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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2AyogTm
Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning (raining. why are raincoat hoods so comically undersized. i used to commute by driving into a sunrise and then a sunset, it sucked, i was so pumped to be heading west in the morning to go to work until i figured out the prevailing winds around here scream nonstop out of the west so every morning this winter i’m going to get my fucking face scoured off and my hood pushed back and that’s that, so, it’s time to return to my pitiful first garb attempts where i tried to make myself a hood and do it properly this time in fucking nylon ripstop waterproofing with a goddamn drawcord around the face or i’ll die this winter, for reals, this should be a product i can buy but it doesn’t seem to be) and idly daydreaming, and i actually got sort of inspired for the solarpunk mammoths novel again, by a very roundabout kind of thing, so.
one of the books i own on kindle is T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War duology, and I was rereading it kind of idly the other night in between marathon bouts of reading Martha Wells Books of the Raksura series to the four-year-old (you’d be amazed how little censorship it takes to make that book into, well, not a kids’ book, but a book you can mostly read to a little kid, well maybe just Farmkid, who has spent her whole life witnessing the processes by which animals become food and so is really unworried about the concept of death, for a little kid anyway) (occasionally during action scenes she says “I hope Moon doesn’t [die in extremely specific and relevant way]!” [like, extremely relevant, she’s good at plot, I’m going to get her to help me come up with action scenes for real] and I’m like “remember we already read one of the sequel stories so we know he doesn’t”).
Anyway.
If you haven’t read the Clocktaur War books, they’re charming and impactful and all-over pretty great, but I had felt zero interest in writing any fic for them, and haven’t looked any up. They kind of– they’re a neat package unto themselves, or so I’ve felt, anyway. It’s not that the characters aren’t compelling, I just feel like we find out enough about them, and we have enough of the various Tragic Backstories, and I guess we don’t get Brenner’s backstory and he does wind up a sympathetic character but I sort of don’t really want to know, it’s probably kind of grim. Anyway.
The dynamic between the two principal characters is, I think, the reason the series exists– the main character is a small petite woman who is very clever and she does have some action chops (climbing through windows, knifeplay, and so on), and then her love interest / other guy whose POV we get is a disgraced/betrayed former paladin who is enormous and beautiful and has a sword three feet long and so on and so forth. (He does a lot of Noble Suffering in an extremely attractive way throughout the book, and it’s very female gazey and I did enjoy it enormously.)
During one action scene, the main character has to rescue the Hot Hunk from captivity, and she makes her daring entrance and has his sword with her, and then an enemy charges her and she can’t even properly hold his sword, let alone swing it– so she throws it at the charging enemy’s feet, very cleverly, and then kills them with a knife when they stumble. It’s extremely smart and heroic and such, and it’s from Hot Hunk’s POV and he’s extremely hearteyes about it. Great!
And I was pondering on that, and how it was a good scene and all, but then I was like, you know, I would like the girl to be able to wield the sword just once.
And I remembered the Solarpunk Mammoths novel. And part of my problem writing it was that I was hung up on how the fuck the plot was going to work, and part of it was, I think, that I just couldn’t make the one character be sexy in my mind– and I don’t mean, like, I personally have to be attracted sexually to a character to write them compellingly, I just mean I wasn’t feeling them on any level, really.
But I remembered that at some point I had decided that the dynamic between two of the characters, from the beginning, was going to be that she was a Buff Muscle Girl and he was a Skinny City Nerd. And I had lost interest in that, but.
Maybe I should just go back and try to write that scene, where he figures out that she could pick him up if she wanted to, and see if I can’t just let the plot work itself out after that.
(I feel like there should be all kinds of characters, and there’s definitely an important place for short girls to feel represented, right? Slate from Clocktaur War is fantastic rep as a female character– she’s smart, she’s repeatedly described as not beautiful [including by the Hot Hunk who is falling in love with her], she’s not particularly coordinated outside of her particular areas of specialty, and has clear eyes about her physical shortcomings. And that’s great.
I’m not making Steampunk Mammoths Heroine a Gwendoline Christie character either, though– there’s definitely a place for that archetype and I love it as well, but. I’m making her not particularly tall and not particularly built; she looks more like a lot of the women I farm with, who in normal clothes just look like an average person but when you have a 75-pound bin of something you can’t pick up, they’ll come over and instead of taking the other side to help you, will kindly wave you off and just pick the thing up and carry it across the courtyard themselves without particularly exerting themselves, and they’ll use good posture and lifting techniques while they’re at it, because they do this sort of thing all day every day.)
