals. How could enough food possibly be stored to sustain entire nations over a multi-year winter, especially with no way of knowing when the cold season will descend upon them? Maybe the southern regions of the inhabited world escape mainly unscathed and supply provisions for the affected areas? The economic effects would be calamitous, though, even if most people managed to scrape by. Isaac Asimov's classic story "Nightfall" takes place on a planet in the middle of a cluster of stars, so that it experiences full darkness only once in several centuries. Although a short story can't cover every aspect of worldbuilding, admittedly, even in the story's later novel-length expansion I don't recall any consideration of how different a culture that develops in perpetual light would be from ours. Agriculture alone would evolve in ways strange to us, wouldn't it? Recently I read SHADOW AND LIGHT and SHADOW RISING, the first two books in an excellent fantasy series by Peter Sartucci. They're set on a planet that revolves around a double star. No results of having two suns, in terms of either circadian rhythms or climate, are developed. As in "Nightfall" with its planet of multiple suns, not only weather but seismic phenomena would surely be affected. With more books to come, however, maybe this aspect of the setting will be elaborated later.

One novel I've read within the past year takes full advantage of its setting's weird seasons, as the title indicates: THE FIFTH SEASON, first book in the Broken Earth series by N. K. Jemisin, offers a devastating, in-depth portrayal of a world periodically ravaged by geological disasters of apocalyptic scope. Fifth Seasons appear at unpredictable intervals and can last from a few months or years to an entire century. At those times, worldwide tectonic cataclysms cause earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, with side effects such as climate change, crop failures, poisonous fungal growths, etc. Appropriately, this world's cultures are crucially shaped by the Fifth Season phenomenon, which includes the ambiguous role of the few people with the gift of controlling seismic events.

Here's a page that lists eight SF novels about climate change:

Sci-Fi Books That Highlight Climate Change

And here's a different list of fourteen novels focusing on climate catastrophes (including some overlap with the previous one, naturally):

Sci-Fi Books for Earth Day

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 12 - What You Learned As A Kid

Worldbuilding From Reality
Part 12
What You Learned As A Kid 

Previous parts in the Worldbuilding From Reality series:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

I found this comic on Facebook - it is from a VERY CLEVER blog that can give you all sorts of plot ideas for Fantasy Romance - even Supernatural - if you apply the principles of worldbuilding we've been discussing.

Just like real people, fictional Characters learned something early in life that shapes opinions later.  Study this comic and transpose it to your universe and your Characters.

Here is the blog.  Do check it out.  And here is one of the entries. The image is large enough to read on the blog's archive page.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

2020 is coming - have a great New Year.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Long comic strip about kid learning Quantum Computing and a Mom trying delicately to have "the talk" - but both mean quantum computing, not the obvious inference.
smbc-comics.com 

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 9 - Conquest In Romance

Worldbuilding From Reality
Part 9
Conquest In Romance
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 


Previous parts in this series are indexed here:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

Every world you build to showcase your story has to include the basic cultural elements anthropologists have identified in human cultures from time immemorial.

That doesn't mean your Aliens have to be Human!

It means you, the writer, has to explain to your reader why your Alien culture lacks this or that element common among humans, and what that absence means.

Spock on Star Trek is the most obvious example, and was created around exactly that formula -- "Human Minus One" -- in his case Emotion.  From that Character, all of Vulcan culture and history was fleshed out.  The necessity for that became obvious when the marvelous one-liner hit the air -- where Spock identifies a Romulan visage as reminiscent of his father.

One of the elements in human cultures has always been Religion -- or some sort of notion about supernatural forces interacting with "real world" elements.

Humans imagine.  If your Aliens have any imagination, they have something that fills the niche of Religion (organized, institutionalized, or not-so-much).

But not every Alien culture has to use (or blame) Religion for sexual behavior.  Not every Alien culture has to integrate Romance and Sexuality.  Sex may be completely irrelevant to Romantic attachment for an Alien.  If so, you have to explain how that happened to a species, and illustrate what it means in relationships with humans.

Alien Romance is a gigantic field that has barely been explored, certainly not mapped, and leaves everything wide open for writers.

There is one rule of writing craftsmanship you must meet, even when exploring Alien Romance with or without sexuality -- your worldbuilding must be internally consistent enough to seem like Reality.

