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Reading the Manual after Jumping from the Plane

centaur 0

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Still plugging away at HEX CODE. But even in the middle of Nanowrimo, when I’m desperate to make my word count before my upcoming adventures, even when I have a good feel for what needs to happen in the next scene … it still helps to do research. Above you see a pile of books fairly typical for working on Cinnamon Frost stories, plus one recreational one (I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one from the negative space of the context) and here’s how they have helped me. For those just joining us, Cinnamon Frost is a teenage weretiger with Tourette’s Syndrome who grew up basically on the streets, and …

  • Chelsea Cain’s “Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture” helped me get in touch with something entirely outside my experience … growing up as a teenage weretiger in essentially a werekindred commune.
  • Brooks Landon’s “Building Great Sentences” audio course (of which I have the printed notes above) reminded me to keep vary the patterns in my sentences, which helps me (in my terms) “solve problems” as I try to deliver the information I need to keep the plot moving while maintaining the right rhythm.
  • Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf” also helped me get in touch with the experiences that someone in a marginalized community might have, though I wasn’t able use this idea in today’s writing session, it might come up soon.
  • Patrick Newman’s “Tracking the Weretiger” is just damn fascinating, and is helping me flesh out the plot of the rest of the “Dakota Frost, Skindancer” / “Cinnamon Frost, Spellpunk” / “Quarry” series.
  • The Jesus Seminar’s “The Parables of Jesus” is helping me flesh out the moral dimensions of the story, by deriving the moral stances of the more “heroic” characters from the more “authentic” parables (at least, according to the Seminar) and deriving the stances of the more morally gray characters from the more “questionable” parables. Of course, all Scripture is profitable for instruction … but some parts of it do seem to get Jesus’s message more on point than others, and by assigning a spectrum of goodness to different characters I get to play with a lot of interesting moral conundrums.
  • Mitzi Waltz’s Tourette’s Syndrome: “Finding Answers & Getting Help” is also useful for helping me portray the subtle aspects of Tourette’s Syndrome, which Cinnamon suffers from, but which is notoriously difficult to portray correctly without it devolving into caricature. It has given me new plot ideas for the whole book and actually makes some of Cinnamon’s weird behavior seem much more understandable, but I need to work it in.

As for the last book, for now it’s fun, but who knows, she’s a math genius, so maybe it will work in.

I didn’t read all of these over lunch, but I got a chapter or a half dozen pages of each, and as a consequence: I found out some interesting other conditions people might suffer from, gave them to a character, creating an instant conflict, and gave Cinnamon a new coping tool, leading to more conflict.

Easily three to five hundred words popped out of today’s salsa of reading, putting me way ahead:

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I’m doing my level headed best to not rest on my laurels though, as I have a LOT more to go:

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Still climbing that mountain. Still reading the manual as falling out of the plane. Still writing 1666+ words a day.

Onward!

-the Centaur

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