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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2TYPdqX
NaNo update: have made par for today but am going to try to push on.
was too sleepy/tired/fried to come up with dinner plans, so we had leftovers. dude is zonked on the couch; his sleep was much disrupted last night by having to pick his mother up from the airport at midnight. so i’m on the other end of the sectional with headphones on and i’m going to try to push through. i’m over 48k, and in a good phase of my life, it takes me like, an hour to write 2k words. so i can probably finish tonight.
wordcount-wise. actual novel-wise… well…
i was about to get to the plot but the main dude character just anxiety-flailed and asked the main woman character out to dinner instead of getting on with the plot, so.
here’s a snippet because now i’m procrastinating. mostly what this snippet says to me is how i’ve cluttered so much infodumping into this, and all this writing is very clunky, and i’m not super pleased with the story and how redundant all this infodumping is. i could do this better. but this is a rough draft, which is the point, so i’m going on. anyway, basically the whole plot is summarized here as this guy monologues to himself over solarpunk-emailing his sort-of-mom.
[snippet behind cut]
The first thing Alik did on his way home was swing by the Flower Quarter’s dovecote. Radio messages were faster, and they used them at the Academy all the time, but they were logged. He was authorized to use the radio for anything he liked, and he could have sent a personal message if he wished, but he did not want this message logged.
He went up and perused the birds on offer. Birds couldn’t stay indefinitely, so not all destinations were available at all times. Sometimes the best you could do was two or three settlements over from where you really wanted to send your message. But someone from his region must have come in recently with fresh birds, because there was his home settlement– three nice fat birds, alert and beady-eyed, with color-coded legbands in a color-coded cage.
The dovecote keeper knew him. He didn’t use the radio for messages home, generally, so he sent more birds than most of the other employees of the Academy, who abused their tiny radio privileges for all they were worth. Some of it was just to camoflage his desire for privacy within the cloak of eccentric habit, and some of it was genuine eccentricity. Something just felt more real to him about bird messages.
He sat down at the desk with the little slips of paper. “I have to let those birds go pretty soon,” the dovecote keeper said. “They’re at the end of their time.” If you kept birds somewhere too long, they got habituated to it. That was how the homing thing worked. Too long, and a bird would just come back when released. “So you can send as many messages as you want; I think I’m going to let all three of them go.”
“I’ll still pay,” Alik said. Sometimes frugal people would leave messages until the birds were set to be released anyway, because the dovecote keeper would usually send them for free. Even if nobody had left a message, the keeper would usually write some– usually little news items and things, just so the birds’ journey wouldn’t be wasted. Along, of course, with the red slip that meant there were no more birds at that origin point, so there’d be no more news unless someone brought some.
It was a low-tech system, and Alik had toyed with solutions for upgrading it, but. There were radios, for that. Every settlement had radios. They didn’t always work, but outages were normally brief. In bad outages, birds got lost too– it was solar flares that did it, took out the radios and confused the birds. The radios were a good indicator, actually, of when not to let the birds out.
And Alik’s shielding project was to keep the radios up. It was crucial, it was urgent, it was badly needed. There was a ton of funding for it, enormous amounts of resources from all over the world. Pliset’s Academy was at the forefront, and if Alik and Amina could engineer the big breakthrough they were hoping for, it meant generations of renown for the Academy.
But the mammoths’ repeaters were crucial too, and nobody else could fix them.
Amina could do the work on the shielding without Alik. Alik couldn’t do it without Amina. Dean Sabira and the Board of Directors of the Academy had to see that.
“You always pay,” the dovecote keeper said fondly.
Dovecotes often did double duty as ancestor shrines. Well, it was the other way around. Most of the people who sent messages from here were people who had ancestors in the adjoining shrine, and so the doves were largely kept up by offerings to the shrine.
Alik, needless to say, did not have ancestors in this shrine. His offerings to the dovecote were entirely for the dovecote. And they had to stand in for ancestor-offerings, because he couldn’t make any on his own account from this distance.
Normally, that was what he was doing: sending messages to his little-mother, his mother’s best friend, who had raised him after his mother’s death and so filled in that role pretty well, asking her to make offerings on his behalf at the shrine where his mother’s ancestors were. (His little-mother’s ancestors were there as well; they’d been distant cousins, both native daughters of the settlement.)
This wasn’t that, though.