OK, our everyday Reality isn't very consistent, but it does keep reverting to well known norms.  If you're going to create verisimilitude enough to transport readers into an Alien culture that does not have sexual arousal during Romance, you need to keep your worldbuilding rigorously consistent.

Worldbuilding, we have established in other series of posts on this topic, is rooted in a Theme.

Just like Spock delineates the theme of Emotion Is Not Logical in Star Trek, so your Alien delineates the theme of your entire world by what that Alien Culture has that humans do not -- or what the Aliens lack that Humans have.

One variable is all you get to play with in a work of fiction where you are departing from everyday Reality.  Just add or subtract one, and only one, element from the world your readers know, then pursue the way that affects everything that happens in an ordinary, regular Romance genre novel.

Suppose you want to rip a notion from current media headlines, from the media's current narrative, and create an Alien Romance from that topic.

One prominent narrative topic in 2019 is a second wave of challenges to Roe v. Wade and a woman's sovereign control of her body.

I'm pretty sure you can find marriages ending in divorce over this massive philosophical divide.

It is entirely possible that abortion is one, perhaps the only, issue that Love can't Conquer, even though it can Conquer All Else.

I do see our everyday reality as a place where love conquers all, and can even conquer this one, horrendous, topic.  But it is easy to imagine a fictional pair, head over heels into an epic Romance, ripped apart by this one topic.

Does a man have any rights over a fetus he fathered?

Does the Law have any business trying to criminalize any actions for or against abortion?

In the USA, we have the constitutional division of Law and Religion -- we can't make laws governing religion.  But in the 21st Century, that division is becoming blurred.

Take for example, a pregnant woman who is addicted to drugs (some bad stuff - heroine etc.).  What is her legal obligation to the fetus?  To the newborn baby, born addicted, and thus suffering a life-long set of health issues which, very possibly, the State has to pay for?

Where do the mother's rights leave off and the baby's rights begin?

The answers to those questions are THEMES.  Take a stance one way or another, state the theme in one sentence, and select every element of story, plot, character, setting, conflict, etc. to illustrate, explain, or challenge that theme.

Theme is philosophy and religion distilled into a platitude, aphorism, or folk wisdom.

So when you build a world from Reality, you start (whether you know it or not) with a theme, some idea about what Reality is or is-not.

Those who start with the concept of Soul Mates are inherently starting with the concept of Soul as a reality in their built world.

What is a soul?  Where does it come from?  Where does it go?  Can souls die?  Can souls be destroyed?  Or do souls learn?

Each of those questions is a brick you build into your world's edifice whether you know it or not.  We all make assumptions about our everyday Reality, but rarely do we articulate those assumptions.  So your Characters, likewise, may have many assumptions about Souls and how they slip into or out of Manifestation, and have no clue why they believe what they believe, or why they are willing to die for a cause.

There are women who will commit themselves to die trying to give birth, and others that prioritize themselves over an unborn fetus.  Both sorts of women are courageous, heroic, and completely believable to your readership.

In fact, one sort can transform before the reader's eyes into the other sort, and the transformation can be completely plausible.

Many women on one side or the other of this divisive issue hold their position because of Religion -- some from adopting a Religion later in life, others having been raised to certain strict standards of right and wrong.  But today's readerships are maybe more than half atheist, and that half divides pretty much along the same line (risk life to give birth vs. my life is more important than potential life).

So entire philosophies of "Who Am I" questions are woven into the themes you can use to feature a conflict over abortion.

Historically, abortion has been an issue that shatters the mood of romance, but today's readers and writers are gradually exploring Romance that deals directly with spouse-abuse, with rape and incest, and even abortion.

And all of these relationship issues are super-charged by Religion.

People on any side of one of these issues point to Religion to justify their position, while the people on the other side point to Religion to nullify their opponent's position.  Sometimes, they both point to the same Religion.

If you're writing Alien Romance, your aliens might have no regard whatever for an unborn fetus -- or even for an infant less than 5 years old.  Some human cultures don't name a child for a long time after birth.  So Aliens who think like that would be plausible to everyday readers.

In Paranormal Romance, you might have ghosts, demons or angels who actually know what a Soul is, and how decisions implemented during mortal life determine fates in the afterlife.  They might be allowed to tell mortals, or perhaps be prevented from telling.  Plot driving conflicts can arise over the refusal to tell -- or disbelief of what has been told.

