beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I think the biggest reason I keep arguing with textbooks (and probably other sorts of texts for that matter) is they seem to be talking to someone else. I want to tell the book off, say "I'm not that person you think you're talking to! And I don't want to be them! They seem to be very dumb!" And then it keeps on thinking I'm that dumb people, and it gets Very Annoying.

Texts that think women need talking down to, for example. Or that what we all really want is... well, anything aimed at 'all' is likely to miss this one.


Sometimes it's a bit literal that favourite shows think the audience is someone else entirely. Quite often you can tell from the advertising. Or someone says in interviews or something.

I very rarely get the feeling that yes, I am exactly the audience they were hoping for. Shows I love most have that feeling. And then sometimes they do something so wildly I'd-never-want-that I end up feeling... dumped, really. They just threw me over for a different audience. No fair!

Fanfic always loves me back.
Well, mostly.
Well, when it doesn't hate me and want me and all those like me to die slowly along with our 'ships and favourite characters.
... Fanfic is passionate and fairly specific about what readers it wants.
Fanfic is also most often helpful about giving specific signals so you can figure it out.
Much less often getting the walked-into-the-wrong-bar feeling that way.

Today: Dreamed of a combination of Cybermen and Mr Freeze, where cryo corpses were interfaced with computer systems in increasingly sophisticated ways, and eventually got smart enough to start up a war and, quite often, win.

Of course I get to dream half of it as a cryo corpse.

One of the better preserved ones, with a brain and smarts and stuff. A bad prep - meaning most of them - makes more of a zombie, but a good prep and some stylin interface technology and a decent supply of freeze crystals and you're more of a liche lord, boss of all the other cryo corpses, and super smart.

Which sounds like fun, aside from the whole thing where there's no touching and everybody's scared of you except the dead, and they're not big on personality.

I, being awkward, was a cryo-corpse who was still fighting on the side of the warm-alive. But the cold-alive would sometimes obey me, and they shared their freezecrystal supplies and stuff.

The suits gave you information on technology and software, the original brain retained all the expertise of a lifetime, and the colder you got the more your IQ went up at the expense of your emotions/empathy/wisdom. Temperature was sort of controllable, if you wanted to risk thawing. You could end up zombie-dead from trying to stay too emotionally warm.

I think I like this setup. There's all kinds of angst potential right there.


There was also a guy who was inventing the Matrix.
He looked like Oz, and was quirky and cool, but not in a frozen kind of way.
His in-game avatar was feminine, and curvy, and veryvery hot.
He didn't hate meatspace, he just didn't see it as a particularly privileged form of interaction.

The machine-mind interface technology was there, and without wires too, all lights instead. (Which is why the cryo-corpses glowed light blue, because that in no way had to do with how movies always do that to cold things.) It was just the software to build up a convincing virtuality that was a bit lacking. So this guy spent a lot of time on it, and his particular corner of the virtual world was very convincing to the senses indeed. Of course the bit of it I saw was mostly a bed, but *really not complaining*.

The last complication was the BSG thing where those already interfaced with the computers could go wander around computer networks real easy, and the cry-corpses with their brains chilled to superfast were considerably better at it than the warm-alive. Faster, anyway, the warm still had the edge in creativity.

So me, stuck in between the two armies, I could be stuck in the suit being miserable, stuck in the suit being coldly intellectual, or wandering a virtuality which wasn't allowed to be networked and only had the one other inhabitant. But if I got warm enough to care about that, I could probably start to rot.

Dilemma much? I *like* it!



The war was about resources - the warm-alive reserved the right to decide who got cryo-frozen on death, who got the best prep, who got a steady crystal supply. Warm-alive basically wanted to control cold-alive from creation to grave. Cold-alive only needed the crystals, but they needed them steadily. Any break in supply sent them one step closer to zombie. Chilling colder could compensate for some loss of faculties, but made them less themselves. And from the cold-alive perspective all those warm-alive fools were sloppy, inefficient, and entirely too dismissive of the predicament. So they tried to take over the relevant facilities. Trouble then being the warm-alive saw it as the cold-alive taking over their chance at immortality, and that's going to piss anyone off. Plus there were the factions that saw them as abominations of nature and stuff. So there was fighting, and once there starts being fighting there starts being more and more reasons to keep fighting. And also every time the warm-alive lost someone they had to decide between cryo-freeze and possibly adding to the enemy army or letting them rot and betraying them. Because from a warm-alive perspective the *real* thing the cryo-preservation was for was to keep their people ready and waiting for the resurrection. And the cold-alive didn't like that idea at all. But the warm-alive were, on the whole, convinced that they'd like it fine once it was done to them, and kept experimenting.

Irreconcilable differences much?


This is a fun setup. I'm keeping this.

... reading/seeing lots of stuff that didn't quite work. And also the DVD commentaries on it.

1) Never, ever dump your beta readers half way through. Really. No matter the time pressure, work produced without the beta (or writing group who fill that function) will not actually be the same as work they've had a look at. And, generally, it will be worse.

2) The sex to plot ratio is important. Alter the ratio and you alter the genre. Not all your readers will follow you.

3) Payoff whatever you setup. Even if you personally don't think it's the main point of the story, some of your readers are sitting there patiently waiting to see what happens next, and if they never do they just won't like it. Plus, you already did the tricky setup work, so don't waste it.

3a) Payoff precisely what you setup. If your payoff is reallyreally cool but actually belongs in another plot and/or genre then you either need a different ending or to rewrite the whole story.

3b) Emotional setup is more important than plot setup. AKA the Blade thing. Maybe you've spent the whole film saying how the vampire god is going to be some kickass monster whirlwind blood storm. You've also spent it *showing* that there's this intense connection-rivalry between two mostly-human-looking characters. If you turn one of the characters into someone/something else before the final fight? You just lost your payoff. Stick to the intense character stuff, ignore the amounts already spent on CGI.

3c) Payoff at the end. Start small and build. If you're going to wrap one plot strand early, some people will lose interest. That means if you think of the action as just a way of getting the romance together you better be really sure your romance readers won't be put off by all that action and your action readers won't be skimming the rest of that boring romance.

3ci) The coolest bit of the movie had better be the payoff. If the cool bits lack setup nobody is waiting for them and you've just wasted the cool. If the cool bits lack consequences they're an ending or an irrelevance. And if the cool bits can be pulled from the movie entirely without a ripple, you probably shouldn't be spending all the money right there.

3cii) Once you've done all the payoff, the story is over. This is probably why everyone goes home, gets medals, and gets married, but they rarely have kids. Because that would be the beginning of a whole other story. It isn't a case of 'happily ever after', it's just if you went one more page complications would once again ensue.

3d) Some things are not payoff to anything. Maybe it's really important to you to show the sidekick gets a promotion after they go home and meet their childhood sweetheart and build a house of their own. Is it important to the story? If not, the book finished already and you just don't want to turn out the lights. If so, all the sidekick fans will kick you if you leave it out. The balance is tricky.





... any more for any more?

I started this thinking about a particular book series that I'm not going back to, then it wandered into movies. The movie stuff I mostly learned from DVD commentaries and deleted scenes because the makers figured it before they released it.

Most useful DVD extras anyone?
Best commentary tracks?