I’ve been rather busy the past couple days. I did a little work on Orguz’s Chapter 4, went through the entirety of Dox’s section (most of the work was minor tweaks, but there were a couple chapters that needed filling out), I tweaked Ophis Python’s prologue and mostly finished his Chapter 1 and epilogue, and I mostly finished Xorgoth’s Chapter 1, all of this being in TTWC2.

That’s some good headway, but at the rate I’m going, I’ll be lucky to make 50K words. Even though I’m not actively seeking publication at the moment, I try to think in terms of publications standards, so I really try to shoot for at least 70K with my novels. One of the joys of self-directed online serialization is that I don’t absolutely have to worry about this kind of beancounting, but it still sticks in my mind. Ideally, each book is as long as it needs to be and that’s that. Looking at how publication works in Japan, it seems you can get away with that more. For instance, I’m reading the Full Metal Panic! light novels and I’ve currently on the fifth book, which is rather thin compared to the others. It just happens to be the length of the story Gatoh intended to tell. However, you may need to have a certain degree of stroke to get away with that. I don’t claim to be an expert on the American publishing industry, so I definitely can’t make any significant claims when it comes to its Japanese counterpart. That being said, I have a feeling I’d have an easier time getting a publication run over there than I would here. Perhaps I’ll take that Japanese novel-writing course after all…

I made progress on Chapters 25, 26 and 27 of Tico4. If I keep it up at this rate, I could actually make up for my massive quota shortfall over the past month and a half. Although I’m kinda tempted to stick with Tico4, I may switch over. I haven’t decided yet. Stay tuned.

I managed to pretty well finish Chapter 24 of Tico4, just as I’d hoped. I may devote a day or two to work on Chapter 25 before switching over to another story. Stay tuned.

I made good progress on Chapter 24 of Tico4. I actually haven’t gotten this much done in a while. Another good push and I should be done with it. We’ll see if I stick with Tico4 a while longer or hop over to another story. Stay tuned.

Well, I didn’t manage to be quite as consistent as I was hoping to be, but I did at least pick things back up and make some progress on Chapter 24 of Tico4. I’m sure I’ve noticed this before, but resuming my work, I was stricken by how close I am to finishing. If I can actually get back to upholding the quota, I’ll be done in the next few months. Then I need to start thinking about what comes next. So much to write and so little time. Stay tuned.

I managed to get some writing done for a change, mostly finishing Chapter 22 of Tico4 and doing a little work on Chapter 24. Maybe more will follow. It’d be nice to get back on track. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

For those of you who have ventured down the rabbit hole that is TVTropes, I’m sure you can appreciate the sort of conceptual shorthand they provide whilst simultaneously ruining and improving your life. Today we’re going to talk about values dissonance. To explain in briefly to the uninitiated, values dissonance is where the values of you the consumer of media clash with those of the characters, author, etc. This is often due to a difference in time period, culture, etc. For instance, the average modern reader probably isn’t going to be completely on board with the values of characters from a Regency Period novel. The inverse is values resonance. Where values dissonance highlights the differences that divide us, values resonance can reveal surprising common ground.

As an author and a pseudo-philologist, the subject of values dissonance fascinates me. Perhaps I just use my novels as a means of sublimation, but it’s the excuse I give for my interest in taking in the ideas and viewpoints of other people. I love taking it in, internalizing it, trying to become a person I’m not. If I’m doing it right, it means that I can make characters that are further removed from myself.

Therein lies a tricky point. Because stories and characters come out of the author, they bear the mark of their source. The most transparent have nearly one-to-one correspondence, but the truly talented storyteller can create degrees of separation. This is certainly what I strive to do, but I couldn’t say how well I succeed. It becomes a problem when you want to create a character largely removed from yourself. The thing is that a lot of people think what’s on the page (or screen) is a direct reflection of the source. This is not always the case, though. Oftentimes, the attempt to create the Other only results in strawmen, but sometimes the Other can be crafted so convincingly that it’s hard to imagine they’re removed from the source. This can lead to misblaming in the case of deliberate values dissonance.