So to craft either an Alien to love your human Character, or a Supernatural Being to love your mortal, you need to choose an answer to the questions that define Soul.

Are Souls real?  Does every human have one?  Does your Alien have one?

Are Souls necessary for Romance to happen?

The answers to those questions are THEMES.  You build the answer into your world, and that integration gives rise to your main plot conflict.

Whatever your answer is, there is a Character in your story who takes the opposite stance.  That creates your integrated Theme-Plot-Character structure.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/12/index-to-theme-plot-character.html

To lure your reader into such an explosive story context and deliver the promised Romance, you need to study up on the World's Religions.  Chances are much of what you think you know comes from news or online articles.  That is necessary information as it tells you what most of your readers think they know -- thus lays out the plot which your conflict will generate.

People act on what they think they know.

Characters can act on what they think they know, but to tell a story, that Character must "arc" -- or learn something the reader didn't know, and begin to act in a distinctly different way.

So study the solidly orthodox, strict, version of several religions, and contrast it with the vastly more popular, more relaxed and accepting version of that religion.  For example, Catholicism vs. Tent Revivalist vs. TV Evangelist.

You might also study the Law, and the history of laws on a particular topic.

It can lead you into many topics, and sorting them out can be difficult.

Themes designed to support a long series of large novels can be "nested" one inside the other, to produce what some call the "braided plot" and possibly use several viewpoint characters.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html

But to nest themes, they must all relate to a single, overall, or envelope theme.  All the questions you answer have to be about the same topic.

Take "conquest" for example.

A Master Theme might be, "My Way Or The Highway"

Sub-themes could be answers to such questions as "Who Am I?" "How Does A Human Choose A Way?" "Do Humans Get A Choice?" "Is Running Away From Home Better Than Running Toward A Goal?"

Each of those sub-theme areas could split and split again to eventually come down to something small enough to fit into a single novel.  Together, they could make a series or a life's work.

Philosophy behind novel themes can be very abstract, and start with things about the notion of a God who is the Creator of the Universe, the master architect.  Does the Divine force take a personal interest in individual humans?  Is that different from interactions with Aliens?

Would a Ghost be able to hold direct dialogue with the Creator of the Universe?  And then tell a human?  Or perhaps a fetus?

Would a Creator still have any power over the Creation?  Note how the Bible's story of the Tower of Babel shows without telling what happens when the Creation challenges the Creator.  What if the Creator hadn't been so gentle in Conquest as to just mess up the ability to communicate?

Some answers to these questions in the context of Romance Genre will inevitably lead to all the issues of human sexual relationships, and thus to how human law attempts to codify morality.

But what about Divine Law?

The Hellenistic Greek gods didn't lay down laws that they, themselves, abided by.  They operated, like the Roman gods after them, basically on whim, and under the thumb of the biggest bully god.

Humans developed Law as a concept, but only very gradually, over many generations.  What if your Aliens don't have the concept of Law, as Star Trek's Vulcans don't have emotion?'

Not all of modern Earth lives under the Judeo-Christian concept of a Creator who has told us His Laws (10 Commandments, 7 Noachide Laws, or 613 Commandments).

The 10 Commandments and the whole set of 613 Commandments given in the Old Testament are considered to apply only to Jews, while the 7 Laws given to Noah apply to all humans.

But overall, the concept is a Divine Creator explaining how Creation works to his Creatures.  And it is a contract. If humans do this, then the Divine will do that.  Our deeds don't cause the Creator to act.  The Creator's word of honor on the Contract is the cause of the consequences of our actions.

Our real world is currently built on the aspiration to make Laws that fill in the outline given to us by the Divine.

Even atheists agree that most of those boundaries around human behavior make for civilization to function to the advantage of most (if not all).  

The USA is founded on the idea that government can't infringe on personal sovereignty.  Each human is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (though there was a big argument over happiness or merely the pursuit thereof.)

Most of the Founders who framed the legal structure of the USA were Christian, and some were Christian mystics.  A lot of their subconscious assumptions became infused into that legal structure.  When they separated Church and State, they were thinking mostly of  various Christian churches, not freedom from Religion, not valuing pagan religions the same as Christian ones, and certainly not accepting the Jewish way of looking at the world.

