Paul SB

Hope so. I'm kind of hoping you'll change your mind about Randall as you get to know him better.

Something Monday this way comes ... ready for more?

It occurred to me that there was a point where A made a very bad decision along these lines, and since I know how it ends I can say it had serious consequences. In fact, it's what sets off the climactic conflict. Back in Entry 20, the day after she finally meets up with R, she lets R into the Grove before it opened, and in non-public places. That revealed to R what A was doing there under the table. It would have been good, though, for the consequences to get a little foreshadowing. Here's what i did with the last 2 paragraphs: It would not surprise me if someone came along with ground-penetrating radar in search of minerals or something. “Is there some way to make it harder to detect?” She nodded slowly. “Yeah, there are materials we could cover the ceiling with, poly-absorbent EM foam. Expensive, but that would make the tunnel virtually invisible to radar.” She read the look on my face perfectly. “I’ll put in a request for it as soon as I get back to the station. It won’t be easy sneaking that much in without being noticed.” She gave my hand a little squeeze, and pulled the hidden door shut behind her. The door clicked shut with a sinking feeling that I had been seriously stupid letting Rachelle in when the place was closed. She probably wouldn’t tell anybody, probably. Unless the was drinking. She could get very truthful, downright cringy TMI, when tipsy

I think I had a kind of similar problem with the first story I wrote after I got out of the hospital. It was my first time participating in a writer’s group, and people complained that the protagonist was too passive. He was a prisoner for almost the entire story, so he had to watch and figure things out before he could stage a breakout. It didn’t help that he was a contractor who worked on a military base, so most of the other prisoners were people who had rank and could give orders when the captors weren’t around. What he was doing was very calculating and deliberate, which made sense to me. This character is kind of the same. She’s in over her head and doesn’t really know what to do, so she’s taking advantage of any help she can get and playing it by ear. She’s also been through enough crap in her young life that she’s learned to tamp down her feelings. That might be a place where I need to get more Dickensian with her/

It sounds like A needs to be more emotional and make more bad choices.

Okay. Did you check the spam filter?

A gets more scapes to hide, but the aliens finally show up to evacuate them. Ch's wife brings the orphan and stays to make sure the orphan will be able to live with A on Mars. Some of the descriptions of the abused slaves get pretty uncomfortable, though I'm not sure if a trigger warning is called for as it isn't actually shown in any detail. A big issue for this chapter is if it's simply too long.

Me me me! And me, too!

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.

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.

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.”

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.

"... 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.

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).

"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!

"... 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

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?

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!

Your comment about A feeling overwhelmed on page 4 prompted me to grab my copy of The Emotion Thesaurus, find overwhelmed in the TOC, then consult the appropriate entry. I picked a couple from the list of physical signals and behaviors (sagging into a chair, rubbing the temples while closing the eyes) and added them to the scene. These are the kind of subtle show-don't-tell hints that the book is so good for. Silk said she was interested in checking the book out, so I'll copy this and send it to her directly. As I have said before, it's a very useful tool for just about any fiction writer and I can't recommend it too highly. My only problem is remembering that i have it.

I didn't pay attention to that band when I was in high school, but now, after decades of hearing little else but rap and headbanger music I've been craving music from back then. Rock Lobster was a silly song, though it actually did have a point. It's kind of funny that I heard an interview a few months back and didn't know that they were gay. I mentioned that to my son and he said, "How did you miss that?"

Hmm. I kind of thought the disconnect was part of the picture. You didn't use the word bulimia but it was obvious enough, so I thought the lack of sensory experience was you showing disassociation without saying it. The restaurant scene does seem like a good place if you want to add some in. The burning sensation in the back of the throat, the heaviness in the forearms. Are you familiar with Ackerman and Puglisi's Emotion Thesaurus? It's a really helpful tool for this kind of stuff (especially when I remember to use it). They have a whole series of similar books, but that's the one to start out with.

I would gladly send you my revisions, but you seem to be strapped for time more often than not, so it probably wouldn't be fair for me to expect that. "Oh hey, I forgot about lobster guy." -- I must be getting old. The B-52's reference seemed obvious to me.

Oh my! I didn’t expect you would start from the beginning after this many entries have gone by! If I had known I would have sent you the revised versions, as I have done a fair bit with the other fine critique partner here. Emotionality is definitely something I always need to work on. Others have commented on how Hemingway it gets. Probably a lifelong condition that results in alexithymia isn’t helping me any. Years of medication and therapy haven’t fixed it. In a way you have actually anticipated an important aspect of the ending, but I probably shouldn’t give that away. Thanks for all the work you’ve done here!

I thought losing herself was the whole point of the story, and finally putting her foot down and getting herself back. I'd be curious about the offered solution.