Dancing the Story Fantastic

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Jenni

My boyfriend and I are on a quest to watch every episode, in order, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We have recently finished Season One. 

It’s interesting to see the genesis of the characters, to see actors figuring out which gestures and tones to use. Riker doesn’t have a beard, and has a fantastic layer of ADD, wanting always to Do Something. Mr. Data is sweetly annoying, and even the computer interrupts him to say, “enough.” 

There’s one character, however, who I have little patience for, and view her presence as not only completely unnecessary, but also as detrimental to the storytelling:

Deanna Troi.

“I’m sensing hostility from this blog post.” 

Let’s take, for example, the first season episode “We’ll Always have Paris.” 

Picard is practicing his fencing with a partner when a strange time phenomenon occurs.

Random Lieutenant: “Interesting move sir. But what technique was that?”

Picard: “The technique of a desperate man.”

<Strange time blur of their swords saluting>

Random Lieutenant: “Interesting move sir. But what technique was that?”

Picard: “The technique of a desperate man.”

Picard confers with Riker via comlink, who says that they have experienced a similar phenomenon on the bridge. Picard runs up to the bridge in his fencing outfit, grabbing his towel and bringing it with him. 

They receive an Emergency Transmission from Dr. Paul Manheim, asking for immediate assistance. The Enterprise lays in a course for Pegos Minor and heads off at Warp 8. 

After we return from the beginning credits, Mr. Data gives Riker an infodump on Manheim. Picard supplements it, mentioning that Manheim was teaching physics at the university when Picard was in Paris.

As Picard relates this, he twirl-slaps the towel against his legs. This is really weird for Picard. Usually he is very calm and collected, even during the most dangerous assignment. Any viewer is going to pick up on the physical cues, and is going to appreciate the heightened tension from this character action. 

Picard abruptly announces that he must change his clothes, and leaves a few acting commands before heading back to the fencing room.

But Deanna Troi can’t let it pass without comment. This is the whole reason she’s there. Her title is Counselor, but her storytelling purpose is to spell out the subtext of the characters’ actions so that everyone, Absolutely Everyone, will be completely sure of what is happening. 

She power walks to catch up with Picard before he steps on to the turbolift, and confronts him, saying that he acted very agitated at the news of Manheim, and that it is her duty to remind him that strong emotions can effect judgement. 

Picard asks Troi to advise him. 

“There are a few hours until we arrive. Perhaps you should use this time to analyze your feelings and put them into perspective.”

Not only has she erased the tension and excitement that Picard’s interesting actions set-up, but she’s also given Picard advice which he was almost certainly going to employ using his own good judgement. He’s heading back to the fencing room to change his clothes and shower. Everything’s taken care of for the moment on the bridge. Why wouldn’t he take a moment to reflect on the emotions bothering him? If Deanna Troi had not been in this scene, it would have moved more concisely and with greater tension. 

There’s a tricky balance between clarity and subtext. Your readers need to know what is happening, but they also want to be able to discover pieces of the narratives for themselves. The importance of clarity was one of my first lessons learned at Clarion West. It is, perhaps, the single most important aspect of a story. If you don’t have clarity, then it is hard for others to even know how to help you fix your story. 

But subtext mouthpieces are almost unbearable to me in fiction. I would rather be totally lost in a story than to have another character explain to me what is happening. That is one of my killswitches. Voiced subtext? Let’s see what other books I want to read instead. 

In order to have clarity in stories, it might be useful to have a Deanna Troi around in an early draft, to make sure a writer knows what the story is trying to say. 

And then the writer can delete her in the next draft, long before showing the story to anyone. 

I hope Deanna Troi’s character grows stronger in the next season, and that she can help add to the tension of the Enterprise’s adventures. But the other characters are charging ahead, becoming real people, while Troi is stuck as a scribble in the margins, a writer’s Note to the Self. 

