Writing is hard. Especially when…

If you have been reading my most recent posts, you may, very likely have developed an impression that I am not physically, emotionally, or just generally, well. You would be correct in this impression. Yet day in and day out, I persist in writing like I have never written before in this journal and elsewhere.

Writing about characters having sex, continued

After writing so much about the process of writing, I thought it was time to take a look at things I am really saying with some of the things that I write. As anyone who has written a publishable story knows, there are multiple kinds of scene with which to populate your story, but each scene reflects something of its creator. So let us explore a couple of scenes involving my most direct proxy, the Mage-General known to most as Kronisk. Kronisk is, with some differences that I will highlight, more or less physically the same as his creator. Kronisk is about five feet and eight inches (with change), and weighs enough to resemble a slightly more in-shape John Belushi (if you do not know who he was, and since 1982 will always be, then piss off). But there are some germane points to understand about the character for the purposes of this discussion. Like the Halfling Mage known as Linula, Kronisk was abused as a child. Whilst the sexual extent of the abuse differs, the overall effect is much the same.

So when Kronisk uses a power against one suspect in the conspiracy and murder that drives the plot of the third novel, well, let us go into the effects that it has. The power causes the victim to start screaming and clawing at his own skin. My writing of this scene makes no secret of the fact that the victim in this case feels like worms of filth are crawling through his skin, just beneath what medical experts refer to as the subcutaneous tissue. (For those who do not know, the subcutaneous layer is the layer just beneath the surface of the skin. People with diabetes put needles into this layer regularly.) The eventual result, which even makes the people who hate the victim most for his deeds, is that the victim starts clawing his own skin off with nothing but his fingernails. Being powerful enough to control how other Mages use their power entails being so powerful that one almost becomes a force of nature.

But as in all writings, one must come up with a credible explanation of what a character does. As the story in question is also attempting to explain how Linula reacts to elements within her place of birth taking exception to her being overtly sexual and unafraid to blow the whistle on abusers, only subtle hints are necessary. But this is a stage in the story I have not quite reached yet, as my fiction writing has once again come to a standstill (it is hard to keep motivated at doing something with no real hope of reward, especially when one is ill very frequently).

But this goes right to the heart of what motivates my writing. A quote that drives the story in question comes from the Sigh song Shingontachikawa. To quote the song, “the hidden power my lust evokes, known in ancient rhyme / turning sexual energy into the power to kill”. Twelve to fifteen years from now, my little sister is probably going to read this and freak out a bit, but it has to be said. The societies in the Allied Realms, especially the Dwarvish and Human ones, have a way of paying attention to the fact that childhood is temporary, but trauma is forever. And the more you attempt to extend one in many cases, the more of the other you will cause. Every word you see written here, or anywhere in my journal, has resulted from the fact that a person who thought they were doing the right thing, or somehow being nice to me, was trying to keep me a child for another day. Although perspectives and levels of information have changed drastically, the truth is that my mind’s contents have not changed a great deal since I was nearly ten years old. What has changed since then, and I am sure anyone who has been autistic for thirty years or more will get what I mean here, is my understanding of those contents.

When an author writes about an absolute loser of a woman being in an abusive relationship where her chastity and general lack of any character other than passivity are held up as virtues, I get sore. When I am told that I am supposed to idolise people that have the same emotional and social responses as eight year olds when they are chronologically eighteen years old, I get sore. When I am told that a television show in which fourteen year olds act exactly the same as four year olds whilst a moron in a suit tells them that they are not good unless they have good feelings, I want to smash my television set in. If you are going to sit and tell me that the stories, shows, or other material that I am referencing here are actually good for their specified target audiences, then if I ever do manage to make the jump to writing or… whatever… professionally, you are the kind of audience I most emphatically do not want.

This, in a nutshell, is why there are no scenes in any of my stories in which children are mentioned, unless they are dealing with a very serious emotional-development issue. Or helping with a plot point that cannot be advanced in any other manner. I am not going to infantalise any audience that I have, and I am deadly sick of others trying to do the same with me.

This is also why, in every novel I have written to date, there is at least one scene in which characters engage in sexual acts. I do not give a fukk about what you have been told. With the manner in which Humans change at a point roughly around their twelfth birthday, the idea that they will reach the age of forty without having engaged in at least some kind of sexual act with another person is not normal. It may happen for various reasons, such as differences in neurological structure (a Google search for “autistic” and “asexual”, for example, can reveal a lot), but the only reason nature would ever see a need to bring about asexuality in a mortal creature designed with its intellect subservient to its emotions is a little thing called overpopulation. A subject I have meandered about enough times to not go into here. One has to ask, how fukked up is our world now that something that nature deliberately designed to bring us enough pleasure and happiness that it can even right severe psychological wrongs is the subject of so much fear, hate, and anger?

That, in a nutshell, is why every novel set in an idealised fantasy world should, where possible, include scenes in which two or more of the characters have sex. If I have convinced anyone reading this of that value, then I am glad to have written this. If not, go to hell. In any event, I thank you all again for reading this far.

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Designing a good fantasy race

One challenge that all fantasy authors face when they decide to write characters that belong to a different race or species than the stock-standard Human is how to keep track of the relative abilities and shortcomings of the different races. The disadvantage of writing designs for each race in one’s stories is that it involves a lot of homework and researching things about how other authors have written characters of similar or even identical racial traits. And if your characters are anything like the characters in my stories, one also has to figure out how one is going to depict how being born of parents from two different races is going to affect the resultant child. So the question to ask oneself first is how are the peoples of different stock-standard races designed, and why? Why, as a question, is an author’s best friend. When an author is struggling to come up with material, asking why Trór Gravewater should be noticeably taller and heavier than other Dwarrow can give them a few thousand words to divert into whilst thinking over the story’s next move.

In that spirit, I will show you a rough translation of all the notes I have in my collection about the different races of Kali-Yuga and how they differ. Differ both in function and abilities. Take note that these are only guide notes and not game design notes. None of the rules given here should be taken as absolute, especially since one of the spices of writing longform fiction is to turn characters into individuals.

The first race of Kali-Yuga we shall concern ourselves with in this writing is the Humans.

Writing about characters having sex

There are three basic types of scene other than exposition that are essential to any fantasy novel (or science fiction, or war, or spy, you name it). Battle scenes, if written well, can keep the writer going for as much as a tenth or even a fifth of the total length of their novel. But one of the big challenges of writing a battle scene, to put it simply, involves investing enough development in your characters to make your audience care about them. Exposition scenes are one way to make this investment. In fact, in the early stages of your story, they tend to be the only way. Explaining to your audience why it is that one character cares enough about the other to invest the time to get to know them helps the audience to care about that character enough to care when something significant happens to them. Telling the audience a story about why a character does what they do, and why they do it a certain way, is also a good way to deliver exposition. It is not enough to tell an audience that your veteran character is obsessive about washing himself. You have to explain that during, say for example the Battle Of The Sleeping Village, a particularly troublesome event resulted in him spending hours stuck inside the rotting carcass of a River Troll. Hence, he now washes his entire body in hospital-grade soap at least once after every time he spends a significant period of time outside of his home.

What I write about

Sometimes, when I inform people that I speak to online that I am an aspiring author who still would like to find a break even though he has given up hope with much of anything else, I get asked what it is I write about.