Paul SB - Incompatible, sub14 - 2874 words - SA

[Paul SB]

Back for more! Only one entry in this submission, as a second would have gone way over the 5000 word limit. A schemes with her folio about a way to use the mystery virus but ends up getting into an awkward conversation about sexuality, then relives her own first sexual encounter in a dream. The dream sequence is a cringy seduction of an underage subordinate by a rich dilettante, and I think it needs to be asked if the scene is best left out, or if it is good to show exactly what kind of society humanity has evolved into. 

Thanks again, and enjoy!

Edited March 19 by Silk
Adding a content tag - Silk

[Silk she/her]

Note: I modified the title of this thread to include an “SA” tag, as the scene at the end is non-consensual.

P1: Is this the same family we met before? Is there a plan to actually get them out of there?

P3: Unless I’m supposed to be suspecting the kid or his mom, it feels awfully coincidental that A started suspecting something just days after the incubators were turned on.

P5 “Doesn’t asexual mean you don’t have sex…”  You mostly answer this in the paragraph below where it’s clear that you’re just using the term slightly differently than it’s often communicated (as I understand it, as an outsider) by those communities, but there are definitely ace people who would dispute this characterization.

P7 I have no idea what she wants with the virus, btw.

I imagine you intended this, but this scene shifts my perception of R pretty dramatically, from maybe well-meaning but oblivious to someone a lot more menacing and malicious. I’m certainly fair less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt on, well, anything.  

Not that that's a bad thing! But it drives home that the elites, including R, see A as an means to an end and not a whole person, even though there are some complexities in the way R interacts with A even in this scene. 

Overall: I’m interested and excited to see the different threads of the story dovetailing a little more, but I still don’t have a very good grasp of the overall shape of the story—I alluded to this above, but I really have no idea how A thinks the virus could be useful to her, for example (“release the virus against those who oppose me” seems like an unhelpful method of defense. And obviously if the incubators produce almost two dozen infants that would be a challenging situation, but I don’t have a grasp on who or why. Further previous comments, I think a little more integration and setup of these plotlines before now will make this part of the story, where we’re entering into a new phase of “A deals with problems beyond her immediate surroundings” more exciting: I don’t think we need to or should have all the answers by any means, but a bit more foreshadowing of what’s to come.

Edited March 19 by Silk

[Paul SB]

Thanks for the feedback here. I’m trapped on the highway (and it’s 97 degrees— in March, in the Northern Hemisphere), so a brief question for now. I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say that you don’t see the shape of the story. I always thought that if you can see it the story is predictable and loses much of the joy of reading. Would it help if I posted my 3-act plot sheet?

[Paul SB]

"... it drives home that the elites, including R, see A as an means to an end and not a whole person, even though there are some complexities ..."

R started out seeing A as nothing more than temporary relief for her 7-day itch. However, I'm assuming that even The Great Gatsby was human. This is where the neuroscience can be really useful. When a person has sex they get that huge dopamine rush, but what happens after that wears off matters, too. If you mate with someone you truly care about, your brain is likely to release a bunch of oxytocin into your mesolimbic pathway (same way the dopamine went). That gives you a comfortable, relaxed feeling, and if you struck it rich you get enough OT to feel afterglow. If, on the other hand, you don't care about, or actively despise, the person you're doing, you won't get that comfy OT feeling. Instead you get a burst of prolactin, which makes you irritable and unsatisfied. So it's possible that R got enough of the oxytocin feeling from her sexual encounters with A that she actually developed some feelings for her. Likewise, if R was consistently gentle and supportive, A might have gotten over the sense of fear and humiliation and eventually traded the prolactin effect for the OT.

The hard part is showing this without having someone like Astrid lecture about it. I've got the egghead stuff, by I welcome any suggestions you might give about conveying this in fiction.

 

Thanks again

[Silk she/her]

2 hours ago, Paul SB said:

I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say that you don’t see the shape of the story. I always thought that if you can see it the story is predictable and loses much of the joy of reading.