But today, the USA is a dynamic and creative wellspring mostly because all these varieties of belief systems co-exist, interact, and even conflict.  Our differences are our greatest strength.

Yet, today's politics seem bent on conquest, not co-existence.

The political lines are being drawn as Men vs. Women, with sovereignty over the physical body at stake.

Does the father of your child have the legal right to force you to risk your life giving birth to his child?  What if your husband raped you?  In some religions that's not possible.  But civilization could stand or fall on that exact issue.

When does a woman have a right to an abortion?  When is a woman required to have an abortion?

Can human law be crafted (and enforced) to govern these decisions?  And if so, then what happens when men go to war over women?

Could the Gender War be settled by Conquest -- of either side over the other?

Are any of these questions even relevant to what is really going on with the US Supreme Court deliberations on Roe v. Wade?  I'm sure they're deliberating whether to take this or that case that would challenge the precedent.  If you're writing futuristic romance, you have to guess whether, in your built future world, Roe v. Wade still stands, and if not, what replaces it?

Here is an article that may give you some ideas of where Roe v. Wade is most vulnerable to being modified, or where the 2019 States attempt to craft anti-abortion legislation at the state level might be stopped by the Supreme Court.

Freedom of Religion is baked into our legal system, and most people think that all Religion is inherently anti-abortion.  Many Christian sub-divisions hold that no matter what (rape, incest, dire health collapse of the mother), no pregnancy may be terminated voluntarily.  So most people, even atheists, think that the only issue Religious people have with abortion is to prevent women from having abortion.

If you are pro-choice, you therefore must be anti-Religion.

That is the unconscious assumption.

However, the opposite is the case.

In Judaism, there are circumstances where a woman is required to get an abortion.

Yeah, who would think it?  But an adult woman, especially one with other children to raise, is absolutely not permitted to continue a life-threatening abortion.  Beyond that, different Rabbinic authorities hold that some other circumstances (such as psychological issues), may also dictate the necessity of an abortion.  Nobody can force a woman, no matter the risk, to have an abortion -- but sometimes, to comply with the Creator's Will, she must choose to do so.  A person who commits suicide is governed by the same laws that pertain to one who is a murderer.  Suicide is considered self-murder, and continuing a truly dangerous pregnancy would be suicidal.

Some of the current State laws being tried out would prohibit the practice of this religious requirement to save one's own life.

Here are two articles - one on the legal implications of abortion, and one on suicide.  Put them together and generate a lot of themes.

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/What-Jewish-law-really-says-about-abortion-590448

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4372311/jewish/Suicide-in-Judaism.htm

Another Jewish view holds that the Soul descends into the unborn fetus gradually, and over time.  That line of thought also holds that the Soul continues to descend after birth, as the body develops all the way to sexual maturity (12 or 13 years).  Does the degree of presence of a Soul have anything to do with the choice of abortion?

What about robots, A. I., will Souls descend to inhabit machine intelligence?

As a writer, consider the incredibly dramatic irony of these opposing views:
Religion requires abortion vs. Religion prohibits abortion.

Right now, this Earth is not in imminent danger of running out of humans. Other species are endangered, so it could come to us very soon.  Or colonies on other planets would place a much higher value on new children.  Artificial wombs will solve a lot of this problem, but will such children acquire souls?

Also note the birthrate in the USA has slacked off to where some official notice is being taken -- perhaps it's time to worry?

Nothing shatters the mood of a Romance novel like murder, death, blood sprayed on the walls, rape, abusive beating -- all the ugliness that goes on in our everyday reality.  Yet, writers are artists who love a challenge.

Can you build a world where one side or the other triumphs in conquest of the other side in these Religion vs. Politics debates?

Can you build an alien civilization where a refugee from the shattered Earth can find Romance and safety?

If you build your world out of unrelated bits, a hodgepodge patchwork world, it won't be a work of Art and will not communicate your theme clearly.

So try starting with your true, most deeply held, belief about Life and Souls.  Weave a powerful Romance, and drive the Characters to an accidental pregnancy.  Will Romance turn to Love and Conquer even this immense problem?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 8 - Flamewars Over The Double Space

Worldbuilding From Reality
Part 8
 Flamewars Over The Double Space
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous posts in the series Worldbuilding From Reality are indexed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

In the various series of posts discussing the Theme element in fiction writing, we peer closely at "reality" -- the reality of the writer, the reality of the reader, and even sometimes attempt to discuss Reality itself.

