Since last posting over two years ago, I've been in a self-induced coma of lethargy. I've been indulging my inner lazy-fuck.
It matters not.
It is 2013. The Almoner cometh.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Meet The Richters
Among the first characters introduced in The Almoner are Eddie and Randall Richter. This father and son operate a large produce farm in the shadow of the Eclipse Spire. With the uncountable masses living underground, how did these two end up on the surface? I'll take a deep breath, and explain:
The Richters are Forsaken, banished by the Church to the surface of All 16 years prior to the timeline established in the opening chapter. Randall, who is Eddie's son and is 16 years old, was born in Tides (one of the vast subterranean city-states). Immediately following his birth, he was seized from his mother by the Church and sent to join his father in surface exile.
Eddie's crime? He was found to have associations with the Auger of God, a growing secret society of religious dissenters. Though the Auger of God has typically been non-violent, the Church does not abide heresy of any kind. So they sent him packing topside, where he will live out the remainder of his days.
So what the hell did Randall do? After all, he was only half-formed in his mother's womb when his banishment was ordered. It is not unprecedented for the Church to extend the sentence of a man convicted of heresy to his descendants, ranging from 1 to 5 generations depending on severity of the crime. Eddie's sentence would typically not have been extended to his unborn son, but the Adjudicators in his case decided to make an example of him due to his high-profile marriage to the Prelate of Tides. The 13 Prelates are governors of the city-states, and together form the Council of All. Their rank in the Church is subordinate only to the Pontiff himself.
So 16 years after the banishment, Eddie runs the farm with the help of his old friend Marco, who had originally introduced him to Auger of God. Eddie has sworn off further association with the Auger in deference to his son. He's also abandoned the scriptures of the Church, as there is no need for pretense on the surface. His world lacks meaning; he hasn't seen his wife in 16 years, she no longer speaks to him, and his relationship with Randall is a struggle. His sense of obligation to his son is the only thing that keeps him going.
Randall loathes his dad. He holds him responsible for their empty lives, and for being separated from his mother at birth. Though he is expected to help his father on the farm, he's lazy and brooding. Conversation between father and son is stunted and unnatural.
Randall fills the void in his life with the Church's scripture, and is aided by missionaries who tend to the Forsaken from their outpost at the Eclipse Spire. For several years he's been wearing stark white skin paint in the manner of the missionaries, to shield his body and the soul within from the malignant gaze of Tuefel, the sun-devil. This leaves his skin pale and un-pigmented like those from the underground, in contrast to the bronze tanning of his father and most other Forsaken.
From the opening chapter, Eddie and Randall are at odds. When they discover an unspeakable presence in a charred crater near their fields, the intangible yet ever-present barrier between them grows and becomes insurmountable. Randall seeks to foil the plans of his father, and Eddie finds himself troubled by a new and persistent thought: his obligation to his son is clear, but does he even love him?
The Richters are Forsaken, banished by the Church to the surface of All 16 years prior to the timeline established in the opening chapter. Randall, who is Eddie's son and is 16 years old, was born in Tides (one of the vast subterranean city-states). Immediately following his birth, he was seized from his mother by the Church and sent to join his father in surface exile.
Eddie's crime? He was found to have associations with the Auger of God, a growing secret society of religious dissenters. Though the Auger of God has typically been non-violent, the Church does not abide heresy of any kind. So they sent him packing topside, where he will live out the remainder of his days.
So what the hell did Randall do? After all, he was only half-formed in his mother's womb when his banishment was ordered. It is not unprecedented for the Church to extend the sentence of a man convicted of heresy to his descendants, ranging from 1 to 5 generations depending on severity of the crime. Eddie's sentence would typically not have been extended to his unborn son, but the Adjudicators in his case decided to make an example of him due to his high-profile marriage to the Prelate of Tides. The 13 Prelates are governors of the city-states, and together form the Council of All. Their rank in the Church is subordinate only to the Pontiff himself.