This is one of those things where I come back to the old Writing Excuses saw of "surprising yet inevitable." Right now it feels like there's lots that would be surprising, but very little feels like it might be inevitable. It's not so much I want to be able to guess what happens, but this far into the story, I want a general sense of where things are going (even if I end up being wrong! that can be done well, but it's hard to pull off a twist when my expectations haven't been set a particular way to begin with). Is this the kind of story where A solves problems with violence? With politicking? Is she well set up to do it, and we suspect we're going to watch her succeed, but are waiting to see how she does it? is she set up poorly for it and we're going to be biting our nails to see if she can pull it off? Are she and R likely to reconcile their differences in some sort of way (not gonna lie, after that last entry I am hoping and probably suspecting not), or is R going to cause her trouble? What sorts of specific problems might the lab and the virus cause--are they inviting violence, causing political upset, something that can be used against A, etc? 

Not that you ought to telegraph each of these down to the last detail, or touch on each and every one of them. But these are the kinds of questions that, answered broadly, can help clarify the stakes, and IMO it's actually harder to be surprised if the story feels like "anything goes." 

3 hours ago, Paul SB said:

Would it help if I posted my 3-act plot sheet?

Totally up to you! I'd be happy to read it and critique accordingly - though that gets into the realm of offering prescriptive feedback, which I'm happy to offer but not everyone finds useful. 

[Silk she/her]

11 minutes ago, Paul SB said:

R started out seeing A as nothing more than temporary relief for her 7-day itch.

Yup, that part came through loud and clear, and I don't think it's necessarily a problem--nor that A has feelings about her in the present-day (though some people will find that power dynamic off-putting on its own, probably enough to stop reading in some cases, that's just an audience thing to be aware of). I don't think you have to worry too much about capturing the neurochemistry specifically, though you could certainly lace some in there if you wanted as that does seem to be an interest of the book, I think it's more that we've seen very little of A and R together, they were already on rocky footing, and then we get this scene which puts R pretty unambiguously in the camp of the bad guys. To drastically over-simplify, there's two potential arcs for R now, one in which she becomes further set up as an antagonist and hurdle to overcome, one in which she gets some sort of redemption arc and becomes an ally/romantic partner/friendly rival/ whatever. Ditto for A if you want to set her up as more than a victim of grooming: that's either something she overcomes (maybe by addressing it directly, maybe by just being a kick-butt protagonist in other ways) or as someone who's formed a relationship with R despite their rocky footing. I think either is viable, though the latter in each case is going to be harder to pull off because of the squick factor, the book will just need to spend more time showing us which road it's going down. Personally, I don't even think it's a matter of needing to happen sooner, necessarily; the pacing on this aspect feels fine to me, just noting this scene has shifted my perception of R from "potential ally" to "probable antagonist," even if she's not the antagonist. The behaviour we get from R in this scene crosses a pretty bright line, so the book will have to work harder to try and move her back to "potential ally" in my perspective.

One thing I'm now very curious of as a reader is what shifted A's perspective of R since obviously it did shift at some point.

[Paul SB]

"One thing I'm now very curious of as a reader is what shifted A's perspective of R since obviously it did shift at some point."

I hoped you would have seen that coming. A's background is low status, so she has little reason to trust the rich to begin with (and if you're interested I could explain the neurochemistry that makes so many rich people such utter bastards). The Dutch spy in the first chapter already suggested to her that R might have just been using her for sex. The fact that she didn't immediately go running all over Mars to find R as soon as she landed should show that if she had been lovestruck at some point the feeling has faded quite a bit. More often than not she thought about her family first and only about R after. (I think I need to have A talk to the EU leader again about finding her family.)

Meeting R again got her hopes back up, but when she caught her cheating that was pretty much the camel that broke the straw's back. Falling out of love can be a gradual process. R, on the other hand, still harbors some feelings for A and is going to show up again more than once. 

 

"Is this the kind of story where A solves problems with violence? With politicking? Is she well set up to do it, and we suspect we're going to watch her succeed, but are waiting to see how she does it? is she set up poorly for it and we're going to be biting our nails to see if she can pull it off?"