The writer's inescapable Reality is that The Essence of Story Is Conflict.

And without a story to tell, you don't have a novel, TV Series, or Game.  Yes, even video games, and very much tabletop board games, are all about story.  That's what the best Dungeon Masters do -- create a story framework for Characters to negotiate toward a goal.

The story framework is the plot, which relies on the problem, the stakes, and the obstacles to lay out the Character's path through the World.

But the Dungeonmaster relies on the Game's various manuals to layout the parameters of the World through which the Characters must travel, overcome obstacles (conflicts), and achieve goals.

The Romance writer, (of any sub-genre of Romance) has to create a World to cradle and showcase her story.

Even Contemporary Romance has to be written in an artificially created world.

Art is a SELECTIVE representation of Reality, not reality itself, and fiction is an art form.

Here is the index to Art and Craft of Story Posts

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/index-post-to-art-and-craft-of-story.html

Dialogue is not speech recorded from reality, but words crafted to tell a story.  Dialogue is the illusion of speech, not speech itself. Dialogue is the selective representation of speech.

Here is the index to dialogue posts:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/10/dialogue-parts-1-4-listed.html

Likewise, the world that surrounds (and frustrates) your Characters is the selective representation of reality, not reality itself.

You, the writer, are the Selector.  You pick and choose, separate, combine, and even color or distort, the Reality of your reader to represent the reality of your Characters.

The fun of reading is in filling-in-the-gaps for yourself, in imagining the rest of the reality the Characters are embedded in, but which is depicted with a few, sparse, selected details, a Japanese Brush Painting suggesting a whole World behind it.

See the series of posts on Depicting different aspects of our generally shared Reality.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

All of these choices, are selections you make either on the fly as you write the story, or prior to having the idea for a story, or while re-writing the mess you made by not outlining before writing (no, you don't have to write it down, but you do have to know the outline).

The selections are not random, any more than our objective Reality is composed of random elements.  We understand our world in terms of cause/effect pairs or sequences, and that view of reality does produce salutary results.

We understand that causes produce effects -- but we adamantly disagree over which action causes what effect.

That essential conflict is the essence of the story of humankind.

Very likely, we will find that conflict to be the essence of the story of Alienkind.

"When I do THIS, THAT happens."  Is it coincidence, probability, Miracle, or just that I'm special and it only works for me?

For an example from Reality, just try this experiment.  Go onto a Facebook Group full of writers, readers, professors, engineers and especially, teachers of English, maybe a few editors.  Start a fight (conflict) with a simple declaration about how to format a typed manuscript for publication.  Make sure some of your connections on the Group are over 50 years old, and some are twenty-something.

Stand back and watch the flamewars begin.  Everyone will back their own idea of which is "the right" way to do it.

The dynamic will emerge that is recognizable (to the world building writer - maybe not to others) as identical to the political battles in the headlines today.

Humans fight. That is the nature of humanity (which gives you a good idea how to create an Alien species for your protagonist's alien lover.)

When an issue arises which "must" be resolved this way, or that way, and the "wrong" way strikes at the core of self-image, existence, livelihood, or progeny, humans fight to the bloody death.

Sometimes, the issue which brings about the necessity of obliterating the opposing human is actually a trivial issue such as Double Space After Periods (or single space after periods.)

Sometimes the issue is actually existential -- such as who commands and directs the collective Power of the Group (and thus over the Group.)

The Group can be a Couple (a marriage in which the question is who wears the pants), a family (where the children don't get a vote about moving to live on another planet), a town (where the homeless can't vote on sewage treatment options), a County, State, Country, or maybe the whole Earth (where we can't vote on another country's fossil fuel usage regulations).

Actually, it doesn't even take two people to make a fight.  All good stories are about how the Main Character's internal conflict manifests in the Character's external situation.  That is, stories are about the CONNECTION between our internal, psychological, emotional reality and our external, "objective" reality.

We (humans, anyway) are all at least two (maybe 7 or 9) people inside, a lion and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.  We love stories where the underdog (lamb) wins because we all can (but don't want to) see ourselves as the lamb.