So 16 years after the banishment, Eddie runs the farm with the help of his old friend Marco, who had originally introduced him to Auger of God. Eddie has sworn off further association with the Auger in deference to his son. He's also abandoned the scriptures of the Church, as there is no need for pretense on the surface. His world lacks meaning; he hasn't seen his wife in 16 years, she no longer speaks to him, and his relationship with Randall is a struggle. His sense of obligation to his son is the only thing that keeps him going.
Randall loathes his dad. He holds him responsible for their empty lives, and for being separated from his mother at birth. Though he is expected to help his father on the farm, he's lazy and brooding. Conversation between father and son is stunted and unnatural.
Randall fills the void in his life with the Church's scripture, and is aided by missionaries who tend to the Forsaken from their outpost at the Eclipse Spire. For several years he's been wearing stark white skin paint in the manner of the missionaries, to shield his body and the soul within from the malignant gaze of Tuefel, the sun-devil. This leaves his skin pale and un-pigmented like those from the underground, in contrast to the bronze tanning of his father and most other Forsaken.
From the opening chapter, Eddie and Randall are at odds. When they discover an unspeakable presence in a charred crater near their fields, the intangible yet ever-present barrier between them grows and becomes insurmountable. Randall seeks to foil the plans of his father, and Eddie finds himself troubled by a new and persistent thought: his obligation to his son is clear, but does he even love him?
Friday, February 25, 2011
World in Conflict
One element that is quite unique to science fiction, and other forms of speculative fiction, is the world-building process. I have to assume that any potential reader of my book is human, and from the planet Earth. So how do I write a novel that is set on a non-Earth planet and is occasionally told through the point of view of multiple non-Human sentient species, while engaging my Earth-bound reader in the story and maintaining a high level of plausibility? The first step (I think), is to build a rich, complex world in which to set the story. It needs to be fantastic but not overly so, alien but not completely outside the realm of familiarity, and most importantly, fun for the reader to imagine living in for as long as he reads the book.
This being my first experience with world-building, I'm learning as I go, and enjoying every minute of it. While I expect many details to to flesh themselves in as I continue to write, I've been settling my thoughts recently one key piece of the world-building puzzle: CONFLICT.
Some description of setting is necessary to understand all of the levels of conflict playing out in The Almoner, so here's a brief snapshot:
The people of the planet 'All' worship the moon as a symbol of their God, and fear the sun as the embodiment of evil. This profound religious idolatry has driven the entire society underground, where 40 billion people reside in 13 vast underground city-states, under the global theocracy of the Church. Those in good favor with the Church will live their entire lives underground, shielded from the malignant gaze of the Sun-devil Tuefel, but doomed to suffer obscene living conditions due to overpopulation. Those who commit crimes of heresy are forsaken by the Church, and are exiled to the surface to work in some manner of surface industry that provides for those in the 13 city-states: agriculture, water treatment, power generation, etc.
Given those conditions, some levels of conflict are quite obvious. The forsaken on the surface live their lives in toil to serve the city-dwellers below, which will obviously breed some insurmountable resentment. In the cities themselves, the age old struggle of the "Haves" vs. the "Have-nots" is running its course: the pipefitter for the waterworks, for example, who subsists on canned tomatos and a gallon of water per day, will naturally be at odds with the theocratic aristrocracy, who lead lives of excess.
You also have lots of potential resource conflict between the city-states. What if Eclipse, which controls fertile agricultural lands in an equatorial region, decides to cut production to artificially boost the costs of produce? And what if Selene, which processes and purifies billions of gallons of water from glaciers in a polar region decides to cut supply in response? The Church has some influence over global resource trade, but their control is tenuous, and things could boil over into open conflict at even slight and unpredictable provocations.
And on the smallest possible scale, each man is subject to his own inner conflict. When the Church teaches that mankind and their single lonely planet are alone in all the universe, what is a missionary to think when an alien lands in his soy field? Food for thought...