I can say that once she gets to Mars she stays on Mars, and the safe house/thirdspace remains the focus. (The genetics lab is mainly there for thematic purposes, but that virus does have a role to play in the climax.) An element of the theme can summed up by an old Beatles song -- I get by with a little help from my friends. I hope it's not hard to see that this is a coming-of-age story. 

Knowing these, do you have any ideas about how I can make the direction more clear to the reader?

 

Sorry I forgot about the tag in the title!

[Paul SB]

Okay, here's the beat sheet. Anyone who doesn't want spoilers should not read this.

 

Incompatible With Love Plot Points

 

Thematic Lie: Life has meaning if you are loved and validated by a romantic partner.

Thematic Truth: There are many ways for people to make meaning in their lives, and people need multiple meanings.

1% – The Hook & Characteristic Moment

Daisy has stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Mars to reunite with her lover, whose family emigrated and left her behind, and finds that the ship is overdue to land on Mars

1-12 – Set-Up

Meets EU spy Joop, who tells her that the ship is secretly going to the Asteroid Belt, and he’s been sent to find out what is happening there.

12% – Inciting Event

Daisy and Joop are caught by corporate security, and Joop is shot right in front of the aliens.

12-25 – Build-Up
Daisy is caught and imprisoned by the company. Aliens insist on visiting her (or they will stop their work) unobserved and she tells them about human civilization and its repressive hierarchies (not in exactly those terms, as she doesn’t have the vocabulary).

25% – 1st Major Plot Point
The aliens help Daisy escape and take her to one of their colonies.

25-37 – Reaction
Daisy finds out the hard way about what happens to the An Ri when they are alone, and relates it to what happens to humans in solitary confinement.

Daisy is taken to an alien colony world and begins to learn about them, their families and society.

37% – 1st Pinch Point
The An Ri who takes Daisy to the colony finds that her mother, who had been taken as a conversion slave by the Jigarth years ago, has been brought home by an An Ri equivalent of the Underground Railroad and is being treated for brain damage. This really makes Daisy think about her own mother and how she wants to break her and her sister out.

37-50 – Realization
Daisy gets to know the life ways of not just the An Ri, but families of Kovol and my Tricrabs, and see how different reproduction and family life can be. For all of them, though, family still matters, as does community. Daisy makes friends among the different species. But not having her own family makes her feel lonely and pointless.

50% – Midpoint (Mirror Moment, etc)
This is the thematic issue that has to be illustrated here: Daisy comes to realize that over-prioritizing romance means neglecting other needs in life, and may not be satisfying by itself, or even necessary to have meaning.

At this point a Jigarth Den Ship arrives and they start raiding the An Ri colony for conversion slaves (people who will be used for their labor, but will also have their brains modified to make them comply w/ Jigarth religious strictures). This will make her rethink pining away for some rich slontze while her Mom and sister are out there somewhere.

 

50-62 – Action
Daisy asks to go to Mars and proposes setting up a system to smuggle indentured servants either to parts of Earth that still have laws and government, or to An Ri colonies.

 

62% – 2nd Pinch Point
Daisy goes to Mars to meet with sympathetic people who might help her with her Underground Railroad idea.

62-75 – Renewed Push
Some humanitarian buys an off-the-beaten-path dwelling that Daisy sets up as a bar and restaurant specifically as a secret place for gay people, since corporations don’t want to offend the Church, but want a place for their execs to frolic, to act as a front for the Underground Railroad. Call it the Aspen Grove?

The place would be an abandoned homestead consisting of a dome on the surface and a set of subsurface tunnels and chambers.

Former lover turns up and starts bringing all sorts of dilettantes to party at her place. Sleeps with her again.

75% – 3rd Major Plot Point
Daisy confronts lover about all those friends and all the drinking and discovers that her lover is just another playboy who really doesn’t care about her. The fight that ensues convinces lover to try to bring down Daisy’s establishment.