In the years before going to Clarion West, I would find the blogs written by soon to be Clarionites, and would follow them with devotion. Most bloggers would begin talking about their excitement over being accepted to the workshop, then maybe a few posts from the workshop describing their conversations with famous authors, and finally one post after the workshop saying, “I’m home, I’ll blog about Clarion later.” {Christopher Reynaga who attended Clarion West in 2008, has an awesome description of this on his blog.} But that later usually doesn’t come about, and I was always curious and frustrated by this drop off in blog updates about Clarion. I wanted to know everything about the workshop so I could prepare for going there someday, if I were lucky enough to attend. 

Neile Graham described leaving Clarion West to us as “raw”, and that’s how I felt my last morning at the sorority house. Some people had already left. Others were packing. When my ride to the airport arrived, things happened so quickly. I went out to say hi to the volunteer who would take me to the airport, and suddenly my classmates were around me, bringing out my luggage and helping me load it into the trunk.

How do you leave Clarion West? You don’t. You kind of get taken away from it.

If you’re lucky you’ll have someone like Cassie to help you keep it together with secret tricks about stiff upper lips, Jei and Alex there to hug you and say you’ll see them again, Mark to come out of the house at the last minute and wrap you in a bear hug. And you might have Maria saying she’ll write to you, and Jack saying he’ll see you again. And just when you think you’ve seen everyone for the last time, there will be Cassie and Jei leaning out of an upstairs window, waving to you, making you laugh, and pushing you into tears after all when you thought you’d make it to the airport without crying. 

So not writing about Clarion West after you’ve come back to your other life is a kind of shield, or maybe just a good guard against writing overly emotional blog posts (I have trespassed, alas, and must pay the price). Going back to life post-Clarion is hard. So hard. But it is worthwhile, because you carry your friendships, and your knowledge, and your new stories with you. 

There is a poem by Rilke that wraps in and out of the feelings I have for my Clarion West classmates. The last Friday night party I spent time talking with Jeremy, about going back, and about how we were just beginning to really know each other. There’s this immense feeling of loss, of almost having. 

You the beloved

lost in advance, you the never-arrived,

I don’t know what songs you like most.

No longer, when the future crests toward the present, 

do I try to discern you. All the great

images in me - the landscape experienced far off, 

cities and towers and bridges and un-

suspected turns in the path

and the forcefulness of those lands

once intertwined with gods:

all mount up in me to signify

you, who forever eludes.

Ah, you are the gardens!

With such hope I

watched them! An open window

in the country house -, and you almost

stepped out pensively to meet me. I found streets, -

you had just walked down them,

and sometimes in the merchants’ shops the mirrors

were still reeling from you and gave back with a start

my too-sudden image. - Who knows if the same

bird did not ring through both of us

yesterday, alone, at evening?

         ~ from Uncollected Poems, by Rainer Maria Rilke

At graduation we were given decoder rings that flash a blue light. I thought at first they were meant to guide us through our writing, to help us translate the mysteries and skills of craft into our own stories. 

But the night I arrived home in Alabama after Clarion West, I discovered the real purpose of the decoder ring. I twisted the silver metal until the blue light flashed, hoping it would somehow take us all back to Seattle, back to the workshop and to each other. I stood in front of the mirror in my clothes that smelled of stale airlines, my pigtails I had brushed into place in the bathroom of the sorority house, and hoped that somehow the stories we had been writing would bend reality, and make this strange thing come true. But there was, of course, Of Course, only the blue blinking light.

So real life went on. I took a shower, I changed into clothes different from the ones I had worn the last six weeks. I plugged in my computer and sat at my old desk. 

And there they were. Some traveling, some still in Seattle, some already home. All hearing echoes of each others’ voices, seeing friendly faces in strangers’. Spread out across the hemispheres, but still and always together.  