Or maybe, sometimes, the same human has two wolves fighting for control inside -- which will win? The one the human feeds the most.

So we invent flamewars over trivia, such as whether to double space after sentence end-punctuation.

The reader may know the issue dividing the Characters, is trivial.  It is your job as a writer to lure the reader into suspending disbelief that these Characters could fight to the bloody death over two spaces.

Your job as a writer of Fantasy-Romance, taking place in an invented world, is to convince the reader that the issue is truly a matter of life or death, truly huge.  It's not that difficult a task.  Just remember, most of your readers live in a world where Causes produce Effects -- they are linked.

If you make one choice - this happens.  If you make another choice, that happens.

We believe that linkage is firm, reliable, predictable, and all you have to do to arrive at the Happily Ever After is choose the action that will have the HEA as a consequence.

Once a human has acquired a firm notion of how actions have consequences, the process (or formula) for understanding the world is inscribed in the brain's synapses.

We become inflexible with age, as we loose the ability to produce new brain cells and new synapses.  In truth, MRI can reveal how the brain shrinks with age, leaving a larger and larger gap between skull and tissue.

Or put another way, the old adage, "As the twig is bent; so grows the tree," is absolutely true of humans.  Science fiction is written by absorbing that truth, and asking, "But what could change it?"

Today, the vast majority of your readers have been "bent" to believe in cause-effect as a law of Nature.  But there is little consensus over how a cause inevitably produces a specific effect.  We know effects are reproducible -- so we are content to "make things happen."

So:
If you put two spaces after end-punctuation, your manuscript will look "old fashioned."

If you put one space after end-punctuation, your manuscript will look illiterate.

Which effect do you want to cause?

No wonder the question produces flamewars, fights to the death over what is "right" and what is "wrong."

The audience I outlined above will "polarize" along age lines more than profession or experience lines.

And they will fight over what is acceptable, and how it looks, and the fact that old people who refuse to accept new things are in the wrong because all new things are right.

Yes, that generational conflict over NEW was fought when I was a child, and again and again ever since.

What you never see in the double-space controversy unless I'm in the discussion is the REASON why double-space is correct while at the same time single-space is also correct.

That's right -- two mutually exclusive conditions can co-exist.

A single thing can be both right and wrong at the same time.

With double-space issue, it goes like this:

When linotype machines cast lead into letters on the fly and deposited them in "galleys" (frames with clamps to hold the type) to make a book page that could be printed, every published manuscript had to be copy-typed by a typesetter.

The typesetters didn't READ the book, and weren't allowed to make any changes. If they made an error, the editor and original writer would send back the "galley proofs" with markup to fix it.

To aid the typesetter in copying correctly, end-sentence punctuation was followed by TWO SPACES.

Another reason TWO SPACES were absolutely necessary is that typewriters could only do fixed-font, every letter and space exactly the same size.  (a bunch of gears, not a program)

The typesetter would SEE the sentence end, and hit a key that put in a ONE-AND-A-HALF slug, producing a space in the printed document (a blank, a space-holder).

The printed book (just like today) has one-and-a-half spacing after end punctuation if done by a desktop publishing program that has that option.

It helps the reader not get distracted by losing their place if you distinguish between sentences.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION: both sides of the argument are correct.

We need MORE space after end-punctuation to read intelligibly -- but we don't need TWO WHOLE spaces!

The change is simply moving to electronic files, publishing is now done by word processor and desktop publishing software that automatically translates double-space to one-and-a-half.  The software does what the typesetter used to do (justifying lines; adjusting letter spacing), but the software does not need the double-space to prevent reading errors.

So while the double space is perfectly acceptable in a submission to a publisher, it makes no difference in the published text.  It gets automatically obliterated.

The single space after end-sentence-punctuation likewise gets automatically translated to the amount of space the publisher requires.  The single space, likewise, gets obliterated.

In the end, the publisher decides the font, size, and translation rules -- not the writer.

CONFLICT RESOLVED -- it simply does not matter because nobody but the writer, editor, and copyeditor will ever see it.

If you are self-publishing, just pick a good desktop publisher program and it'll take care of appearance.

So both sides win the argument.

That's an HEA to a hot-diggity Romance plot.

If conflict is the essence of story -- then it follows that conflict resolution is the essence of the HEA.