75-87 – Recovery and Re-Commitment
Focus on the bar/restaurant & creating a safe house for runaways

87% – Beginning of Climax
Now former lover informs an escaped slave hunter/reseller company that Daisy is setting up a safe house for escapees

Church sends a spy to make sure that Daisy’s business is legitimate and not catering to people who have “unclean” practices. Daisy gets wind and tells her regular patrons, who then pretend to be hetero while the spy is around.

87-99 – Climactic Confrontation
Daisy is informed that her sister has escaped, and someone is bringing her to the safe house on Mars. However, this is actually a set-up. The Labor Reseller company tracked Daisy’s sister down and they bring her to Mars hoping that Daisy will lead them to the safe house (sister’s bugged, of course). They will raid the safe house, but her patrons will help Daisy defeat them.

100% – Resolution & Characteristic Moment

Reunited with her sister, they vow to find their mother, and to devote their lives to building an Underground Railroad for Earth and connecting it with the An Ri organization.

 

Story Beats Planning Sheet (example)

Working Title: Incompatible with Love

Thematic Truth: There are many ways for people to make meaning in their lives, and people need multiple meanings.

Thematic Lie: Life has meaning if you are loved and validated by a romantic partner.

 

Beat	Plot	Character	Theme	Setting
The Hook	Daisy has stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Mars to reunite with her lover, whose family emigrated and left her behind, and finds that the ship is overdue to land on Mars	Daisy is positive that if she can only get to Mars she will be welcomed with open arms by the daughter of her former owner. Her naïvety struggles with her more cynical side.	Daisy misses her mother and little sister, but keeps that on the back burner while in pursuit of a romantic partner.	Inside a remotely piloted cargo ship - bleak, functional, and lonely. It turns out there’s another person on board.
Inciting Event	Daisy and Joop are caught by corporate security, and Joop is shot right in front of the aliens.	Daisy is somewhat shaken by the presence of aliens working with the Spencer Corporation in a secret base.	Daisy has made friends with the stranger and is very upset when he gets shot, on top of the shock of meeting real, live aliens.	Secret base on Ceres, made partly underground, partly out of cargo containers. Includes lavish areas for the executives.
1st Plot Point (Door of No Return)	The aliens help Daisy escape and take her to one of their colonies.	Daisy has to put her desperate need to be loved on the back burner and focus on the aliens.	The aliens go out of their way to help Daisy, while the lover just left her behind on Earth.	Still in Friedman Base, but Daisy leaves in an alien bubble ship.
1st Pinch Point	After traveling for 5 days, Daisy arrives at an alien colony where she is safe and free.	Daisy witnesses her rescuer who returns home to find that her long missing mother has returned, but in terrible condition after being enslaved to another alien race.	Seeing the touching relationship between Chiktmintle and her mother reminds Daisy that she has not seen her own mother since she was sold to a different family years earlier.	Lektamira Village on the planet Tzintil Calar. The planet is almost pristine. The houses of the village are covered with roof gardens. It is an idyllic place.
2nd Plot Point (Midpoint)	Jigarth raid the village for slaves, killing some of the local An Ri in the process.	Daisy is pretty terrified, because she knows what it is to be a slave, but not for the fearsome aliens.	The raid and the deaths convince Daisy that she should go back to Human space and try to find and free her mother and sister, and anyone else she can.	Same village, the action mostly happens in a storeroom where Daisy hides.
2nd Pinch Point	Daisy goes to Mars where she convinces EU officials to support her establishing a safe house for escaped slaves.	Daisy is determined to start a new Underground Railroad, and that sense of purpose gives her the confidence to deal with important people.	Daisy begins to discover how good it feels to have a purpose in life.	Mars, an EU base to begin with, though she goes to a corporate controlled city, and sets up shop in an abandoned prospector’s dome.
3rd Plot Point (Dark Night of the Soul)	Daisy’s former lover patronizes the club she set up as a front for the safe house. After trying to rekindle their relationship, Daisy realizes that the rich chick is just another spoiled brat who has no soul (á la The Great Gatsby)	Daisy is at first crushed by her discovery of the shallowness of her former lover, who was really just using her for sex.	This is where Daisy contrasts her muddled romance versus the joy she is finding in helping people escape their indenture contracts.	Most of this takes place in the prospector’s dome she made into a sort of community center (nightclub, bar, restaurant, theater, and a small day care for patrons) and the secret passages where escapees are hidden.
Climax	The angry ex informs an escapee reseller of Daisy’s operation, and they send a hit team. They find Daisy’s little sister to use as bait.	Surviving this assault with the help of her patrons and reuniting with her sister proves to Daisy that she is a person worthy of love.	Meaning, and love for her family, clearly triumphs over romance.	The Aspen Hill Thirdspace (the nightclub).
Resolution (Denouement)	Daisy and her sister vow to carrying on their work and find their mother, while connecting runaways with aliens who will take them in.	Daisy now feels like a competent adult with a purposeful life, loved by her sister and the community she is building.	As people we can tell our stories in many ways to give our lives meaning.	The Aspen Hill Thirdspace (the nightclub).