Another long-missed opportunity that my hometown has offered for years - a science fiction convention! 2011 is the first time that I have known about, and as a result have attended, my local science fiction convention. It is put on by North Alabama Science Fiction Association (NASFA), and has been running for thirty years now. 

On Friday afternoon I picked up my convention badge. Somehow the spellings never quite seem to work out for me. But the alternatives always sound cooler than my real name. 

The Guest of Honor for this year’s convention was Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe! He’s sitting in the middle of the table in this picture taken during the Opening Ceremonies. To the left is Guest of Honor Artist, Lubov. On the left end of the table is Master of Ceremonies, Stephanie Osborn. To the right is Gay Haldeman, Fan Guest of Honor, and her husband, Joe Haldeman. 

Gay and Joe Haldeman were an awesome duo. Gay handled panels with deftness and wit and humor. Lubov kept appearing near me at random times during the convention, always wearing beautiful skirts and tops that seemed like she had plucked them from her paintings. 

And Gene Wolfe! He was delightful. He told wonderful stories and anecdotes on the panels, and a few in the hallways too. He gave a reading from his current project, The Land Across. 

On the last day of the convention, there was an author signing. I had brought my copy of The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I’d been trying to work up the courage to talk to him all weekend. 

He asked me if it was my copy, and he said it was in wonderful condition for such an old edition. He signed my copy of his book, and I gushed for a minute about how much I liked his writing. 

Yay Gene Wolfe! I’m so glad I had the chance to meet him. 

Con*Stellation also had a nice Art Room. There were probably twenty or so artists that had art for sale. They had a great range of art, from amigurumi cthulhu to an original painting by Lubov. 

There was an amazing Martian landscape, “Oasis on Mars”, by F.R. Amthor. I made the mistake of waiting to buy it. On Sunday morning I came to the con ready to take it home, but someone else had purchased it. 

 There was one print that I fell in love with and bought right away (presented here by Furball):

“Hero Worship” by Sarah Clemens.

There’s a little card in the corner of the print that says, “It brings a tear to their eyes to see The Big Guy stomp Tokyo”. I love the wistful look in the dragon’s eyes, and the cunning in the cat’s. 

Each year the convention has a kind of patron saint constellation. This year it was the Corona Borealis. The t-shirt art is done by the same artist every year, and it is a tradition for regular con-goers to wear the t-shirts of Con*Stellations past. One of my favorite past-con t-shirts was an aquamarine shirt with Delphinus. 

In the dealer room, I successfully kept myself from buying a Star Trek plate painted with the Enterprise sailing into a nebula. I don’t have a good place to display it at the moment without the fear of a cat knocking it over. But someday I will have a china hutch with a few antiques I have inherited. And some Star Trek plates. It is going to be awesome. 

I learned how to play the Eleminis  card game, and bought a set to play with my brother. I bought a copy of Tales from a Goth Librarian from Kimberly Richardson. And, I bought these:

Yes. SeaQuest badges. Aren’t they awesome?

Con*Stellation was a great small convention. There weren’t so many people there that I got overwhelmed with agoraphobia (well, except for once during the Friday night mingle session where everyone was in a small room). And the Guests of Honor were always visible hanging out at the panels, in the hallways, on the sofa in the lobby. I talked to some people I had never met before and came away feeling a recharge in my sense of science fiction community.

My dream is to go to the World Fantasy Convention within the next few years, but whether or not I can go, I’m glad that I’ll be able to attend my extremely awesome local science fiction convention. My many thanks to NASFA for all of the great work they did to make the convention happen!

In my application essay to Clarion West, I wrote that I wanted to hangout with Science Fiction writers, because I didn’t know of any in my city. 

Shortly after I came home from Clarion West, I went to a meeting of the North Alabama Science Fiction Association. When I introduced myself as a Science Fiction writer, they told me that NASFA was a group of fans. “That’s cool,” I thought, “I’m a SF fan. This is great. What more could I want?”

And then they gave me the phone number of a person who is the contact for a local Science Fiction writers critique group. 