Study the flamewars, beat-downs, and pile-ons you see on Twitter or Facebook, and how gangs will gather to destroy another poster's reputation or enthusiasm for speaking in public.  Look at the white-heat of emotion appropriate for a fight-to-the-death being used on an issue which is not properly defined on either side.  Notice how usually there are no sides, no either/or, no zero-sum-game, yet humans seem compelled to triumph, to win, to obliterate an existential threat where there is none.  Probe the nature of humanity, then ask yourself what tiny change would make Aliens A) loveable, B) incomprehensible, C) a serious threat.

How do you resolve a conflict with Aliens if you can't resolve a conflict over the double space?

You don't have a novel if you don't have a conflict.  But if you don't have a conflict resolution, you don't have a novel.  You might not have to know the resolution before you've written the book, but it takes months, even years, off the writing time if you do know the resolution (or at least a few to choose among.)

Take for example my Vampire Romance, THOSE OF MY BLOOD.

https://www.amazon.com/Those-My-Blood-Tales-Luren-ebook/dp/B00A7WQUIW/

While writing it, I didn't know the resolution of the Father/Son Vampire conflict. I knew who had to die, and why, but not by whose hand or how.  Heading for an HEA for the two protagonists, I knew who could not kill whom.  I was really stuck for weeks.  I think it worked out as poetic justice, but that is yours to judge.

And its sequel, DREAMSPY (about a galactic ecological war where love conquers):

https://www.amazon.com/Dreamspy-Tales-Luren-Book-Two-ebook/dp/B00BFGG1RO/

There's a lot more to be said about conflict resolution and the craftsmanship required to keep the reader's disbelief suspended.  Meanwhile, practice creating conflicts from the historical changes over the generations in your well built new worlds.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Worldbuilding For Science Fiction Romance Part 3 - Body And Soul

Worldbuilding For Science Fiction Romance
Part 3
Body And Soul 


Previous parts in Worldbuilding for Science Fiction Romance are:

Part 1
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html

Part 2 - Imagine An Impossible World
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/10/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html

Now in Part 3, we look at the inhabitants of the built world.

The "world" you build around your Characters arises from your Theme which from the point of view of the Characters is what they refer to as, "The Story Of My Life."  Or, sometimes, "Every Single &%$#@! Time This Happens To Me!"

The point of reading a novel is to explore how to break those "every single time" patterns in your own life.  The power of fiction lies in the ability to convey to the reader a clue, an insight, about how the reader's life works and how the reader can take command of their life and "edit" their fate-destiny-plight-theme to be more amenable.

So you are looking (as you scan the headlines) for a popular theme which recurs because of a misconception you can spot.  Once you fully understand the mechanism driving that misconception, then you can transpose that misconception into a well-built world where you can expose the misconception -- and be very entertaining as you do so.

I say "transpose" because this writer-craft process of crafting themes relevant to you, and to your reader, is just like adapting a musical composition to be played on different instruments and perhaps in a different key.  It's "the same but different" which is what purveyors of fiction look for.

Let's take an example.

In Science Fiction Romance one must blend "science" (the study of physical reality) with "Romance" (the bonding process of the Soul).

In science, there is no such thing as the Soul.

In Romance, no scientific declaration of "impossible" is a barrier to two Soul Mates joining -- Love Conquers All is the master theme.

In Romance, there is such a thing as "science."  But it does not govern the limits of the possible.  In Romance, the Soul governs.

When you join Science (the study of reality) to Fiction, you alter the Science to fit the Story and use that altered Science (what if you can go faster than light?) to drive the Plot (Interstellar Wars).

When you join Romance (the experience of Truth) to Fiction, you alter the actual, real-life experience of people to fit the Story and use that altered version of Romance to drive the Plot (Helen of Troy).

In both cases you have to start with something to say (theme).  That statement you are making has to be a reply to what your target readership is thinking and feeling.

In today's world, young people (teens-20's) have been immersed in a world that makes little distinction between thinking and feeling.  In fact, what people feel is considered a more reliable determinant in all decision making.  Thinking, while admired and even shrouded in the mystique of expertise, is a subordinate ingredient in distinguishing right from wrong, good from bad.

