Intersection Logs

I can't help wondering what people near me on the bus might think if they noticed me solemnly jotting down things like, "Claris finds greeting-installation in her cabin, alters it, and finds herself in a conversation," or, "The world where Claris grows up is heavily terraformed for farming."

What this project needs right now is more pink (character) cards. I made a start on the bus home tonight. The First Officer, apparently, is a frustrated novelist. Very frustrated, because for one thing he hardly ever gets off the ship, and for another he can't get anyone below him in the chain of command to give him an honest critique. It's amazing, sometimes, how quickly things come into focus when I have a pen in my hand; perhaps I should do more of this.

I was up way too late last night watching the flare, and I really mean to try to go to bed early tonight. There has to be some way I can use that; the fascination of watching a trace on a screen and knowing what it means. I remember sheer joy in the abstract beauty of an upside-down exponential curve, the first time I got my experimental setup working for my doctoral research. At the end of a long day I pressed a key and there it was, an azure line leaping up and flattening out on the coarse-grained monitor screen as my ice sample charged up between its capacitor plates, and my heart leapt with it.

The Shipwights, it seems, like to leave pieces of abstract installation art lying around the place; this is some kind of communication.

After two days of unseasonal warmth and perfect light, the sky has disappeard behind a thin layer of grey, flat and soft as lint on a filter.

This morning, instead of grabbing a book as I went out, I grabbed my box of plot-cards, and contemplated them on the bus. Almost immediately, I spotted a major problem. Claris, my protagonist, doesn't do anything. Things happen to her, and she meets people and has conversations and gives the odd performance, but that's about it. It doesn't help that most of the plot takes place aboard a ship that trundles through hyperspace almost literally on rails, and Claris is not much more than a passenger.

The other problem, which has been bugging me ever since I wrote most of the first chapter, is that when she does do something, or at least stubbornly refuse to do something, it doesn't make sense. By this I don't mean that I don't know why she does it in the sense that she's doing things I don't want her to; rather, she's doing the thing I want because I'm writing her that way, but she has no internal motivation that I can see. She might as well be a plasticene figure that I'm prodding into the poses I want for the plot.

Later in the day, a possible solution to the latter problem occurred to me. It would actually make more sense for her, and move the plot more logically, if she does give in under interrogation, implicates the long-distance friend who set her up to annoy the authorities, and then has to live with what she's done. She still has to get off-planet, and when they finally meet, there'll be more conflict. It doesn't help with making her into a strong sympathetic character from the beginning, of course. I have a fairly high tolerance for weak, whiny characters myself, but I know a lot of readers don't.

The other idea I have is to have her become more involved with the mysterious behind-the-wainscot inhabitants of the ship, helping them in some active way and doing some growing-up in the progress. In the meantime, I have to deal with a scared, lonely, young character and make her something more than pitiful.

Also, I need a writing icon, but not tonight.