Yes. There is an in-person critique group for science fiction stories in my city. HUZZAH!!

I had never heard of this group in all of my years of living in Huntsville as a child and young adult, nor in my visits home after I had moved away. But this was my failing - I had thought such a thing was impossible. Surely Science Fiction writing groups only happened in big cities like New York and Seattle. 

At the North Alabama Science Fiction Association meeting that night, they had an auction to raise money for the upcoming convention, Con*Stellation. One of the last items to be auctioned off was a  signed collection of short stories written by the North Alabama Science Fiction and Cake Appreciation Society (NASFCAS). I bid on it and won. 

It took me a few weeks to work up the courage to call the phone number for the writing group. When I finally did, a nice lady named Lin told me about the critique group. Then something awesome happened.

“Your voicemail said that you just got back from Clarion West,” Lin said.

“Yes. It was wonderful.”

“I went to Clarion West, too. Back when they first started,” Lin said. 

Whoa! Not only is there a science fiction critique group in my city, but there’s a writer who went to Clarion West in it! I’ve been living in Huntsville for a year. I could have been working on science fiction stories with a group of talented writers all this time. I could have talked with someone who went to Clarion West and asked questions about the workshop. 

I was too focused on the opportunities that were elsewhere. I was focusing on objects in the distance, and everything close by was blurry. 

But then again, Clarion West gave me some important writerly tools that helped me connect with my local fan group, and then my local crit group:

• The courage to say that I am a science fiction writer, without preparing myself for an imagined rebuke. Mary Robinette Kowal told us not to be ashamed for writing science fiction or for calling ourselves authors. In the past, I probably would have just told the NASFA members that I like reading science fiction. And they would not have known that I write, and would not have given me Lin’s number.

• The need for sharing my stories with others, and getting feedback from them. I’ve always been jittery in workshops. They still make me nervous, but after hearing eighteen people respond to my stories week after week, I began to realize that what they were saying was immensely helpful to my writing. At Clarion West, I began to think of feedback from my peers as part of the writing process - an important step between a somewhat working story and a ready to go out for submission story.

• The sense that hanging out with other writers is part of life. This is more than just the concept that critiquing is useful to writing. It’s more of the feeling of community existing as a real and accessible part of the world, and knowing that you are part of that community. I’ve heard of people attending a convention, or taking a class in dancing, and having that connection, saying “This is my tribe.” Clarion West connected those wires for me, and that’s partly why leaving was so hard. 

Last week was the monthly meeting of the critique group. I revised some stories, and took my little laptop with me so I could share them. The meeting was at a member’s house, and the house was on top of a mountain. 

My car is old, and dying. I only made it a short way up the steep slope, going inches at a time with the engine rumbling, before I pulled off of the road and turned around. 

But I am determined that my car’s inability to climb a mountain will not be a metaphor for my writing. 

The NASFCAS members are holding a public reading next weekend at Con*Stellation. I’m going to be there to listen to their stories and meet them. My tribe is the seventeen other writers I spent six weeks with this summer, and it is also this expanding, enveloping circle of the new writers that I meet. 

After visiting the Ham Radio Festival two weeks ago, my father and I attended the 30 Year Celebration Festival at the US Space and Rocket Center. 

I’ve been going to the Space and Rocket Center since I was a kid. I can remember racing my small plastic space shuttle on the asphalt outside the Space Center, grinding the little plastic wheels on the sidewalk to make the ignition sparks light up.

Living away from my hometown for years, and coming back without having really planned to, has changed my perspective on the city.   

The Space Center was one of the many things I took for granted about living in Huntsville.

The Celebration at the Space Center was huge. There were tons of people everywhere. We had to park in a grassy field and ride a school bus to the Space Center, because the usual parking lot was completely full. 

We picked up free Mission Badge stickers and listened to a band play songs from The Sound of Music as we wandered beneath the Saturn V rocket. Then we lined up and waited for the big deal - an astronaut autograph signing. 