 

[Appol PhD they/he]

Overall: Again, mostly agree with @Silk. There are some interesting bits, especially the way that R thinks she's being fair while violating A, but it all feels a bit disconnected. 

18 hours ago, Silk said:

I still don’t have a very good grasp of the overall shape of the story

I think this is a great way of putting it, and is similar to (and perhaps more graceful and less blunt than) my comments that it's hard to see how these pieces matter to the overall story. A related concept I've had a professor talk about that helped me is narrative control, which is the idea that the story has tight control over how it progresses and that there's a clear reason why moving from any one scene to the next fleshes out the story. 

16 hours ago, Paul SB said:

I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say that you don’t see the shape of the story. I always thought that if you can see it the story is predictable and loses much of the joy of reading.

A story can be unpredictable and still have a solid shape, and I'd argue the two are mostly unrelated. It should be clear what the story is about, how it's engaging with those ideas, and how each scene feeds into that even if the reader doesn't know what will happen next. It's hard to do this, so it's what I tend to focus on in my writing and others. There are essentially infinite ways for a scene to play out, so it needs to be clear why the version that's on the page is the best fit for this specific story. 

12 hours ago, Silk said:

One thing I'm now very curious of as a reader is what shifted A's perspective of R since obviously it did shift at some point.

I think this is also something the story could flesh out. There are definitely events that seem to be contributing to this, but it can feel a bit vague (distrusting the rich) or simplistic (R cheating on her). Easier said than done, I know, and I think the fact that Silk and I are focusing on these broad tricky issues are a testament to the story reading fairly well on a scene by scene level.

As I go:

Pg 1-2. It’s good that we’re looping back to the lab since it feels like it’s been brushed aside a bit for the last few chapters. That being said, I think we need more on how it connects to the larger plot threads here.

Pg 4. I’m still not sure why a teenage refugee was given complete ownership of this property

Pg 5-6. It’s good to get a discussion on A’s identity here, but I don’t think the neuroscience adds much (plus it seems very oversimplified)

-the asexual talk depends a lot on how it’s defined. By current day standards this isn’t accurate, since asexuality is about identity (lack of feeling attraction) rather than behavioral (not having sex). Some asexual people have sex all the time and enjoy it! If the definition’s changed in this fictional setting, it could help to know why.

Pg 7. If this could be a simple dream and we don’t know it’s real, it’s harder to be invested

Edited March 20 by Appol PhD

[Paul SB]

"... asexuality is about identity (lack of feeling attraction) rather than behavioral (not having sex). Some asexual people have sex all the time and enjoy it!" 

This is kind of perplexing, since you would think that if a person isn't feeling the instinctive attraction they aren't very motivated and are unlikely to actually engage. Calling someone who has sex all the time and enjoys it asexual sounds very much like false advertising. Or is it that some people don't feel the impetus to initiate it, but will respond if someone else does? There's a parallel I can think of elsewhere in the Animal Kingdom. Female lagomorphs (rabbits & hares) don't go around with a working estrus cycle. They are asexual until a male lago (of the same species, of course) comes along and initiated mating. This is called Induced Ovulation. Pheromones from the male activates ovulation in the female.

