Tag: Washington

[REBLOG]: Jake’s Last Mission, conflict, a defense of Kristark’s Coronation as a story, probably other stuff too because I’m writing this right before bed so my inner editor is already asleep

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This was linked to via pingback on this other reblog I made and it was, I thought, a good if rambly and typo riddled take on the subject; in her defense, the author does indicate she was writing the the small hours of the morning – ah, the logics of 2AM.

My own work “lacks conflict” and according to one or two reviews “lacks plot” because 1) these two things, by many’s definition, are one and the same and 2) because some people really have a poor understanding of what those words mean

1) Plot is A happens, then B happens, then C happens.  That’s all plot is.  It’s “wha-happ’n’d”.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It’s very difficult to tell any story of any sort, even a vignette, without having, by strict definition, a plot.  Conflict is … well, it’s conflict.  It’s the characters’ internal struggles, it’s their struggles against their environment, it’s their struggles against others.

2) The very fact that time passes within Now & Forever is an indicator that there’s a plot.  A single thread of plot?  Yes, actually, though it’s only liable to be clearly visible once all four books are written — though I’ll say it now:  the plot is the girls’ growing love and them growing up, and how that impacts their love and relationship; put more succinctly the plot is two high school sweethearts getting through high school together.

Conflict abounds, though it is in no way the driving force of the story.  There’s minor conflict between Lauren and Sally – as any couple will, they have their disagreements, and we see them.  Maybe it’s not generally a flaming row, but not all couples have those.  There’s “[wo]man versus [her] environment”.  I’m sorry, but even in Washington, the US is not and in 2010 – 2014 was not a terribly wonderful place to be homosexual, this is not a major factor of the story, but it is a primary source of what conflict exists.  It also has “[wo]man versus [her]self” given that the girls are growing up and have their doubts and insecurities that come with such things and that come with being in love.

Honestly, though, I’m merely echoing … more or less, anyway … what this other post says with my own stories inserted in place of hers.

Jake’s Last Mission, conflict, a defense of Kristark’s Coronation as a story, probably other stuff too because I’m writing this right before bed so my inner editor is already asleep

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Shannon Haddock

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, I apologize in advance for, even for me, an unusual amount of rambly-ness in this post.  And typos.  And homonym errors.  If I had any sense, I’d probably wait until tomorrow . . . err, later today, I guess . . . to write this.  If I had any sense, however, I’d have gone into a much more lucrative career than writing space opera, so . . .

Second, this isn’t complaining about my reviews.  My reviewers are entitled to their opinions.  They just gave me something concrete to point at while I make a point about something that’s been bothering me for quite a long time.

Now, on to my actual post:

Ursula K. LeGuin said:

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.

Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

I just discovered this quote a few days ago, but it’s something I’ve thought of before.  Years ago, in fact, I argued this very point on a rpg forum when I was told, pretty much, by some people that my games couldn’t possibly be fun because conflict wasn’t the driving force.  And it wasn’t even a “rpgs are about killin’ things and gettin’ mad loot” or whatever thing.  Apparently if there’s a love story in your game or story, the drama and change that comes just from being in a relationship isn’t enough, you have to bring in soap opera elements like love triangles and kidnappings and such, for example.  Change wasn’t enough; there had to be conflict, according to these people. (continued)

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Now & Forever ABCs (Travis)

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My God, I can’t believe I forgot Travis.  Maybe I forgot Travis started with a T?

Travis Kaleo Puanani

20 May 1995
Agnostic

Travis’ parents met when his mother was stationed in Hawaii, where Travis was born.  The family moved back to her home in Washington when she left the Air Force.  Travis is the oldest of three children.

Travis tends to have a rather pervy sense of humour, make sexual innuendo out of anything and everything he can.  He’s actually a fairly shy, sweet guy when given a chance to prove it, however.

He has been dancing very nearly as long as Lauren, though he started with ballroom and jazz rather than ballet.  He loves dancing, even if he doesn’t love the perception, especially once he discovered a passion for ballet, it leaves so many people — including members of his own family — with.  Luckily Janet and he dating has done a little to dissuade those attitudes, and no one ever made much effort to bother him; Travis has been studying Taekwondo since he was six, and recently has taken a slight interest in Krav Maga.  Soon people learnt not to bother his friends who really are gay when, in middle school, some bullies decided to try to beat on Marcus, and Travis made them back down without ever actually hitting anyone, he just managed to convince them he could single-handedly send the lot of them to the emergency room.