We’d been out and about since 9am, and we were getting a bit tired. But there was a whole separate building of the Space Center we hadn’t been in - a building with a traveling Dinosaur exhibit! So Dad settled into the theatre to watch a short film about the last space shuttle mission, and I walked over to the museum building in search of dinosaur awesomeness.

But the dinosaur exhibit was mainly an excuse for small-child friendly activities, like digging in a sand box to excavate fake dinosaur bones. I spent a minute staring at a cast of the T-Rex Sue, the mainstay of the exhibit, and then wandered down a hallway, hoping for some more grown up dinosaur fun. 

Instead I walked into a hallway that somehow survived the museum’s recent overhaul. The Space and Rocket Center used to be packed full of archival goodness. Amazing objects from the space program. Things that filled you with awe and excitement and the desire to know more.

Doesn’t it just make you want to read up on the history of the space program? Or at least watch Apollo 13?

But I guess models of Space Lab and displays of spacesuits don’t bring in as much money as traveling exhibits. So all of these archival bits were whisked away, and the empty space filled with activities for the very, very young.

Except for one, small hallway, one I spent a lot of time in when I was younger, because it held the only Hugo Award I had ever seen in person.

The one that belonged to Wernher Von Braun. 

Seeing his Hugo Award motivated me to keep writing when I was younger. It let me know that yes, there are other people out there who love these stories of space and science and strange things as much as you do. 

My parents took me to so many kid-friendly museums when I was a child. We went to one nearly every time we took a family vacation.

I cannot remember any of them.

But I remember standing in front of the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian. I remember being awed and frightened by the wingspan of a pterodactyl.

And I remember wandering through the Space and Rocket Center, the models of people in Space Lab and the International Space Station sparking within me a burning desire to leave Earth and go into space.

How can we inspire the next generation of star voyagers if flimsy traveling sideshows push away the images, the excitement of discovery? 

Last Saturday was my father’s birthday, and as per our tradition, we went to the Huntsville Ham Radio festival together. 

This is a picture from the end of the Hamfest on Saturday, as everyone eagerly awaits the prize drawings. 

I studied for and received my Technician Class license in 2008, and I’ve been meaning to upgrade to a General Class License. With a General Class license you can get on the HF bands and talk to people who are much farther away. 

We went to a panel for YLs (Young Ladies), and I was the only Technician Class level person in the room. A few others were General Class, but most were the highest level - Extra Class.

This calls for action.

I’ve already printed out the questions for the General Class exam.

I’m going to level up. 

I’m in love with the aesthetics of old technology. All things Heathkit make my heart go pitter patter.

But I don’t want to just be in love with the visual, the appearance of old technology. I want to be able to work with it, get inside, know how it functions. 

At the Hamfest every year there are women selling jewelry, and every year I walk past those booths. I like jewelry. Jewelry is fun and great. But at a technology festival I don’t want to be part of the pileup to look at bracelets and earrings.

But this time I broke my promise for a moment and stopped to look at some lovely earrings made out of capacitors. (I didn’t take a picture, but they looked similar to this.)

Very cool. But the thing is, these earrings don’t DO anything. They’re made out of capacitors, but they might as well be made out of beads. More aesthetics without function. Without meaning.

My challenge to myself this year is to write more science into my science fiction. I’m gong to take classes, read books, and have a general Seeking Mind when it comes to finding out more about the technology behind the beautiful. 

I want to write a story that my second week Clarion West instructor, Nancy Kress, would consider viable. I’ll keep writing my weird-reality fantasy stories, but I’m going to regularly push myself to write science based stories as well. 

The only idea for a novel that I’ve ever been excited about has tons of technology in it. I’m going to give myself a few years with short stories to get all of the mechanics down, and I want to be ready with more techno savvy by the time I’m ready to start my novel. 

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