Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much time for writing.  Even without the commute, because I’m home I have to deal with the kids when they leave and get back: packing lunches, getting dressed, and then homework and extracurricular activities.

But I did find time to write this evening, and did about a thousand words.  It’s a centaur/centaur scene between two of my green-furred foxtaurs, one of whom has revealed a terrible secret (“We’re not the same species anymore”), and the other of whom is about to reveal, not so much a secret as a terrible cultural defect.

If only I didn’t hear Shatner’s voice every time the male lead opened his mouth.  But it’s nice to be writing again.

Yes, I understand that the change we made to chapter 2 of A Pleasing Shape complety changes the tenor of the story and that heavy lifting is required. On the other hand, that is no reason to make the current ending so boring. Even if it’s not the ending we’re going to use, it’s still supposed to be competent. I know you feel it would be a waste to keep working after 23,000 words, but still, you could at least try to give me an ending with all three of them content with each other.

On the other hand, thank you so much for the new Yowler story Silent Night With Daggered Books. I’m sure we’ll be able to work it into the schedule somewhere.

I’m sorry, but I felt it necessary to throw away Soul Searcher. The original is lost on an Amiga floppy somewhere, and I was never going to be able to re-write in and recapture that.

And I agree that Wishing Well: Epilogue is nicely finished.

p.s. Your suggestion for Under the Big Gun is interesting, but getting into Leysa’s head right now would be particularly difficult. Didn’t you say you wanted to look at what it would take to make Honest Impulses a retailable novel?

All of this is very boring, so specialized quasi-conscious AIs are tasked with figuring it all out. The post-human overseers who leave their entertainment realms to manage theses systems are rock stars, wealthy in some way, empowered perhaps to make decisions and dole out favors. The AIs, meanwhile, are looking through the optimization space to make sure the polis they’re programmed to oversee has the best possible deals, maximizing speedups and minimizing slowdowns.

The day comes when someone is called upon to make good on a contract, and fails to deliver. Big. An adventure goes south, pixellated and trashed. And while the adventurers in the game are disappointed, the overseeing AI overreacts and pulls its contracts in, refusing to deal until its neighbors, some of whom are coming into a functional transactional range and others are moving out as orbits proceed, until they demonstrate significantly greater transparency.

Everything goes sour in the time it takes light to traverse the solar system twice as people realize that the promises the AIs have been making have no basis in real deliverables, and the promised adventures aren’t going to happen and, worse, the promised entertainments to be delivered out-system to the manfacturing base that provides maintenance and parts for this bread-and-circuses civilization aren’t going to happen, and the manfacturers either shut down or go slow-and-local. The intra-Mars orbit civilization starts to slow down as more and more resources are dedicated to preservation, and a great depression settles onto Sol.

And then the aliens invade, I suppose. Or something.

When trying to cold-start Muse, it helps to find something I have that’s half-finished, with which I’m neither happy or unhappy.  Something for which it’s time either to push it, or kill it.  A Pleasing Shape came to me; it’s a love story between a man, his girlfriend, and his robot.  It’s a little weak, mostly because I don’t have much grip on Darzi’s motivations.  He doesn’t want to get rid of Peren and Jouet, but he certainly didn’t invite them into his life.  He just wanted someone to pose for his paintings.  The sex scene I wrote is actually really good, and I enjoyed it because it has lots of moments of cinema verite, like this:

Darzi’s mouth watered with desire for her, a feeling he appreciated even after so many months together, and he was grateful she was on top and he could keep swallowing.  He didn’t want to drool on her, not yet.

I dunno.  Maybe that’s just one of my hang-ups.  Here’s a better scene, one in which Darzi has been forced to separate from Peren during the college’s summer break, and is using Jouet, a robot whose brain has been erased and is now slowly recovering. In the meantime, the AI looking over Jouet has given her to Darzi as a posing mannequin:

“Do you think you’ll be able to return to this pose tomorrow?” he asked her.  She nodded her head only slightly.  “Then let me help you down.”  She relaxed slightly.  He took her arm and guided her back down to the bed.  He touched her cheek, and she tilted her head against his hand.  “Don’t fall over, okay?”  She moved her arm down to the bed to show she could hold herself up just fine.

He looked at his canvas.  A portrait is three things: the patience of the subject, the talent of the artist, and an expression of the relationship between the two. If that was true, as he had told Peren, and as he believed, then what was his painting of Jouet expressing?

He wasn’t sure yet.

He sighed deeply and turned his attention to the kitchen.  He had never been a good cook– for that matter neither was Peren.  Robots were famously good cooks, part of their talent for taking care of the humans they cared about.  He wondered if Jouet would ever be smart enough or whole enough to take care of Peren and himself.

That is, if Peren wanted to accompany him into the future.  He looked back at Jouet and wondered if she would.  If she had a choice in the matter.  When he had acquired her, she’d been empty, blank.  But she was made to learn how to be human.  It just took time.

Anyway, I’ve done about 3,500 words in the past two days on this, including a delightful love scene, Peren’s addiction to nicotine, one of Darzi’s friends being smug because, with Peren back on Pendor visting her parents he’s getting laid much more than Darzi is, and the set-up for Darzi to really start getting it on with Jouet. It’ll be good for both of them. For Peren… not so much.