Travis long ago, watching his mother and father, decided one thing for certain:  he’d never have a normal day job.  He saw them going to ordinary, mundane, nine-to-five work for a paycheque.  He promised himself that, one day, he’d make a living on a stage, on a screen, or in tournaments.  He wants excitement, energy, and to do work that makes him feel like he’s accomplished something.  Failing that, he says, he’ll join the French Foreign Legion or MI:6.

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Now & Forever ABCs (Sally)

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Salencia Lily Constellino

12 June 1996
Theist

Sally was born in Toronto, but moved from there before she was four so barely remembers the place — though she still holds Canadian citizenship due to not being an adult and thus unable to apply for US citizenship and unable to inherit it from parents who have not, themselves, applied.  Through quirks of law in her parents’ birth countries she also holds citizenship, or at least a right to it, in France and Italy.  Sally is aware of these details and finds it funny — she belongs to three countries she has never lived in, but not the one in which she nearly always has.

Sally has always been mesmerised by horses.  Her favourite animals at the zoo were always the equines, and as early as two she would happily watch horse racing and equestrian competitions.  Oddly enough, however, she has never liked Westerns — despite their plethora of horses, many of which she will happily admit are gorgeous animals.

To Sally, home is and in many ways will always be Glade Falls.  She does have something of a love-hate relationship with the little community, but that is because the small rural town is a lovely example of conservative rural America.  The average person did nothing to directly insult or upset her, though they could be highly frustrating, as it was not unheard of for them to treat her with a certain caution in certain situations (showers at school, sleepovers, etc.) or in efforts to be ‘helpful’.  Some disgusted and angered her, not a majority, but Sally is too good with numbers and the realisation that twenty people in two hundred is a rather more significant figure than twenty in, even, a thousand.  The ones outright hostile or rude to her, though, were countered by those who were kind, supportive, and/or understanding.

She had never been, always, the most popular of people in the town.  Her sense of humour and tendency to speak her mind and damn the consequences put many a bit off.  Sally never means to insult anyone, she simply has no concept of reverence; to her God happens to other people, whether or not any deities exist (something she’s fairly certain is true as she can think of no alternate logical reason for the existence of the universe) she sees no reason why they should be treated any differently than other people — in fact she feels that, should God manifest before her, she is in full right to demand He be willing to answer for a good chunk of the last few thousand years of human history.

To compound her relationship with those around her, Sally’s rather broad-minded approach to the universe left her outed as a lesbian at nine years old in a small school populated, primarily, by Christian conservatives.  It had completely passed her by that ordinary people could take issue with someone being attracted to the same sex; she sincerely believed such people stood out and always made loud speeches while wearing buttons or t-shirts with really stupid slogans on them — and also had an impression they all spoke with bad southern accents or had shaved heads & dressed in camo.  She was friends, through Hrithrik and Theresa, with many different sorts of people — not to mention the members of her own family including someone who is transgender — from a gay couple to a polyamorist family of three men and five women, from Atheists to Zoroastrians.  She simply wasn’t prepared for the reaction her little note asking the little Miss Vivian Canadien, who sat beside Sally in Science class, if the two could be girlfriends would receive.

Sally was heartbroken by the reactions of her classmates, angered beyond words by the reactions of her school’s faculty, and stung deeply by the reactions of the parents of various of her friends (or, after this, in several cases former friends).  Until this point Sally had called herself Catholic under the logic that she attended a Catholic school, worshipped — if infrequently, and only when told she had to go — at a Catholic church, and was part of a primarily Catholic family … Sally’s relationship with God went from casual and indifferent to hostile, church and the Christian divine stopped being quite so amusing to her.

The friendships that held on remained strong, however, and the love and support from both her family and those friends that stuck by her helped her through; she even, eventually, made a few new friendships from the ashes of the old — people who saw how some treated her and offered their sympathies leading to a discovery of common interests.

The move to Washington was a devastating blow to Sally, though she remained philosophical enough about it to not become clinically depressed about the fact.  She didn’t want to leave her beloved mountains and horses, to leave behind cherished and deep friendships to try to forge new from a crowd of strangers in unfamiliar territory — the only time she’d ever been in Seattle had been a stopover at the airport while en route to visit a little village in Siberia.  Still she was not so naïve she couldn’t see that, even in a city like Memphis or Atlanta, the odds improved steeply that she might be better accepted (or at least tolerated) and might even meet some nice girls willing to date her.  She focused on the positives — getting to see her mother more often, more open minded populous, proximity to the ocean — trying to will herself to accept the move.