My ace beta reader said nothing at all about this, and, in fact, began her critique of the first draft by thanking me for writing it. I didn't get any impression that she had any objections to the portrayal or any definitional issues, and that was just last year. I've been cooking up a sequel in which this will matter, so I apparently need to do more research. My trans son, who reads everything I write, usually points out when I'm working from an older-generation conception that no longer applies.

[Appol PhD they/he]

51 minutes ago, Paul SB said:

This is kind of perplexing, since you would think that if a person isn't feeling the instinctive attraction they aren't very motivated and are unlikely to actually engage. Calling someone who has sex all the time and enjoys it asexual sounds very much like false advertising.

Yeah it's pretty unintuitive, and it's true that someone who's asexual is in general much less likely to want/enjoy sex since they're not attracted to people. But that's not a hard and fast rule. It's a little different than any animal comparison because sexuality looks at identity, not behavior.

The example that helped me understand it is that some straight men choose to do gay porn and enjoy the work despite not being attracted to the other guys. In this case there are a variety of reasons the straight man could seek out having sex with another man, possibly even enjoying the sensation of it, and it makes sense that he's still straight instead of being bi because there's no attraction behind it. Now imagine someone who's identical to that straight man with the one change of not being interested in women. If a straight man can seek out sex with another man and still be straight, then couldn't an asexual man seek out sex with a man and still be asexual? Then that could be extrapolated out to an asexual person having sex with someone of any sex/gender. 

Of course, most ace people aren't doing gay porn in droves, and as you mention it often intersects with emotional relationship dynamics so it shouldn't be framed as exclusively seeking out casual sex. It's just an example that helped me understand that behavior isn't the same as attraction.

If you're interested in more info, I think this website does a decent job of breaking it down. 

For the story's sake, I think A could be asexual but sex-indifferent or sex-favorable, or she could be gray asexual who can feel attraction in limited situations. I don't think she even necessarily needs to decide which labels fit her (and labels that use too much modern lingo might feel a bit shoehorned into a futuristic setting, so I'd recommend understanding the jargon but not using too much of it). The point is that, assuming discussions of sexuality are meant to come across as accurate and useful, they should be focused on identity and attraction rather than behavior. 

[Paul SB]

Thanks for pointing out that website. It feels to me like the kind of terminology people are using as identity markers is in an early stage of development. With your biology background I'm sure you're familiar with how taxonomies can go through a lot of changes before the community settles on a standard set of criteria. With humans, however, conscious thought complicates the situation even more. On top of that, this is a folk taxonomy, based more on folk conceptions than on the actual sciences of human nature.

Ernst Mayr once wrote a paper that explained the reason so few people get biology, especially the population genetics that underpins evolution, because they think typologically rather than in populations. That typological thinking is the foundation of all our bigotries. Everyone knows that everyone is a unique individual, yet people have pronounced tendencies to lump each other into categories and assume rigid, undeniable similarities so they can treat them as equivalent. The example you gave of men who identify as heterosexual but engage in homosexual activities sounds like a piece of that. Anything that has a polygenic element to it will most likely have a normal distribution. That's why it's called the normal distribution, and why it's the null hypothesis. No doubt sexuality is the same in that respect. Everyone is a unique mix of instincts that nudge them one way or the other, and only a very small fraction (around 12.5%) would be so strongly driven in one direction that they are instinctively heterosexual or homosexual, while the rest are more or less instinctively bisexual. Those men you mention are probably exploring elements of their instinct that aren't usually a strong part of themselves, but are nonetheless there. But then we insist on making up categories and putting ourselves and everyone else in them.

