The Mutinous Crew: Chapter 8 Thought and Exercise

I'll post more of the other exercises later, but normally I've been posting these inside at Scribophile, which limits the audience and the feedback.

I finished Chapter Eight just as I finished Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. I confess that the multiple points of view, gliding from one to the other was challenging, as was the use of names as a formal surname, then switching to a more informal first name. I blame that on my initial laziness and started keeping track of names -- I'm bad with names, so perhaps this is a literary manifestation of my real life. Shocking, I know.

The Mutinous Crew: Becalmed

Over the weeks, the mutinous crew seems to have abandoned ship; I'm determined to press on. Writing is ultimately a solitary craft; I've traveled by ocean liner and by canoe, and am reasonably at home with either.   Many of us do better in our coracles, paddling in shallow waters well in sight of a safe, comforting shore.  I was surprised that so many stopped at chapter one, declaring that a particular musical analogy was inaccurate or they detected a "whiff of pretentiousness" - as if declaring a whiff of anything from words on the page weren't pretentious enough. Others chafed at the idea of gorgeous writing, and purposefully conflated it with purple prose, which, if they had read any further, wasn't the point at all. 

The Mutinous Crew: Exercise 7

Exercise 7 from Steering the Craft is the exercise that was as engaging as it was long. It was as if the last part of the exercise lifted a veil and showed the entire scene that had hints with the other methods. So I found myself revisiting the earlier parts based on what I learned.

The actual exercise below the fold

Article Review: Star Trek, Axanar, and the Future of Fan Fiction

Star Trek, Axanar and the Future of Fan Fiction

Dany Roth did a good job producing an article that is about much more than just Star Trek, but used Axanar as one of the more complicated examples of the (non) interaction between fan and licensed works. It gave a good overview of the copyright-able and non-copyright-able aspects of fan fiction. After what seemed like a decent primer on copyright law, goes into actual lawsuits.

The article also goes into where the courts do not agree amongst themselves with the interpretation of 'fair use' and how that really makes things confusing, and since that can determine the fate of your fan work, it is a crucial area. 

The example court cases are very interesting and well worth a read.

The Mutinous Crew: Chapter 7

Chapter seven is a great exercise -- one not quite as contentious as the previous about tense -- and I'm puzzled why. Perhaps it's our binary nature. Tense has only two options: past (inclusive narrative tense) and present (focused narrative tense). With only two sides there must be for any situation a right and a wrong, and so sides are chosen.

The Stone That Sings, Chapter 1 Revision

Chapter 1, Rev 2

The Stone That Sings isn't exactly in first draft, though parts of it are. I tend to write in waves, where I write Chapter 1, then write Chapter 2, then revise Chapter 1 -- This is the process that got the first five chapters on Scribophile.

But now that I've created the first draft, I'm on the second full draft. Things I learned in the first draft by completing it all the way to the end can now be added.

So what did I learn?

I learned that P'nem, Danek, and Lorot are members of a Syrrannite enclave on Vulcan. This makes them different from Vulcan standards, but also held in high regard -- they tend to be the moral conscience of the Vulcan people -- whether they are wanted or not. If it sounds like that might make them scolds, you are right. All this technology and such causing 'deviations' in the Way of Kolinahr, which is why they remain in the desert, even if the desert plays havoc with higher technologies.

The Past Speaks of the Present

In Chapter 6, Subject Pronoun and Verb, Ms. Le Guin mentions references Lynne Sharon Schwartz, whose essay, Remembrance of Tense Past is an insightful analysis of influenza, miniskirts, and of course verb tense with many thoughtful examples of both success and failures of using the present tense (also called focused narrative tense, by Le Guin). In Steering the Craft, Le Guin analyzes the fallacy of 'immediacy' as a reason to use the focused narrative tense. In this post, I'll examine some of the other points Schwartz makes in her essay.