He pulled out the inscribed cipher key he kept in his wallet, and efficiently worked out the message he needed to send. The dovecote keeper was rifling through cubicles, making sure there were no un-sent messages; he’d pulled out a half-dozen little slips and was fitting them into capsules. “Write two copies, dear,” he said to Alik, “I’m worried these beauties might stray.” He shook his head. “I kept them a little too long. I thought you might be by.”
“I’ve been busy,” Alik said, guiltily. Maybe he’d need to send a radio message, too. This was fairly urgent.
The dovecote keeper tsk’d. “It’s all right, love,” he said. “Between the trio of them I imagine they’ll figure it out. It just seems silly to send a bird empty, might as well make a copy.”
Alik nodded. He worked out the rest of the cipher on the scratch paper, then retrieved two of the real message slips. The key was printing very small and precisely, so that it fit neatly into the canisters on the legs of the birds. There were machines that could spit out little printed messages for you, but Alik had a neat hand from so much time spent drafting blueprints, and never needed to use it.
He wrote out the encrypted message twice, addressed it in block lettering across the back to his little-mother Istaso, and handed the slips off to the dovecote keeper, who rolled them neatly into the canisters. “Istaso will be glad to hear from you,” he said, seeming to pay no mind to the cipher. Lots of people used codes, Alik knew; it was a great way to keep message length down, if you had specific things you’d worked out beforehand to convey by extreme abbreviations. This wasn’t that, though.
Alik smiled sadly. “Not as happy as she’d be to see me,” he answered. The dovecote keeper had never met Istaso, but he saw the frequency of her replies. Alik genuinely believed the man didn’t read them, not even the unencrypted ones. Either that, or Alik’s faithful tribute bought the man’s silence so thoroughly that he never let on that he had.
Alik knew for a fact that the dovecote keeper back at his home settlement read every damn message. And they were a small enough settlement that there wasn’t just one full-time dovecote keeper, but rather several people who did the work in rotation. And every one of them read the messages, and gossiped about them. It was almost as public as the radio.
Hence the cipher.
“When’s the last time you went home, child?” the dovecote keeper asked.
Alik shook his head a little. “Too long,” he said. He put the coins into the cup to pay for the messages– he paid for two, even though copies were usually discounted or free– and went out.
(Your picture was not posted)
NaNo update: have made par for today but am going to try to push on.
was too sleepy/tired/fried to come up with dinner plans, so we had leftovers. dude is zonked on the couch; his sleep was much disrupted last night by having to pick his mother up from the airport at midnight. so i’m on the other end of the sectional with headphones on and i’m going to try to push through. i’m over 48k, and in a good phase of my life, it takes me like, an hour to write 2k words. so i can probably finish tonight.
wordcount-wise. actual novel-wise… well…
i was about to get to the plot but the main dude character just anxiety-flailed and asked the main woman character out to dinner instead of getting on with the plot, so.
here’s a snippet because now i’m procrastinating. mostly what this snippet says to me is how i’ve cluttered so much infodumping into this, and all this writing is very clunky, and i’m not super pleased with the story and how redundant all this infodumping is. i could do this better. but this is a rough draft, which is the point, so i’m going on. anyway, basically the whole plot is summarized here as this guy monologues to himself over solarpunk-emailing his sort-of-mom.
[snippet behind cut]
The first thing Alik did on his way home was swing by the Flower Quarter’s dovecote. Radio messages were faster, and they used them at the Academy all the time, but they were logged. He was authorized to use the radio for anything he liked, and he could have sent a personal message if he wished, but he did not want this message logged.
He went up and perused the birds on offer. Birds couldn’t stay indefinitely, so not all destinations were available at all times. Sometimes the best you could do was two or three settlements over from where you really wanted to send your message. But someone from his region must have come in recently with fresh birds, because there was his home settlement– three nice fat birds, alert and beady-eyed, with color-coded legbands in a color-coded cage.
The dovecote keeper knew him. He didn’t use the radio for messages home, generally, so he sent more birds than most of the other employees of the Academy, who abused their tiny radio privileges for all they were worth. Some of it was just to camoflage his desire for privacy within the cloak of eccentric habit, and some of it was genuine eccentricity. Something just felt more real to him about bird messages.
He sat down at the desk with the little slips of paper. “I have to let those birds go pretty soon,” the dovecote keeper said. “They’re at the end of their time.” If you kept birds somewhere too long, they got habituated to it. That was how the homing thing worked. Too long, and a bird would just come back when released. “So you can send as many messages as you want; I think I’m going to let all three of them go.”
