Monday, Monday

News For Today

A tweet by Tim Pratt yesterday:

When younger, it bothered me that my 1st response to any criticism of my work was incoherent rage. Now I know it's just part of my process.

Gives me some nice perspective. The world doesn't consist of people who take criticism with quiet dignity and grace and people who go all Scott Adams or Anne Rice with nothing in between.

I just might frame that tweet and put it up on my wall next to the picture of Office Productivity Manager Batman. The purpose of the quote wouldn't be to justify my anger. It would be to lessen it, by giving me something to smile at when I'm inclined towards anger.

Personal Assessment

My brain is so burnt from this weekend. I got to sleep late last night and woke up late today, and my brain is still in a fog.

Plans For Today

Pretty minimal. I'm going to post Tales of MU chapter 6 when I'm awake enough to be messing around with that sort of thing, which I'm going to estimate as being anywhere between 2:00 and 6:00. That, and posting a flash story from my file, is going to be about it. I might write a few flash stories today if the fog clears sufficiently... if I can get two or three of them, then with the built-up backlog of such stories I won't have to give another day this week over to Fantasy In Miniature and so I won't fall behind for the week.

Son of Flexibility

So, originally the chapter that just went up was to cover one of Mackenzie's classes in about 1,000 words. Well, no originally it was going to be mostly one of her classes, but then I decided that the story shouldn't focus equally on each of her classes... the spellbinding for enchantment class is the most important one of the day for her, it's the one that's most central to her major and her plans, and it gives her the most cool shit that she can play with. So it got a full chapter of in-class stuff, plus a good portion of this one.

But then I came up with a really awesome idea. So I've dumped the class that Mackenzie would have had... it would have filled a similar narrative role to her logic class in the previous volume... she goes there, sometimes there's some info on what she's doing, but it was never terribly important except as a way to make her path intersect with Sooni's. In point of fact, I cycled through three very different and separate ideas for what her second class of the day would have been. But all of them had the same problem of not being very gripping.

Here is the problem as I saw it: in order to keep things moving at all, Mackenzie cannot be absorbed by all of her classes. She needs classes she cares about and classes that she shows up for.

But at some point last week when I was working on this chapter, I hit upon the seed of an idea for how to make the "filler" class interesting to the readers, if not Mackenzie. The fact that she's not passionately invested in the subject material means that the narrative can gloss over it when it needs to, but I'll still be able to work in interesting tidbits when the narrative touches on it, and it allows me to bring back a well-regarded character who might otherwise fade into obscurity.

To make a long story short*, the chapter that I write for Wednesday is something that was completely unplanned. I just had an idea that I thought was too compelling to be ignored. I think a lot of the readers will agree when they read it.

Of course, with all of these decisions taken in total, Mackenzie's first day back in class has already grown by at least one chapter compared to my initial outline for it, which hearkens back to what I said in the comments on chapter one of the new volume, when asked the question: "Will we have a more even flow of time in the sophomore year?"

My response to that was:

That’s the plan.
It was also the plan for volume I.
Draw your own conclusions about the future freely.

Pacing and plotting-wise, my only really specific goal for Volume 2 is that it's always going to be going somewhere. I'm always going to be writing towards something. As I've said before, there are limits to how fast I can make this go. Even if at a three-chapters-a-week pace, it would take half a month to get through two days of classes if I gave each class its own chapter (Callahan, of course, would be double-dipping because her class would meet both days).

So maybe an "even pace" is not a phrase I should embrace. What I meant when I said "That's the plan." is specifically that I wasn't planning on spending four years of real time to write the story of about two months' worth of story time and then skip ahead ten months.

What I'm aiming for, rather, is an appropriately flexible pace. A weekend will take a dozen chapters if it warrants it, or it might be skipped over with a sentence or two if that's what it warrants.

Weird Random Insight

It occurs to me that at this point in my life/career, I'm actually often pretty okay with criticism in the sense the word is usually used... it's advice that really has the magic button-pushing power over me. It's only because criticism so often carries with it implicit or explicit advice that it makes me see red so often.

I mean, when I look back (metaphorically, I'm not actually going to go back and read the comments) on the comment exchanges that I really got worked up on at the time, that's the common thread. If a commenter just leaves replies that implies he thinks Mackenzie is a hero with a thousand faces on a journey through the belly of the beast so she can fire off the gun on the mantelpiece from act 1 to defeat her antagonist or whatever, I'm inclined to find it amusing. When I see the same commenter telling me that X needs to go where Y is and Y should be replaced with Z... RAEG.

And I then start interpreting all the commenter's nonsense as containing implicit advice: This is the way stories are supposed to be, so this is the way you should be doing it...

I've known that I don't take advice well, and I've often thought that it's like a subset or special case of my aversion to criticism. But now I'm thinking I had that backwards.

I think the proof of this insight will be when I try to apply it, under the theory that understanding why some criticism pisses me off so completely will help me to control that reaction. Because when I get unwanted advice that I can tell is well-meant and is by somebody I perceive as a friend or at least a well-wisher, I usually do manage to avoid flying off the handle at them.