Those are the readers you are talking to, answering the questions they torment themselves over.  Those are the readers you, the writer, are to show a way out of torment, a way to change "the story of my life" -- to edit reality.

One subject the Romance field took up decades ago is the thesis that reshapes all lives and all realities when adopted -- that the sexual impulse, sexual arousal, can be "irresistible."

The feelings, hormones, emotions of the Body pre-empt all thinking.

Many today regard the Body as the thinker, and much Science (grant money) is being channeled into studies of the brain, nerves, genes, cells, ostensibly to create cures or treatments for disease and to extend life-span.

Science is the Body for many people, at least when they are young.

Most young people (teens) do not have much awareness of having a Soul, of being a two-part composition.

So the writer looks for a theory of Body and Soul which is TRUE in the World she is building, and dubious in this real world.  Choose a statement about Body and Soul, and build the entire fictional world around it (usually by starting with a Character.)

There is an occult theory that the Soul is first joined to the Body at conception, but only a tiny bit of contact is made.  As the fetus grows, more Soul pours into the little body.  At Birth, even more of the Soul is inserted into the Body, and then the contact is choked down to a tiny channel. By the teens, the channel has gradually opened to allow more Soul to pour into the Body.  This continues to life's peak, and then the Soul (having learned the lessons it is here to learn) starts to retreat.  With Aging of the Body, the Soul has only to pass on its lesson.  Death is the complete freeing of the Soul from contact with this Body.

By this esoteric theory of Soul, "the story of my life" -- the thematic pattern that repeats every ^%&$#@@@ time -- is the Lesson the Soul is here to learn.

You have to pass age 30 to have lived long enough to identify some of these patterns, and perhaps 50 to see which one is the lesson of this life.

But in the teens, the awareness that there are patterns is what causes the teen-angst we are so familiar with (and scornful of.)

If your life is about your Soul -- and the Body is just a disposable vehicle like a phone or a car -- but you deny the possibility that Soul exists, you are in Conflict.  That is an Internal Conflict.

If you deny that Soul is real, then meet a Soul Mate -- what do you do?

If the Soul "remembers" that every single &^^!@#$ time this new Soul has touched a Life you were living, everything went wrong, then how would the Soul/Body combination of this life react to yet another meeting -- another chance?

Now consider the Soul Mate Couple -- each has lived a series of Lives designed to teach them that the Soul is real, but neither of them has learned that lesson.

Into their Meeting Moment in this life, you put a Character who has complete Soul awareness, and whose body and soul are fully blended and activated.

This third Character would deal with each of them -- and everyone else he/she deals with -- as Souls, with the experience and awareness available only to Souls.

Other Characters in their lives, and the two Mates, would deal with each other as Body alone -- no Soul dimension to be considered.  Body's Lust is irresistible, emotions are truth, humans are primates who talk.  Do what's "natural" to the primate body - it's not healthy to do anything else.

The Other Characters behave that way because they live in the World you have built around them -- they fit their world.

The Third Character does not fit their world.

The Third Character is a source of Conflict, external and internal.

The Third Character is also the resolution of both Conflicts.

The way he/she resolves these Conflicts, leaving both Soul Mate Souls having learned the Lesson of this life, will be the thematic statement you choose.

Many Resolutions of the "I don't believe in Souls" Conflict are possible.  Think about it. The Resolution might be "Souls Are Fiction" or "Souls Might Be Real" or "Some People Don't Have Souls And Are Just Primates That Talk," or "What's That Got To Do With Anything."

Complications and Plot Twists galore open up if you include a pregnancy.

To get more ideas, just go to the Mall and sit, people-watch for a while.  We, in our current world, predicate our speech and deeds on the assumption that other people are just Bodies.  We deal with store clerks, patrollers, wandering advertisers wearing sandwich boards, or handing out flyers, all with Body-to-Body dynamics.

Read The Dresden Files -- and other Fantasy Series -- that include "The Soul Gaze."  When a Mage stares into your eyes, he Sees your Soul.


It is a common Fantasy element because Historically it was deemed a real world possibility.

Think about that.  Do some research. Imagine what a world full of Humans who deal with each other Soul-to-Soul might be like.  What Laws would they make?  What manners would they adopt?  How would they phrase statements and observations -- what would their Headlines say?

Such a world would seem strange, bizarre, uncanny, to your readers, but it might be irresistible.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com