Returning to Ranea

[chipotle]

While I’ve been lax in updating again, I’m going to blame (with some justification, I’d argue) the flu of doom that I’ve been suffering. Truth to tell it’s not a very high level of doom, but in some ways that’s made it more irritating: instead of a few days of abject misery followed by recovery, it’s just been an ongoing lingering cough and low energy.

This has put the kibosh on a lot of “what I’d like to be doing” plans over the last couple of weeks; it kind of sucks to be inspired to finally get going on projects and then find yourself completely unable to work on any of them. Even so, one long-standing idea has been pulled out of mothballs, and has actually had a little progress made already.

About (glark) eighteen years ago I wrote a fantasy novella entitled “A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood,” which was—at least in certain circles—wildly popular and still has fans to this day. Since it technicaly remained in print up until just a few years ago, I’ve resisted the idea of putting it into a collection, but I’ve decided that YARF! is pretty much dead to the world. At the convention, I talked with a publisher about the idea of producing a new edition.

This of course leads to the question of whether to revise the story. While there’s something to be said for not mucking with success, the truth is that a lot of people either haven’t read the original version of the story—or haven’t read it in a long time—and together with its sequel story, “The Lighthouse,” there’s basically a novel-length narrative that could probably be strengthened by, well, treating it like a novel. (Looking back, there are things that were added to the story’s “mythology” in later bits that should really have been mentioned. Most obvious so far: one of the main characters belongs to a race which has a name—Derysi—in a later story, yet is never given in the fifty thousand words of the two novellas.)

So. I’ve actually already started. I have about three thousand words written on the new incarnation of “Gift of Fire,” which comprise the first two scenes—the first one a rewrite of the original first scene, an the second one a scene that was referenced but not shown before. (Funny how show, don’t tell actually works in practice.)

Deciding what to do with “Lighthouse” will be harder; while “Gift of Fire” is written in canonical third-person, past-tense from Mika’s point of view, “Lighthouse” is written in first-person present tense, virtually stream of consciousness, from Revar’s point of view. That seemed like a great idea at the time but I’m not sure whether to retool it—still from Revar’s point of view, but back to third-person, past-tense—this time through. The argument against doing that is that, well, it works in the current incarnation, mostly; the argument for doing it is that to make this all work as a novel, I’m going to have to give Mika more to do in the second half beyond just showing up at the end, and it may be easier to do that if I can switch between the two characters’ points of views. (If you’ve read the two, you know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, I don’t think I’ve given much away.)

Even so, it’s already been fun to revisit the characters, and the world. This time I’m trying to assume that readers have no familiarity with the world the story’s set in—an assumption that wasn’t necessarily true back in 1990. (Yes, in the early days of the fandom, my stories were actually that well known. Scary, huh?) This actually adds to the fun; I get to re-examine the assumptions I made in the world in the first place, quietly disposing of things I no longer like, and seeing if I can bring out things that, if I’m honest, existed more in world-building notes than in the actual stories themselves. Something that should inform the whole world, for instance, is the idea that magicians are basically Ranea’s equivalent of engineers, fashioning devices that are used in everyday life by normal people—but we don’t see that in practice nearly enough.

I’ve been playing around with my working habits, too, for this project, and as I get energy back I’ll hopefully be able to put more of that into practice. But that’s for another post.

Comments

[bwcoyoten.livejournal.com]

Well huzzah! Good for you, pepperyote!

[hyniof.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear it!

I've always thought you could make a fine novel from both parts skillfully stitched together. Good luck!

Mike

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Why should it be mentioned? I for one think it's cool that the name 'Derysi' is this esoteric piece of trivia that never appears in the main stories (and isn't even well-known in the story's setting). Maybe that's just the kind of writer I am, but I like making readers work for this incidental stuff. Why should you hand it to them, like it's a children's book? Plus assigning special names to everything just seems a little fannish... giving everything clever names is what amateur writers do in lieu of having a real story, and I don't think that's the kind of flavor you want to taint your writing with.