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Now & Forever ABCs (Granny)

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Josette Rhianon Morgan Conners

24 February 1944
Lutheran (ELCA)

Josette Morgan, better known these days as Granny, is a fiery little woman born and raised in Wyoming.  As a teenager she took to the road with a boyfriend, winding up living with he and several others in a Wisconsin commune.  There she met Charles Conners and the pair became fast friends, and later they became lovers.  In 1961 they married, and Gerrid (the original boyfriend) was best man and two of his wives were bridesmaids.

Eventually the commune broke up, but by then the young couple had migrated to Winthrop in Washington.  Charlie’s aunt loaned them the down payment for the farm, and soon they and a crowd of friends had the place self-sufficient and earning enough to pay back Jenny and keep the mortgage paid.  As time drifted on, so did the friends — it’d never, strictly speaking, been a commune — but the family, to this day, happily takes in friends and family who wish to stay and no questions asked, so long as the person can help with the work that needs done.

The ancient farmhouse had, initially, relied on outhouses and hand pump plumbing, but Granny had always been fascinated by electrical engineering and managed to construct a turbine out of parts salvaged from a junk yard and otherwise bought from the hardware store and they bought a well pump, by the early Seventies they had a septic system and ordinary modern taps for the plumbing.  Hot water had always been available — the property has a small natural gas well that has long been tapped, powered a very early model water heater, and was used as a starter for the fireplaces.  Granny initially used it to power the generator for the water pumps, but in the late Seventies a friend had helped restore the old waterwheel and connected mill-house, reconnecting the old mechanical pump system to the home, and using it to mill their grain.

When Charlie died Josette continued to work the farm, though now it was almost purely sustenance, the work to make excess for sale being largely beyond her at her age; though she did make some cash selling the products of the maple and apple orchards by the roadside.  These days, though, Elizabeth and her family live on the farm and are building it up to be profitable in dairy, wool, and produce within organic farming circles.

Most recently Granny was convinced, after many long and drawn out arguments, to begin the process of installing gas lamps and lanterns in some of the rooms of the house, though many are still lit only by candles the family makes themselves.  While neither she nor Charlie were willing to part with the old icebox that had been in the home when they bought it, they did buy a deep-freezer which was powered by Josette’s generator until the couple invested in solar panels the year before he died.

Some have accused Josette, and to some extent Charlie, of being backward and technophobic.  Josette always laughs at these accusations.  Too modest, usually, to boast, but she has taught herself computer programming in C, C++, COBOL, and Fortan; she and Charlie we both equally competent to maintain their 1953 Chevy pick-up truck, and Josette has more than once proven she is fully capable of working on the motors of modern Electric and hybrid engines as well — though she lacks the means to utilise the computer diagnostics systems.  She simply loathes the use of technology for its own sake.  She feels that there’s no call for telephones, personal computers, light bulbs, and other things that put such a reliance on other people.

Needless to say, given her life, her experiences in it, and the myriad college degrees worth of knowledge she possesses, Granny is often delighted and borderline smug when she informs those who ask, that she never completed her tenth grade year of high school, never obtained a GED, and has never set foot on a college campus before doing so to watch the graduation of eldest child.

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Now & Forever ABCs (Gramps & the Witch)

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Albert Lee Swanson & Claudette Isis Swanson née Baardsson

10 October 1935 & 2 June 1933
Anglican & Church of All Worlds

The couple who brought Yvette into the world, and an eccentric pair.  Gramps, as far back as Yvette can recall, tended to give people names to suit a mix of who the person was and his own unusual sense of humour.  The Witch, on the other hand, felt that children should actually have names — so insisted on giving permanent names to her children, and also insisted that, given that they’d have to live with them, that it should sound like a name rather than an appellation.  Gramps has never once called one of his children by their given name — and his wife has heard him utter her name few times in the decades they’ve been together.

The pair live in an old hotel that’s been converted to a large home in northern-most Washington, part of their property is possibly in Canada in fact.

Married in 1951 the pair had ten children over the course of twenty-three years.  Gramps has always been talented with woodcarving and carpentry, so owned a furniture making shop and did contracting work while the Witch, who had always been immensely fascinated by the various uses of plants, opened an herbalist shop which specialised in beauty supplies and cosmetics.  Both businesses were successful enough that all of their children were able to go to college, though only eight did, and all of them got scholarships — so the education money went to helping each child into their first homes or other similar boosts to starting adulthood.