[Paul SB]

I had a thought that might help give the story a little more focus. Originally I was going to save it for the sequel, but maybe it would work at the very beginning of this story. Since our hero here is half Maya, she might explain what happened to her ancestors, the famously collapsed Maya Civilization. Having that story as part of her background would help to explain a big part of why she thinks the way she does. Unfortunately it takes a lot of words to get it across. I'm not sure if it would ruin the pacing at the beginning, or if people would be intrigued enough to enjoy it. The passage is around 600 words, which I would probably append to Entry 2:

Daisy and the Maya Collapse

 

“My mother did them. Her grandmother was a tribe archaeologist, way back when we had those. She was one of the people who worked on figuring out what happened to our people’s ancient civilization. It’s quite the story, but it should sound familiar.”

“I don’t know anything about archaeology. So what happened to them?” Joop gestured for me to continue. Of course he was bored after sitting around alone for days. I was always glad to have someone to tell the tale to. I held out my left arm.

“For a long time the landscape was filled with little farming villages. I’m sure they weren’t one-hundred percent peaceful and innocent. They were human. But they seemed to have done okay. Then someone built a big, stone temple, and that attracted a lot of attention from other villages. People came to see the temple and it brought a lot of business.Pretty soon every village built its own big stone temple. Each village tried to outdo their neighbors by building bigger temples.”

Joop nodded and leaned his head and shoulders closer. “Competitive architecture. Presumably whoever built the biggest temple was thought to have the most favor of the gods.”

I smiled. He was both interested and smart enough to get it. “Exactly. Now these were mostly farmers, and they had to do all the hard work, but it was also the local chief who ordered them to do it. There was a bigger problem, though, than tired but disgruntled farmers. To build these huge temples they needed mortar to hold the stones together. The mortar came from burning limestone, which meant they had to cut down trees.”

“I think I know where this is going. Runaway erosion, right?”

I smiled and pointed at him. “They cut down too many trees, the roots no longer held the soil down. My mom said the big clue was the fact that the first cities to collapse were in the middle of the Yucatan, where the deforestation would have been the most intense, but then collapse spread in the direction of the winds. Dead soil blown around ruining the crops, causing famine, which gave people more reason to fight each other. The key fact is that it was the rich and powerful people, the chiefs, nobles, war leaders, and of course the clergy, that drove this whole system. When the crops started to fail, what did they do? They figured the gods weren’t happy so they built bigger temples.”

“Which meant chopping down more trees, which caused more erosion.”

“In one century the population went from several million to just a few thousand people. The rich, powerful, competitive people killed each other off, leaving only a handful of farmers. Competition between rich people to show off how rich they were made the civilization grow, and like a tumor they pretty well killed the civilization. Then European people came along and conquered the descendants of that bloody catastrophe, my ancestors, turning us into part of their own rich-people competition game.”

“That’s quite the story,” Joop said, his whole form unnaturally stiff. By that time I was pointing at the image of a little farmer working in a field on my right ankle. I had managed to show most of it without exposing too much of my own skin, at least in places I didn’t want some guy to see. “A story for our time, for sure,” he said, a little awestruck.

“A story for all time. Humans have done pretty much the same thing everywhere and all through history. The Romans, the Greeks, China several times, There are abandoned cities all over the Earth, and they got that way when rich people screwed up their land trying to outdo each other.”

[Silk she/her]

"Identity not behaviour" is a good way of putting it and also my understanding of asexuality and others. (I should note, though, that I'm not speaking from an "own voices" perspective here.) 

On 3/19/2026 at 11:32 PM, Paul SB said:

This is the thematic issue that has to be illustrated here: Daisy comes to realize that over-prioritizing romance means neglecting other needs in life, and may not be satisfying by itself, or even necessary to have meaning.

Oh, I think bringing the themes out even more could absolutely help here. What might help is to really illustrate the shift D/A's thinking. 