(Your picture was not posted)
Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning (raining. why are raincoat hoods so comically undersized. i used to commute by driving into a sunrise and then a sunset, it sucked, i was so pumped to be heading west in the morning to go to work until i figured out the prevailing winds around here scream nonstop out of the west so every morning this winter i’m going to get my fucking face scoured off and my hood pushed back and that’s that, so, it’s time to return to my pitiful first garb attempts where i tried to make myself a hood and do it properly this time in fucking nylon ripstop waterproofing with a goddamn drawcord around the face or i’ll die this winter, for reals, this should be a product i can buy but it doesn’t seem to be) and idly daydreaming, and i actually got sort of inspired for the solarpunk mammoths novel again, by a very roundabout kind of thing, so.
one of the books i own on kindle is T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War duology, and I was rereading it kind of idly the other night in between marathon bouts of reading Martha Wells Books of the Raksura series to the four-year-old (you’d be amazed how little censorship it takes to make that book into, well, not a kids’ book, but a book you can mostly read to a little kid, well maybe just Farmkid, who has spent her whole life witnessing the processes by which animals become food and so is really unworried about the concept of death, for a little kid anyway) (occasionally during action scenes she says “I hope Moon doesn’t [die in extremely specific and relevant way]!” [like, extremely relevant, she’s good at plot, I’m going to get her to help me come up with action scenes for real] and I’m like “remember we already read one of the sequel stories so we know he doesn’t”).
Anyway.
If you haven’t read the Clocktaur War books, they’re charming and impactful and all-over pretty great, but I had felt zero interest in writing any fic for them, and haven’t looked any up. They kind of– they’re a neat package unto themselves, or so I’ve felt, anyway. It’s not that the characters aren’t compelling, I just feel like we find out enough about them, and we have enough of the various Tragic Backstories, and I guess we don’t get Brenner’s backstory and he does wind up a sympathetic character but I sort of don’t really want to know, it’s probably kind of grim. Anyway.
The dynamic between the two principal characters is, I think, the reason the series exists– the main character is a small petite woman who is very clever and she does have some action chops (climbing through windows, knifeplay, and so on), and then her love interest / other guy whose POV we get is a disgraced/betrayed former paladin who is enormous and beautiful and has a sword three feet long and so on and so forth. (He does a lot of Noble Suffering in an extremely attractive way throughout the book, and it’s very female gazey and I did enjoy it enormously.)
During one action scene, the main character has to rescue the Hot Hunk from captivity, and she makes her daring entrance and has his sword with her, and then an enemy charges her and she can’t even properly hold his sword, let alone swing it– so she throws it at the charging enemy’s feet, very cleverly, and then kills them with a knife when they stumble. It’s extremely smart and heroic and such, and it’s from Hot Hunk’s POV and he’s extremely hearteyes about it. Great!
And I was pondering on that, and how it was a good scene and all, but then I was like, you know, I would like the girl to be able to wield the sword just once.
And I remembered the Solarpunk Mammoths novel. And part of my problem writing it was that I was hung up on how the fuck the plot was going to work, and part of it was, I think, that I just couldn’t make the one character be sexy in my mind– and I don’t mean, like, I personally have to be attracted sexually to a character to write them compellingly, I just mean I wasn’t feeling them on any level, really.
But I remembered that at some point I had decided that the dynamic between two of the characters, from the beginning, was going to be that she was a Buff Muscle Girl and he was a Skinny City Nerd. And I had lost interest in that, but.
Maybe I should just go back and try to write that scene, where he figures out that she could pick him up if she wanted to, and see if I can’t just let the plot work itself out after that.
(I feel like there should be all kinds of characters, and there’s definitely an important place for short girls to feel represented, right? Slate from Clocktaur War is fantastic rep as a female character– she’s smart, she’s repeatedly described as not beautiful [including by the Hot Hunk who is falling in love with her], she’s not particularly coordinated outside of her particular areas of specialty, and has clear eyes about her physical shortcomings. And that’s great.
I’m not making Steampunk Mammoths Heroine a Gwendoline Christie character either, though– there’s definitely a place for that archetype and I love it as well, but. I’m making her not particularly tall and not particularly built; she looks more like a lot of the women I farm with, who in normal clothes just look like an average person but when you have a 75-pound bin of something you can’t pick up, they’ll come over and instead of taking the other side to help you, will kindly wave you off and just pick the thing up and carry it across the courtyard themselves without particularly exerting themselves, and they’ll use good posture and lifting techniques while they’re at it, because they do this sort of thing all day every day.)
(Your picture was not posted)