But having said that, I agree that you should absolutely remove or change anything which assumes preknowledge, especially a familiarity stemming from presence in the fandom; I recall you were very good about not using buzzwords like 'morph' which only have significance to furry fans... at the same time, yeah, don't go off on a lot of exposition about how things are or how they work, when you can hint at it through natural character actions or through narrative references strictly relevant to story, and let the reader put the pieces together themselves. You're not writing a D&D module, which essentially exists to satisfy a need for that kind of wankery (and you could always write a Ranea RPG later, if you had to gratify that urge), you're writing, I presume, a story that's going to pull people in and be real to the reader, and that means emphasis of things which are familiar to all readers.

Anyway, I hope it doesn't seem like I'm talking down to you, and I understand that my interests in writing might not be the same as yours.

[(Anonymous)]

*I* remember the Ranea RPG, as it were. But then I was there! Oh,the elves! And the smilie-face-covered bowl thing I made, and Everything is Beautiful In Its Own Way, and... :)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Actually, that wasn't in Ranea, it was in its own godawful world. But, I'm pretty sure you played in the Ranea D&D setting. I'm pretty sure the only thing that actually persists in the story incarnation of Ranea from that D&D campaign is the Wyvern's Den Pub. (And nominally the character of Donthen, although IIRC, he started out as a wizard I played in somebody else's campaign and only the name is the same.)

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I'm probably mixing the two worlds up... and yes, I remember the Ranea D&D campaign! :) Luviel... OMG, you and me and Stan and RK and Bob...

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Plus assigning special names to everything just seems a little fannish… giving everything clever names is what amateur writers do in lieu of having a real story, and I don’t think that’s the kind of flavor you want to taint your writing with.

You’re not the first person to say something vaguely akin to this; as I recall, a comment I got years ago on an unfinished draft complained about Ranea having species names separate from fox, wolf, cat, and so on; the commenter said something extremely close to, “We don’t have separate names for ape and human,” without apparently understanding he’d just made the best rebuttal to that which I could hope to on my own. The concession to the human (and particularly furry, granted) reader is using fox at all rather than only sticking with Vraini and trying to give the reader enough details to puzzle it out. Calling a Melifen a “cat” or a L’rovri a “wolf” would really logically be like, well, calling a human an ape: not something likely to make the speaker very endearing. In fact, thinking about it just now, I should really have to make the case in the story as to why so many Raneans think of the bats as bats rather than as Derysi; in “Wounds” it’s said the name isn’t that well-known, but I don’t see any obvious reason why that would be so.

…don’t go off on a lot of exposition about how things are or how they work, when you can hint at it through natural character actions or through narrative references strictly relevant to story, and let the reader put the pieces together themselves.

Well, I’d certainly try not do to that. The problem with some of the Ranea stories in their existing form is actually that they don’t give enough of the background, even through hints. While magic in Ranea shouldn’t be anything like magic in The Lord of the Rings or a D&D campaign, for a place that’s supposedly using it as the equivalent of the steam engine, it’s pretty invisible most of the time in the stories. My mental conception of Ranea is as existing in sort of a Victorian-era state with respect to technology, with magic something that’s always been there but has just in recent times started to be, in effect, industrialized, although Ranea would just be at the cusp of its equivalent of the Industrial Revolution (if indeed there’s going to be such a thing at all).

There’s a kind of fan writer that I think you’re tacitly responding to who does a lot of world-building but falls down on the storytelling. I think if I have a sin in writing, it’s somewhat the reverse — after a quarter-century of Ranea, I could tell you how many countries there are in the Empire (ten) but I doubt I could name more than half of them. (Right now, Raneadhros, Garanelt, Rionar, and Orinthe are the only ones that come to mind, and I doubt there’s more than one or two others that have ever been given names at all.)