Of course, aside from all the ancillary conflict described above, you have the story's central conflict. Osiphus has been hunting Linegal for thousands of years, and is seeking to restore their ancient symbiosis. Linegal doesn't want to be found, and the people of All are but pawns in the struggle.
As I work all the angles and develop the conflict in my story, I want my readers to be constantly taking sides. What I don't want to do is to paint with a broad brush, or make things so black and white that every reader chooses the same side in every conflict.
Thats a challenge, and I'd be lying if I said it isn't fun.
This being my first experience with world-building, I'm learning as I go, and enjoying every minute of it. While I expect many details to to flesh themselves in as I continue to write, I've been settling my thoughts recently one key piece of the world-building puzzle: CONFLICT.
Some description of setting is necessary to understand all of the levels of conflict playing out in The Almoner, so here's a brief snapshot:
The people of the planet 'All' worship the moon as a symbol of their God, and fear the sun as the embodiment of evil. This profound religious idolatry has driven the entire society underground, where 40 billion people reside in 13 vast underground city-states, under the global theocracy of the Church. Those in good favor with the Church will live their entire lives underground, shielded from the malignant gaze of the Sun-devil Tuefel, but doomed to suffer obscene living conditions due to overpopulation. Those who commit crimes of heresy are forsaken by the Church, and are exiled to the surface to work in some manner of surface industry that provides for those in the 13 city-states: agriculture, water treatment, power generation, etc.
Given those conditions, some levels of conflict are quite obvious. The forsaken on the surface live their lives in toil to serve the city-dwellers below, which will obviously breed some insurmountable resentment. In the cities themselves, the age old struggle of the "Haves" vs. the "Have-nots" is running its course: the pipefitter for the waterworks, for example, who subsists on canned tomatos and a gallon of water per day, will naturally be at odds with the theocratic aristrocracy, who lead lives of excess.
You also have lots of potential resource conflict between the city-states. What if Eclipse, which controls fertile agricultural lands in an equatorial region, decides to cut production to artificially boost the costs of produce? And what if Selene, which processes and purifies billions of gallons of water from glaciers in a polar region decides to cut supply in response? The Church has some influence over global resource trade, but their control is tenuous, and things could boil over into open conflict at even slight and unpredictable provocations.
And on the smallest possible scale, each man is subject to his own inner conflict. When the Church teaches that mankind and their single lonely planet are alone in all the universe, what is a missionary to think when an alien lands in his soy field? Food for thought...
Of course, aside from all the ancillary conflict described above, you have the story's central conflict. Osiphus has been hunting Linegal for thousands of years, and is seeking to restore their ancient symbiosis. Linegal doesn't want to be found, and the people of All are but pawns in the struggle.
As I work all the angles and develop the conflict in my story, I want my readers to be constantly taking sides. What I don't want to do is to paint with a broad brush, or make things so black and white that every reader chooses the same side in every conflict.
Thats a challenge, and I'd be lying if I said it isn't fun.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Nibbles
So, there's a word for what I've been doing the past week or so: nibbling.
As I continue to flesh The Almoner out in my mind, I'm writing little bits and pieces. A draft of the prologue is done, and I've written odd paragraphs here and there. I've even written little passages from the religious texts that the Church of All uses as their "Bible", which I plan to work into the story at some point but am not yet decided on precisely how or where.
I've decided I'm going to give Scrivener a try, though the Windows version is still in pre-release and is not completely functional.
I've been nibbling at the edges, taking tentative baby steps. The nibbles account for something like 3500 words in total. This will be slow going at this rate...
Enough of this. The nibbles have to stop. Time to take a few man-sized bites.
CHOMP!
As I continue to flesh The Almoner out in my mind, I'm writing little bits and pieces. A draft of the prologue is done, and I've written odd paragraphs here and there. I've even written little passages from the religious texts that the Church of All uses as their "Bible", which I plan to work into the story at some point but am not yet decided on precisely how or where.