“I’ll still pay,” Alik said. Sometimes frugal people would leave messages until the birds were set to be released anyway, because the dovecote keeper would usually send them for free. Even if nobody had left a message, the keeper would usually write some– usually little news items and things, just so the birds’ journey wouldn’t be wasted. Along, of course, with the red slip that meant there were no more birds at that origin point, so there’d be no more news unless someone brought some.
It was a low-tech system, and Alik had toyed with solutions for upgrading it, but. There were radios, for that. Every settlement had radios. They didn’t always work, but outages were normally brief. In bad outages, birds got lost too– it was solar flares that did it, took out the radios and confused the birds. The radios were a good indicator, actually, of when not to let the birds out.
And Alik’s shielding project was to keep the radios up. It was crucial, it was urgent, it was badly needed. There was a ton of funding for it, enormous amounts of resources from all over the world. Pliset’s Academy was at the forefront, and if Alik and Amina could engineer the big breakthrough they were hoping for, it meant generations of renown for the Academy.
But the mammoths’ repeaters were crucial too, and nobody else could fix them.
Amina could do the work on the shielding without Alik. Alik couldn’t do it without Amina. Dean Sabira and the Board of Directors of the Academy had to see that.
“You always pay,” the dovecote keeper said fondly.
Dovecotes often did double duty as ancestor shrines. Well, it was the other way around. Most of the people who sent messages from here were people who had ancestors in the adjoining shrine, and so the doves were largely kept up by offerings to the shrine.
Alik, needless to say, did not have ancestors in this shrine. His offerings to the dovecote were entirely for the dovecote. And they had to stand in for ancestor-offerings, because he couldn’t make any on his own account from this distance.
Normally, that was what he was doing: sending messages to his little-mother, his mother’s best friend, who had raised him after his mother’s death and so filled in that role pretty well, asking her to make offerings on his behalf at the shrine where his mother’s ancestors were. (His little-mother’s ancestors were there as well; they’d been distant cousins, both native daughters of the settlement.)
This wasn’t that, though.
He pulled out the inscribed cipher key he kept in his wallet, and efficiently worked out the message he needed to send. The dovecote keeper was rifling through cubicles, making sure there were no un-sent messages; he’d pulled out a half-dozen little slips and was fitting them into capsules. “Write two copies, dear,” he said to Alik, “I’m worried these beauties might stray.” He shook his head. “I kept them a little too long. I thought you might be by.”
“I’ve been busy,” Alik said, guiltily. Maybe he’d need to send a radio message, too. This was fairly urgent.
The dovecote keeper tsk’d. “It’s all right, love,” he said. “Between the trio of them I imagine they’ll figure it out. It just seems silly to send a bird empty, might as well make a copy.”
Alik nodded. He worked out the rest of the cipher on the scratch paper, then retrieved two of the real message slips. The key was printing very small and precisely, so that it fit neatly into the canisters on the legs of the birds. There were machines that could spit out little printed messages for you, but Alik had a neat hand from so much time spent drafting blueprints, and never needed to use it.
He wrote out the encrypted message twice, addressed it in block lettering across the back to his little-mother Istaso, and handed the slips off to the dovecote keeper, who rolled them neatly into the canisters. “Istaso will be glad to hear from you,” he said, seeming to pay no mind to the cipher. Lots of people used codes, Alik knew; it was a great way to keep message length down, if you had specific things you’d worked out beforehand to convey by extreme abbreviations. This wasn’t that, though.
Alik smiled sadly. “Not as happy as she’d be to see me,” he answered. The dovecote keeper had never met Istaso, but he saw the frequency of her replies. Alik genuinely believed the man didn’t read them, not even the unencrypted ones. Either that, or Alik’s faithful tribute bought the man’s silence so thoroughly that he never let on that he had.
Alik knew for a fact that the dovecote keeper back at his home settlement read every damn message. And they were a small enough settlement that there wasn’t just one full-time dovecote keeper, but rather several people who did the work in rotation. And every one of them read the messages, and gossiped about them. It was almost as public as the radio.
Hence the cipher.
“When’s the last time you went home, child?” the dovecote keeper asked.
Alik shook his head a little. “Too long,” he said. He put the coins into the cup to pay for the messages– he paid for two, even though copies were usually discounted or free– and went out.
(Your picture was not posted)