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I can think of a good reason right off the top of my head that they're just called 'bats': they're a feared, despised, little-understood minority which mostly lives in the twilight and the underground of 'decent' society. In fact, you'd expect even worse epithets than just giving them an animal name. I also thought that the Derysi popped up relatively recently in that world's history, and that they'd never referred to themselves by the name; I gathered 'Derysi' was a relatively academic term coined by a group of people who weren't in the habit of handing out their information readily. To the humans the Derysi farmed in their proto-society, they were just 'the bats,' and not many of those people survived anyway... you can imagine that the Derysi spread out from their enclave because it just didn't support their numbers, and a precursor to this was their initial prey population dying off.

It's not that I think you're guilty of these, um, indiscretions, necessarily, but it can't hurt to emphasize them, given the torrent of bad writing and roleplaying we find ourselves surrounded by. I mean, check it out; there's this teleportation entry message on Tapestries where 'existence' is misspelled as 'existance.' And you see this misspelling dozens of times a day, every day you're on there. Maybe I'm just weak-willed, but after a while I can vaguely feel myself wanting to spell it the incorrect way. So yeah, it seems like I'm constantly swimming upstream and that it can't be stated enough, not to let yourself get sucked into fan habits.

A problem I have with world-building and outlining is that it takes all the fun out of writing. It makes it so I know all the interesting bits already, so what's in it for me as a writer if I've already gratified myself with the substantial part of the creation? I like to keep a lot of stuff a mystery until it actually appears on the page... I also like to have a lot of stuff be deliberately undecided, indefinitely. I don't know, it keeps it interesting for me if I don't know all there is to know about a character's backstory.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While it's been a long time since I've read my own writing (!), I believe "Derysi" was the name given by those who created them (which was presumed to be the faerie folk; in Ranea the fae are definitely of the "do not screw with" variety). At any rate, in the current new draft, "Derysi" appears in a book that Mika's reading; in the original story he learns something about bats from going to a library and looking up information, and I've kept that. But that's precisely the sort of thing that would have the correct name.

As I keep writing, I suppose I'll learn whether it makes sense to keep the name in there or not. I haven't played around much with the idea that I mentioned in my last response about the language used for the non-human races; there could well be a distinction drawn between those who'd want to know what to call Revar other than "bat," and those who either didn't think about it or just didn't care. There's a lot of play story-wise that could involve species relations in Ranea, and while I don't want to make any of the stories into allegories about racism, being mindful of this could add a bit of extra depth.

While I tend not to do much world-building ahead of time, I've always done some level of outlining, and that's actually increased over the years as I realized that I really didn't do enough. My outlining isn't a point-by-point description of everything that happens in a story, but rather pretty close to the idea of writing down scene ideas on index cards and shuffling them around. I know some writers, including some very successful ones, hate the idea of outlining, for much the reasons you described. For years I didn't actually outline as much as write notes about what needed to happen next in a story, so my muse was always running a few scenes ahead of where I was.

At least for me personally, though, the longer the story is, the less likely that approach--or the "don't outline anything, just let it flow" approach--is to work. There's a middle ground between outlining in such detail that I feel like I've already told the story, and doing so little planning that I end up with writer's block a third of the way through a long story because I have no idea how the hell to get from where I am to where I want to be. Some people may be able to manage without the index cards to push around, but I am not one of those people. And I wish I'd figured this out about fifteen years earlier than I did!

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I agree that the proper name would turn up during research; though I think it would be amusing if Mika referred to Revar by that term, and she's like, "'Derysi?' What the hell is that?" :)

I also agree that it shouldn't turn into an overt parable, but racism is certainly a major element of the story; it's part of what drives the story's conflicts. I suppose having Revar's people thought of as frightening monsters rather than a despised but 'human' minority is more Gothic and in keeping with a fantasy setting, but it seems unlikely that you could maintain mindless fear when the object of that fear consists of people you see on the street with a certain regularity, who have ordinary jobs and stuff. You know what I mean? But maybe the derysi rarely cross paths with the average person.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I agree that the proper name would turn up during research; though I think it would be amusing if Mika referred to Revar by that term, and she's like, "'Derysi?' What the hell is that?" :)

I've actually finished the first chapter draft now, and an exchange that isn't too far off from that happens.

