tl;dr: If you’re a man, or a writer, don’t read this.  Just… don’t.  I can’t speak for women who don’t write.

A friend of mine recommended the Cat Star Chronicles to me a long time ago.  After all, I write catboy/catgirl smut, I should be able to enjoy some of it.  So let me say off the bat that I tried, I really did, to enjoy the second book, Warrior, and in that I have failed utterly.

Here’s your basic plot: In a science-fictional universe, our heroine lives on a world that has turned its back on technology.  She knows her world has a starport, but nobody goes there, and in fact people teach their children that the stars, indoor plumbing, books, vaccinations, and decent communications are for crazy people.  Sane people lead, and subject their children to, short, brutal lives in a sub-gunpowder world of furs and swords.  She’s also a “witch,” which is the author’s poorly-reasoned shorthand for someone with psionic powers, including talking to animals and setting stuff on fire.   A supporting character drops off the romantic hero– a cat-man supersoldier who’s ill with an unspecified problem.  The witch is supposed to heal him, at which point the supporting character will come back and claim his slave.

I fully believe Cheryl Brooks is a woman, rather than a man masquerading as one.  And as a man, I was offended from the very first sex scene: his penis is large, prehensile, knubby in just the right way, and worst of all, exudes a pre-seminal fluid, the scent of which is a perfect aphrodisiac to humans, and the taste of which induces orgasms.  It’s wish-fulfillment of the worst sort.  Every sex scene thereafter is built upon these premises; our characters aren’t so much in love as she’s addicted to opiates he exudes.

After their mutual compatibility is established, the supporting character comes back to reveal that something terrible has happened, and he needs the unified tracking skills of the witch and the cat-man to right a terrible wrong.  What follows from this is a far, far too wordy journey through the snow to a distant keep and a final battle.  Worse, the witch character, despite her rejection of all things technological, has the Weltanschauung of an American coastal liberal who’s never thought too hard about her ethical and moral choices.  She talks and she talks, often in tell-don’t-show form, to the reader and the characters, pointlessly retreading the same ground in chapter after chapter.  The epilogue is a piece of breathless, “Reader, you won’t believe what happened next!” nonsense.  I kept re-wording whole scenes in my head to show myself that important plot points could be revealed in dialogue and action without “as you knows” in front of them.   An experienced writer could have done it easily.

Cat Star Chronicles: Warrior reads like an ex-valley girl hauswife decided to write something vaguely like the Kushiel series, only without education, voice, or wit.  If you’re a man, you’ll be insulted by the hero: He’s a cardboard cutout with a massive strap-on dong dripping a mixture of Astroglide and meth.  If you’re a writer, you’ll just be insulted.

It’s not just a great song by Rush, it’s a battlecry of writers everywhere to the raw recruits.  Over and over, we writers are told, it is import to show the story through the eyes of the characters, through the words they say and do, through the events they hear, see, and feel.   By doing so, you get a story, not just a collection of events arranged in the outline of a plot.

I had a problem, though.  I had, what I thought, was a great idea for a story.  One of the biggest problems I have with The Journal Entries is that I rarely explain anything to the audience.  I use a lot of high SFnal tropes, some of them relatively recent (mind uploads, consciousness taking credit for unconsciousness, robot rights, things like that), and I expect a reader to come up to speed on the things she doesn’t recognize fairly quickly.  Sometimes, when I’m feeling merciful, I write a fish-out-of-water story, taking a character from the Corridor and dropping them somewhere else, or taking someone from somewhere else and dropping them into the Corridor.  The culture shock scene is place where the character can say, “Back home, we do it this way.”   I’ve had one of those on my writing machine for a while, Nefer & Sabrine, which first appeared on my notebook as “City Terran / Country Sterling.”