Cybernetic Control Authority started life as a role-playing game scene, and I thought I could adapt it to a Journal Entry. As it stands, it’s not too bad: “Cheyenne versus the Terminator,” ending up as a huge diplomatic brouhahah.

The problem is that there’s no sex scene, and no real justification for one. Muse’s response is that I should try making the story bigger. “You need a reason for Cheyenne’s behavior in Robots of the Deep Versus the Vampire Girl of Fallow Five; maybe this is the chance The Deep takes, here and now, to seed the universe with Encompassment Enforcers, and Cheyenne becomes programmed, unknown even to her, to be one of them.” Grief, I’m not sure I want to write another novel, though. I’ve got too many already.

Still, looking through the catalog of unfinished works, it seems that I’ll be finishing quite a number sometime soon. And the queue will get deeper.

Oh, but Muse has more for me. Last night she said, “You complained that the family reunions in the Honesty and Heroine arcs are too similar. Okay, let’s play with Heroine, since the backstory in Honesty is too solid. Does Dove have a sister?”

Wretched girl.

That’s true for me as well. Not the four-hour block, but the lack of interruption. As most of my long-time readers know, I write during my commute on a county bus, or at a cafe’ near my home, most of the time. I can get a lot done in a half-hour, as long as I’m absolutely confident that no one will interrupt me.

In the past three days I’ve written 5,596 words. All on one story, Moi Neuroses, which is a Shardik Journal Entry (gasp, yes I can still write those) in which Shardik and a Sterling woman develop a curious relationship, and how Aaden sort-of freaks out over it. After two weeks of no-writing-time madness, it was nice to be able to get back into a groove (or is it a rut?) that I had missed for far too long.

All I needed was a block of time, no matter how small, during which I knew I would not be interrupted by work or family.

But she came to me last night and said, “I have this idea…” And I listened patiently, and nodded my head as she rolled out an interesting character and an interesting situation. It’s a new Sterlings story set around the same time as Polestar. I took down all the notes. It’s a good arc, I thought.

“But Muse,” I told her, “I don’t know anything about curling.

“Yah?”

“How would the military treat Bastet? Does the knowledge that, so far, medicine has failed to find a way to extend their lifespans beyond 45 while everyone else is living to 70 affect the way people treat them? What’s their relationship in the US with the gay community? How about with the black community, since they were both emancipated by Lincoln? Are prostitution laws in the Yowlerverse more or less strict because of them? Since Bastet males and females don’t generally get along together, what is the basis of Bastet familial arrangements? Different states have different ideas about racial harmonization with abandoned infants and with foster kids: how do they treat Bastet foster kids, if there are any? Are there any Bastet politicians? What’s the split among religious communities with regard to the Bastet? Are there any special social programs for Bastet? They’d congregate in cities even more than gay people do, would they have their own ghettos? What are the more popular insults humans use against Bastet, and vice versa? What has the porn industry done with the Bastet in the past twenty years? Any Bastet at the top of any corporations? Noteable Bastet newscasters? How do insurance companies treat Bastet? Since the Bastet were maintained by legal conventions in sexually suggestive indentured servitude in many states up until the start of World War 2, does the kink community have any special angst about Bastet in their midst? What does the range of Bastet civil rights activists look like? Are there Bastet terrorists? Back-to-Tanganyika types? What happened to the Tanganyika tribe after 1901? How do different Asian and Arabic cultures view the Bastet? What about Europe? Are there any unusual steps taken when a Bastet shows up in an ER? What happened to German Bastet during WW2?”

I stared at her, goggle-eyed. She giggled. I said, “Muse, that’s not fair!”

“What? You need to answer these questions if you’re gonna keep writing Bastet stories.”

“But not all at once!”

“But I’ve got it. Really, I do! See, Gabriel’s supposed to be the next Adam, a kind of posthuman Adam. It would work, wouldn’t it? Remember Lucifer’s promise at the end of Repentance? It would work. See, Gabriel’s supposed to progenitate– is that a word? It is now!– ”

“Muse, please!” I’m wailing at her.

“You said you wanted an ending, didn’t you? Anyway, Gabriel, who thinks he’s in love with Jill, is supposed to progenitate– oooh, I love that word!– with Elitia, right? That was the idea. Only, only, see, he gets set up by watching Mahazioth die at the flaming swords of the other angels, just so you can write the fight scene, which is something you need practice doing by the way, and at the last second he’s whisked to safety by some on Mahazioth’s side, including Hushai–”

“Wait, I thought Hushai was a demon. From Hell.”

“She is!”

“You’re giving me a massive headache, Muse, really you are.”

“Anyway, Hushai gives Gabriel and Elitia the room they need, but… but! Gabe refuses to go along until someone, you know, the Guy In Charge™ does something to right the wrong of Mahazioth, because it’s really Mahazioth that Gabriel’s in love with.”

“And then what?” I said.

“Well, then you write the love scene that gives Gabriel what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“You’re the writer. You figure it out!”

“Muse!”