The Derysi are supposed to be pretty rare; Revar and Jemara only knew of one another in the city "Gift" takes place in. I envision that Raneadhros has a moderate large population, even though that's not mentioned in either story, but I also suspect they could all be in one or two neighborhood blocks. In many parts of Ranea, it'd be pretty easy to go through your whole life without seeing one. (And of course, the whole "we have to take blood from living, sapient prey" thing does play into the fear in a way that doesn't have a direct parallel to real life.)

One thing that's a bit interesting -- well, maybe -- as I went back over the story is observing that while class was always present in "Gift," there was an obvious point that I missed. The existing version mostly treats Dahlu and Mika as being from the same social/economic milieu, but they're not. Consciously or not, Dahlu is trying to lift Mika up. (Dahlu was kind of cardboard through most of "Gift," which has always bothered me; the reader shouldn't really be left wondering just what Mika saw in her in the first place.)

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

...don't go off on a lot of exposition about how things are or how they work, when you can hint at it through natural character actions or through narrative references strictly relevant to story, and let the reader put the pieces together themselves. You're not writing a D&D module, which essentially exists to satisfy a need for that kind of wankery (and you could always write a Ranea RPG later, if you had to gratify that urge)

You've read chipotle's writing before, right?

I ask because I haven't seen him make the kind of mistakes you're describing. He's...better than that.

I think that detailed comments are good, and I'm sure a close reading with a critical eye toward these sorts of revisions would be helpful after...well, after the revisions are actually written. But I'm also willing to give Watts the benefit of the doubt on being able to pull this off.

you're writing, I presume, a story that's going to pull people in and be real to the reader, and that means emphasis of things which are familiar to all readers.

It's one of the things I imagine would be most difficult about writing sci-fi and fantasy...merging aspects of the created world seamlessly into the narrative. Watts does it well.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I've read his work, yes; I'm quite familiar with it. I just don't think one can overemphasize good writing habits, in the face of a tidal wave of fan writing. :)

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

That makes sense too. :-)

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I remember it all, and still have the original stories. I wonder if Zjonni would like to redo the art.

And I also remember the short story you did about the creation of the Derysi. I think things would work best without it. The more unsaid, the more you can say.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Zjonni's pictures were certainly wonderful, but I'm considering going in a different direction for illustrations this time around. There was an artist I had in mind very early on, actually, that I mentioned to YARF! when they asked who I wanted to do the art; I may see if I can bring her into the project. (I've already brought the idea up with her and got an expression of interest.) Having said that, I'm certainly not ruling anything/anyone out.

[revar.livejournal.com]

I'd buy a copy. *fangy grin*

If you need, I can nuke or replace the copies on belfry.com.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Assuming I ever get Claw & Quill restarted (another defunct and ambitious project), I'll probably ask you to take down the Belfry copies of the stories because I'll move newer versions of them to C&Q. But for right now, the versions at Belfry are the only versions anywhere, so it's probably best they stay left up. (Those are, in fact, the versions of the stories I'm working from, although I have local copies.)

[(Anonymous)]

I know I'm probably a bit late with this, but please, PLEASE don't go "George Lucas" on the Revar and Mika stories

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While this project is a bit stalled for various RL reasons right now, you'll probably have to trust me. I don't intend to be fixing things that aren't broken, but the truth is that there are some rough edges, particularly in the first story: characterizations other than Revar and Mika are a little flat, there's too many plot points that seem to be advanced by coincidence and lucky timing, and there are inconsistencies with other Ranea stories (and even later stories about these characters) that don't need to be there, such as who doesn't and doesn't know the word "Derysi."

The Everything2 node you pointed me to is flattering, but it somewhat ironically points out one of the characterization problems: Dahlu is aristocratic but she's not supposed to be a ditz. She's not just attractive, she's smart and strong-willed. Readers don't have to like Dahlu, but they do need to understand why Mika likes Dahlu, and for all of the things I think I got right in the original story, that wasn't one of them.

[(Anonymous)]

Guy from last post made again, here's a link if you're not convinced:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1244619