I have written and re-written the first three scenes over and over, never getting anywhere.  Nefer is my city Terran– a mechanic and engineer, attached to an expedition soon to head off to a dangerous place.  Sabrine is my country girl– a historian by trade also attached to the same mission as team archivist.  Nefer is also a powered-armor goddess, but Sabrine’s dance training allows her to master the armor much faster than anyone else, giving Nefer a fit of jealousy, and of course desire.  Nefer turns out to be one of those people (like me) who dive headfirst into a language’s grammar and have it down in three months, after which all that’s left is the slog of encountering new vocabulary and remembering it, so soon she and Sabrine have a private language, French, between them.  This facility makes Sabrine jealous, but hearing an ordinary human speak her language also makes her homesick.  And despite both of them feeling obliged to put aside romantic attachments for the duration of the mission, and having other reasons to avoid entanglements, well…

Well, that’s tension.

I tried too hard, over and over, to impress the reader with Nefer’s and Sabrine’s relative skills.  I tried to show, and the scene got longer and longer without going anywhere.  One of the best pieces of advice I recently got from Trey Parker (of South Park fame) was this: “If you have two scenes, the connecting phrase between them should be ‘but,’ or ‘therefore’.  If it’s ‘and then,’ your story is boring.  ’This happened then this happened then this happened is boring.  ’This happened therefore this happened but that happened therefore this happened,’ that is an interesting story.”  My story had a “this happened then that happened” quality.

I stepped back and said, “What is this story about?”  The story was about Nefer and Sabrine seeing something interesting in each other.  One paragraph of admiration from Sabrine about the quality of Nefer’s armor, one paragraph of surprise from Nefer as she watches newbie Sabrine push her armor into a retire devant and then into a full battement develope while keeping the other foot en pointe, a common but difficult ballet move, was all that was needed to get past that scene.  (Yes, it’s told from two points of view.  That’s common in romance writing.)

The lesson is simple: Don’t show what doesn’t need to be shown.   Concentrate on what the story is about, and cut out any scenes, however lovely, that don’t progress the story.

Also, I want to apologize to people who may have commented recently.  I seem not to be getting emails from said server when someone comments, and I’m supposed to.

Then, in another tab go to google.fr, and paste the results into the search window.  There you go.  Cheap and easy, and it actually works fairly well.

”But… how will I get back to my sarcophagus?”"You can hire a guide, if you need one.  They’re much cheaper than lawyers, I assure you.  Good day.”  With that, a tophat materialized in vir hand.  Vi placed it on vir head and walked down the empty passageway, disappearing around the corner, leaving Jess alone in the airlock cylinder, facing away from a circular door above which read Xajan (TRPV).

“Stick your linear navigator onto an analog scope and suck it!”  she shouted at vir retreating back.  ”Glider spaz!  R-Pento!  Barberpole! Block!” She angrily turned to face the airlock.  ”Fine,” she said,taking a deep breath.  ”Let’s see what mother left for me.

In other news, I’m sorry if you sent a comment to the blog and it didn’t get approved in a timely fashion.  It seems I’m not getting the emails I’m supposed to.  (I’m also having some very weird interactions between this blog and my LiveJournal account that I need to iron out.)

Our friends, the penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information — and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

I suspect “the penguins” is Mamet’s way of writing “the suits.”  There’s much more, and I recommend you read it all.

  I would be totally remiss in my duties if I didn’t remind you that I had some Tron fanfic of my own, now wouldn’t I? Data Flow is M/M, and a warning for non-consensual sex.

Meanwhile, enjoy staring at the totally hot chick. If that’s Mercury, damn, that’s a lot of nice polygons.

It was easy then. Remove his infectious code, pull up the registry and edit out all the brutal redirects from his remotes, along with shutdown codes that prevent legitimate anti-malware from running.

The penguin doesn’t care about any of that. To me, all of that’s just bits and bytes, and tromping through it is routine.

Even in 2020, being a cocksucker in South Africa is dangerous outside of Capetown or Johannesburg, especially if you meet the rare angry religious type from the northeast corner. Being pale-skinned is unusual, but not worth remarking on except when getting joshed by your mates. But living with cyberwear that just works without daily permission from Seattle or San Jose? Now that’s queer.