The Witch was raised in a household that, ostensibly, was Unitarian but was largely agnostic or Deist in specifics.  She and her siblings were encouraged to study philosophy and theology, their father believing it gave a better understanding of the world, people, and morals & ethics.  She is well versed in Judaism, several forms of Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, can quote the Bible in Greek, and has a firm grounding in several forms of Hindu.  When Otter and Morning Glory Zell founded the Church of All Worlds she studied it as avidly leading to her rising within the ranks of its priesthood.  Gramps, on the other hand, continues to attend a small Anglican church near his home any Sunday he can and makes a stubborn point of going on Easter and Christmas, and insisting even more stubbornly that his wife, and any of their sundry children, children-in-laws, and their children join them whenever they’re visiting on those days.

Among their various hippie friends the pair are sometimes seen as oddly old fashioned.  Gramps and the Witch were fairly strict with their children in terms of expectations of their behaviour.  The girls were, at the Witch’s adamant insistence, thoroughly taught etiquette, diction, posture, and just about every other womanly art that would be taught in a finishing school.  Gramps followed her example — every one of their sons was to be a perfect gentleman (he stopped short at actually making them learn to use a sword, given that he couldn’t use one either).  In seemingly stark contrast to this the parents were exceedingly open with their children and the Witch even educated those of her daughters and sons interested in the subject on the contents of her copy of the Kama Sutra and other related works — not practical demonstrations, mind, only theory; practice was up to them to arrange.

Eventually the couple has retired, giving over his business to a friend and hers to one of their children, and are spending their twilight years enjoying their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, spoiling them as much and as often as possible.

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Now & Forever ABCs (Falcon Grove, Wa)

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Okay, so I don’t have a person for F, but I do have a place and a rather important one.  So I’m going with that.

Falcon Grove, Washington, USA

Established 1863

Falcon Grove is a town outside of Tacoma, Washington by approximately 30-45 minutes, and nearly a full hour outside of most major portions of Seattle.  It’s located south and East of both cities.

It is a small town, comprising some 5000 souls, and home to two of the area’s high schools, Sam Clemens and Immaculate Conception, and home of several affluent neighbourhoods.

During the last decade of the 19th century the town was a popular place for the well to-do of the Seattle/Tacoma business elite to get away to the country, or for the especially well off to live out of the smell and bustle of the city.  The town is still filled with many rather affluent neighbourhoods, large homes, manors, and a few mansions.  Though it did also become a Mecca in parts of its history for the area middle classes looking for a quieter, more idyllic life than in the major urban centres.  As the town grew it attracted speciality shops to cater to the affluent audience — cafés, restaurants, boutiques, etc.

In present times parts of Falcon Grove run into other neighbouring communities, and several surrounding towns are indistinguishable from one another — all being primarily suburbs of the larger Tri-Cities area — and filled with, largely, upper middle class to lower upper class professionals commuting and telecommuting into their respective Redmond, Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue offices.

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Now & Forever ABCs (Daren)

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Daren Keith Jones

14 December 1995
Baptist

Daren is a tall, handsome, and thoughtful young man.  He attended a different local elementary school from Lauren and many of her friends, but he met Sarah during fourth grade and became fast friends with her and during fifth grade he met and became friends with Lauren.

He has attended Immaculate Conception since sixth grade, and as a result has become friends — if not quite as close — with many of Sarah and Lauren’s other friends.

At IC he joined the baseball team as a pitcher, something he’s fair at, but not good enough to ever start with.  His batting average is atrocious.  His true sport is boxing, he takes lessons at the local Y and competes often, and he’s quite accomplished, bringing home more than a few trophies.  He hopes to get a college scholarship on his boxing, even possibly become pro for a short time.

He’d always had a bit of a crush on Lauren, having seen her even before he’d met her; at the end of seventh grade he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, and the two seemed a perfect couple from there on.

The perfection was only on the surface, though.  The two grew to be less close friends while dating, until Lauren started to notice their lack of compatibility.  Both were determined to try to make it work out, partially out of a stubborn nature on both their parts, and because neither one had much stomach for casual dating — preferring to take all relationships quite seriously.

Despite his reaction when Lauren tells him she’s met someone else, he does care for her — as a valued friend, and as someone he really did have genuine feelings for — but he’s never been the most expressive young man where his feelings are concerned (something, he realises, might have helped him keep Lauren if he’d been better about) and as such takes a rather long time to renew his friendship with her.

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