I've decided I'm going to give Scrivener a try, though the Windows version is still in pre-release and is not completely functional.
I've been nibbling at the edges, taking tentative baby steps. The nibbles account for something like 3500 words in total. This will be slow going at this rate...
Enough of this. The nibbles have to stop. Time to take a few man-sized bites.
CHOMP!
Random Paragraph of the Day
A keening wail rose behind him, and Eddie turned to see Randall with hands pressed to both ears, eyes squeezed shut and face contorted in a mask of pain and terror. The ululating cry of his son was both bone-chilling and pathetic.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Meet Osiphus
There's a fairly common technique used in a lot of the movies we've all seen, where as the credits begin to roll, the camera slowly pans out from the final action scene. What begins as a narrow overhead view of the bad guys' corpse gradually opens up to show the burning car beside him, then the street and the surge of onlookers, then the city block, etc. Finally, just before the screen fades to black and the movie's title song kicks in, you've got the widest possible view of the entire city, with dark clouds of smoke billowing from the car that you can no longer quite see.
It's dramatic as all hell.
I'll introduce one of my "Aliens" in much the same way, starting with the narrow view and panning out to wide-angle.
Osiphus is one bad-ass mother-trucker. It's as big as an RV, looks like the mix of an angry bull and a gigantic space scorpion, and is essentially hell on six legs. On top of all that, it's older than the stars and virtually indestructable. To clear up any confusion, I'm referring to it as "It" for now, because to my knowledge, it has neither penis nor vagina.
<Pan Out>
Osiphus is actually only one-half of a symbiotic pair. The other half is Linegal (lin-a-GALL). If Osiphus is the brawn of the pair, Linegal is the brain. Problem is, Linegal has gone rogue and abandoned the symbiosis. Linegal has been running or in hiding for a few thousand years, and Osiphus has been hunting it's other half for all of that time. The hunt has spanned the galaxies and the millenia, but the chase is nearing its end.
<Pan Out>
The Osiphus-Linegal pair are but one of perhaps a hundred similar pairs that are sparsely spread throughout the Universe. Collectively, all of the pairs are the "Primordial", an ancient being that encompasses all of the lesser symbiotic pairs in a single collective conscience, or "hive mind".
Though the pairs act with autonomy, their thoughts and behaviors are subject to the influence of the collective conscience. There are elements of that conscience that want both Linegal and Osiphus destroyed - to sever the limb so that the body may be saved.
Osiphus is the hand. The Osiphus-Linegal symbiosis is the arm. The Primordial is the body.
Osiphus and it's hunt for Linegal are a key plot element in The Almoner, but it is not really a central character. Only one scene will be told through Osiphus' point of view, and that's the prologue.
And I'll be honest, trying to write even a single scene in the POV of the convoluted mess I've described above is proving to be a challenge. I may skip it for now, and begin writing scenes for the more central human characters with whom I can more easily identify, by virtue of them having penises and vaginas (though rarely both).
It's dramatic as all hell.
I'll introduce one of my "Aliens" in much the same way, starting with the narrow view and panning out to wide-angle.
Osiphus is one bad-ass mother-trucker. It's as big as an RV, looks like the mix of an angry bull and a gigantic space scorpion, and is essentially hell on six legs. On top of all that, it's older than the stars and virtually indestructable. To clear up any confusion, I'm referring to it as "It" for now, because to my knowledge, it has neither penis nor vagina.
<Pan Out>
Osiphus is actually only one-half of a symbiotic pair. The other half is Linegal (lin-a-GALL). If Osiphus is the brawn of the pair, Linegal is the brain. Problem is, Linegal has gone rogue and abandoned the symbiosis. Linegal has been running or in hiding for a few thousand years, and Osiphus has been hunting it's other half for all of that time. The hunt has spanned the galaxies and the millenia, but the chase is nearing its end.