The cowardly solution is to lay it on thick with the disclaimers or to abandon a convincing, fleshed-out character for a safe strawman that only the thickest would confuse for self-representation. Alternatively, you can have your little author avatar thoroughly dismantle the offending character or see that karmic retribution is swiftly and duly meted out. If you’ve got a little more steel in your nerves, you can opt for things to play out more naturalistically. The focus of values dissonance may not ever get refuted in any meaningful way if it doesn’t serve the interests of the story. You may catch some flak for it, but your work will probably have more integrity.

Let’s take an example from my own work. As you know, I don’t like to dwell on my own views, political, religious or what have you. It’s not that I lack any conviction or am ashamed of my beliefs, but I don’t like to create unnecessary conflict or distract from my work, which should be the focus. I can tell you now that no one character is a carbon copy of myself. In fact, because I’ve been working with most of my characters for so long, many of them retain artifacts from earlier stages of my development. They may represent former aspects of my beliefs but not me as I am now. Anyway, on to the specific example, let’s look at Chapter 1 of Tico3. The drunken racial and political diatribe by Lydia and Sean with the bartender Khoi was actually a lot of fun for me to write because I was going out of both my comfort zone and myself. Things like race and politics are touchy subjects, maybe not so much in some countries out there, but here in the US, get ready for a scrap if you get into it in mixed company. (Even in an audience with largely the same views, it can get unpleasantly heated.) Cutting loose like I did was really cathartic. Lydia is mostly an equal opportunity misanthrope, but despite (or perhaps because of) her own Chinese ancestry, she’s rather strongly anti-Chinese, but as a general gadfly, she’ll latch on to any angle of abuse if she can. Sean, on the other hand, doesn’t have much actual antipathy for anyone, but he’s a bit of a troll and hates political correctness (which is still very much in force in the Union era). They don’t think as I think or speak as I speak and are likely to rub a lot of people the wrong way, but that’s all part of the reason I love them so much.

In conclusion, values dissonance may make you uncomfortable, but can be interesting. If you’re the sort of person who likes to venture beyond your own boundaries, it can actually be a way of broadening your horizons. Maybe you’ll use it to hone your ability to launch a counterattack and maybe you’ll use it to build a little empathy. Or you could just shut yourself off. It’d be a bit of a waste, but life is too short to raise your blood pressure too much.

Here’s something you haven’t seen in a while. I’ll dispense with any excuses, apologies or empty promises. Instead, I’ll just say that I did a little work on Orguz’s epilogue of TTWC2. I swear, just clearing out the number of spam comments before they get out of hand is almost incentive enough to be meeting my daily quota. Hopefully there’ll be more to come. Stay tuned.

I’ve mentioned before that I consider Frank Herbert one of my Three Pillars and that the Dune series has had a profound impact on me and my writing. I’ve also discussed how I studied adaptation of the written word in grad school. One of the main themes of the course was stories that are “unadaptable”, that is, ill-suited for the screen for one reason or another. Working out the how and why a particular story could be considered unadaptable was a decent chunk of our in-class discussions. Anyway, I bring all this up because if ever there was a story that was unadaptable, Dune is it. If you’ve seen the David Lynch version (or its Alan Smithee variant), you know that it was a mess. There are some good points to it, but it misses the mark by a wide margin. I thought the mini series made by the Sci-Fi Channel was better as an adaptation, but still came up short. I honestly don’t think the gap can be overcome, though I could potentially see it working in animation. Working better, at any rate, in the right hands, of course. A 13- or even 26-ep series would probably do the trick. All that aside, I want to talk about the first attempt to bring Dune to the silver screen as chronicled in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which I watched last week.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is something of an experimental filmmaker and at a friend’s recommendation, he decided to make the leap from arthouse indie flicks to a a big-budget magnum opus with Dune. I highly recommend the documentary, so I’m not going to hash out everything that it covers. What I am going to say is how intrigued I was at Jodorowsky’s concept, the years of work he sunk into it and the grand assemblage of talent he was pulling together. Salvador Dali as the Padishah Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen… That’s just scratching the surface. Each step of the story seems more impossible than the last and the amazing thing is how far Jodorowsky actually got. It was an impossible vision and the final result was inevitable. Still, it’s amazing to see and the aftermath isn’t nearly as dire as you might think.

My all too brief treatment doesn’t come anywhere close to doing the material justice, but in conclusion, check out Jodorowsky’s Dune. It’s a real trip. In more ways than one. ^_^