When I first read the prologue, for example, I didn't get the impression that she was mostly running away to find R; I had the impression that she was running away from things being generally bad, and finding R and/or her family was basically a bonus. All of those things can still be true, of course, but it might help to shift the focus of those first scenes to have her more focused on R. Then it will mean more when she starts "falling out of love" - she gets caught up in all these other things and R starts to become less important. Eventually, we should probably see her making choices that feel more deliberate about choosing things other than R - maybe she chooses her own safety over R, finding her mom and sister over finding R, her work over finding R, etc - but making it more apparent that she's deliberately choosing other things. She can have feelings about that: maybe she's conflicted about choosing one over the other, maybe she realizes that she hasn't thought about R in a while and has feelings about that, etc. (Which doesn't need to be long inner monologues: the Emotion Thesaurus kinds of sentences you pointed out could go a long way towards illustrating how she feels about the choices she makes.) Plus, if R is more of a presence in A's mind before she appears on the page, we'll be more prepared for that appearance and that will also help the story be more focused. 

1 hour ago, Paul SB said:

Since our hero here is half Maya

Ah, I did not know this about her! 

Especially if this history comes more into play in the sequel, your instinct to save the long explanation for the sequel might be correct; there's the potential pacing issue but also just kind of a lot of things happening. But, I still think this is important information for us to have about the protagonist as it does of course shape her thinking, so maybe there are smaller snippets of it we can get here and there, while this longer segment appears in the second book especially if this is where the history has more direct bearing on the book. 

[Paul SB]

Now this really helps! Thanks a bunch! I guess it’s been a really long time since I was 16 and having obsessive thoughts about girls. Big mistake not playing that up. Maybe I can draw on my obsessive thoughts and D’vana Tendi for inspiration.

You must have missed Entry 2 where J asks D about her tattoos. I sprinkled in a couple other references, like the huipil and the traditional Mayan soup, but if you didn’t know that from Entry 2 you probably would have missed that. And I can see dropping some hints in this story to prepare readers for the next one.

Maybe it would be a good idea to promote people who submit here posting their beat sheets or other planning materials they use.

 I seriously wish you were around when I was posting Twilight’s Rift here. 

[Silk she/her]

Oh, excellent, I'm glad it was helpful! 

21 hours ago, Paul SB said:

I guess it’s been a really long time since I was 16 and having obsessive thoughts about girls. Big mistake not playing that up.

You could definitely play that up--have her notice other girls and be surprised or ashamed at herself for noticing, realize she hasn't thought about R in a long time, all sorts of things. 

21 hours ago, Paul SB said:

You must have missed Entry 2 where J asks D about her tattoos.

Quite possibly. There were a couple spots where I missed attachments, and I read through the earlier chapters pretty quickly in order to catch up.

21 hours ago, Paul SB said:

Maybe it would be a good idea to promote people who submit here posting their beat sheets or other planning materials they use.

For sure, anyone should feel invited to do so! Personally, I tend to hold off on sharing that stuff, since I only get that "first exposure to the story" kind of reaction once, and share it only when I'm workshopping something specific. 

Plus, our current little crew seems happy to run with prescriptive feedback, but not everyone is. I usually default to more reaction-based critiques unless I know the person I'm critiquing is happy to get prescriptive suggestions.

[Paul SB]

I'll take any kind of critique you're willing to send my way. It's only been a week and you've already done quite a bit to restart my brain. If you did beta reading I'd be your next customer (though I might have to knock off a bank or two, the way my wife complains about my spending).

 

I had an odd idea last night, then while driving home from work with the Brandenburg Concerti blasting own the highway the idea came back. When you said that I need to have A think more about her missing gf, maybe catch herself looking at others and feeling ashamed, etc, I came up with a music analogy. Since you play an instrument I'm sure you know how tonic notes are used. If you are playing a song in the key of A, the song will probably start and end on A, and there will be a whole lot of As throughout. Think of the key as being a theme. A story would probably do well to begin with the theme, hint at it frequently, then recap in the denouement. If not done carefully it could come out preachy, but apply the analogy to character arc. In a flat arc this would be pretty straightforward, whereas in a change arc it would be like modulating from one key to another. So min this case D would spend a lot of time thinking/talking/sighing about her romantic obsession, but by the end of the story she is thinking/talking/whatever about her new focus on participating in the Underground Railroad. If I weren't Straight Outta Consciousness I might be able to do more with the analogy.