<Pan Out>
The Osiphus-Linegal pair are but one of perhaps a hundred similar pairs that are sparsely spread throughout the Universe. Collectively, all of the pairs are the "Primordial", an ancient being that encompasses all of the lesser symbiotic pairs in a single collective conscience, or "hive mind".
Though the pairs act with autonomy, their thoughts and behaviors are subject to the influence of the collective conscience. There are elements of that conscience that want both Linegal and Osiphus destroyed - to sever the limb so that the body may be saved.
Osiphus is the hand. The Osiphus-Linegal symbiosis is the arm. The Primordial is the body.
Osiphus and it's hunt for Linegal are a key plot element in The Almoner, but it is not really a central character. Only one scene will be told through Osiphus' point of view, and that's the prologue.
And I'll be honest, trying to write even a single scene in the POV of the convoluted mess I've described above is proving to be a challenge. I may skip it for now, and begin writing scenes for the more central human characters with whom I can more easily identify, by virtue of them having penises and vaginas (though rarely both).
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Motivation
We all face daunting tasks in our lives. Dad and I are gearing up to write novels, Christopher is well on his way through law-school, and Jeremy is championing the cause of the Lesbian/Gay/Transgendered community by finally taking the plunge into gender-reassignment surgery. Well, two out of three, at least.
Fear of failure is probably an inevitable part of taking big leaps into something you're not entirely comfortable or familiar with. I think the key is to shrug that fear off, and not allow it to make a slow-starter out of you. Or worse, a non-starter.
To that end, here are a couple of Tolkien quotes I'm fond of. They're nice and versatile - I can't think of any challenge in life that has a beginning and an end that these can't be applied to:
"It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish."
And...
"Little by little, one travels far."
Clever dude, that Tolkien.
Fear of failure is probably an inevitable part of taking big leaps into something you're not entirely comfortable or familiar with. I think the key is to shrug that fear off, and not allow it to make a slow-starter out of you. Or worse, a non-starter.
To that end, here are a couple of Tolkien quotes I'm fond of. They're nice and versatile - I can't think of any challenge in life that has a beginning and an end that these can't be applied to:
"It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish."
And...
"Little by little, one travels far."
Clever dude, that Tolkien.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Random Paragraph of the Day
That which is envisioned, created, cradled and wrought by a thousand generations spanning countless millennia can be unwrought in an infinitesimal fraction of the time. The reverse is no less true: what is born of an instant in time, a bat of an eye or a beat of a heart, can die the slow and withering death of ages.
Back Jacket Blurb
“The Demon Osiphus comes as harbinger of end-times. The righteous faithful is the Shield and the Sword. The unbeliever shall be kindling to the hellfire.”
All is a world of 40 billion souls. It’s people struggle to survive in subterranean squalor, while the One Church presides over their lives without tolerance for religious or political dissent.
The Church of All preaches this core tenant: All is the Universe. Nothing but perdition lies in the beyond.
In the shadow of the Eclipse Spire, an ancient presence crashes down in a ball of fire, and begins to hunt. Halfway across the world, trillions of tons of dirt are being excavated at the Dig, but nobody knows who, or what, is doing the digging. And one man begins to question the Faith that he’s built his life’s work on. He is…
The Almoner.
The Almoner
Almoner: [al-muh-ner]
–noun
1. a person whose function or duty is the distribution of alms on behalf of an institution, a royal personage, a monastery, etc.
"The Almoner" is the working title for the novel I'm about to begin writing. This title may very possibly suck balls, but it's what I'm rolling with for now. I'll revisit other options after I have the thing written.
"The Almoner" is the working title for the novel I'm about to begin writing. This title may very possibly suck balls, but it's what I'm rolling with for now. I'll revisit other options after I have the thing written.
So, unless the title of this blog suddenly changes, "The Almoner" it shall be.
If you're reading this now, you're one three or four peeps who actually give a damn about how this develops, and odds are your last name is "St James". No matter who you are, welcome to my day to day chronicle of the fun and the pitfalls of grinding out a first novel.
Thanks for stopping by!
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