love scenes and stuff

Whenever I come to the romantic or sexy (or violent) scenes, I always start wondering if the level is right. Today's is pretty tame and it could be a scene in a young adult book. Sometimes I wonder if they aren't too tame for an adult book. Certainly they would make it more racy on television or a movie, these days, but reading doesn't really equate to a visual portrayal and I trust the readers to fill in more blanks in a sex scene than modern movie makers seem to think their audiences are capable of achieving.

More often in this book I have found myself taking stuff out as being too over the top. If I wouldn't say the word aloud, I don't think I should put it in writing either, for starters. It's possible to say a lot without using those words. I've played with some interesting sex scenes using classic metaphors in tidal waves and sweeping storms and the rise and fall of empires, but really, it's usually enough to get the couple started and encounter them later. Adult readers can fill in the blanks happily so long as the scene is friendly.

The violent sex scenes definitely don't need any details and I find myself wondering if I should change them to nonsexual violence rather than even imply the sexual nature of the violence. I do in anything young adult. i don't write young adult dramas about people coping with horror; I like fun adventures. The propensity for sexual violence on the tv shows (never shown, sometimes implied even when it doesn't happen, especially in advertisements for the episode) is plenty and too much as it is. Still, I've included some in Cerel Gold. Candice's past is all about every kind of violence I could think of and it's only a matter of how much to imply, how much to describe, and the tone to take in the description.

In the case of violence and generating either sympathy or horror or other reactions, I think there is a kind of magic required, and what we think will work may have the opposite effect. I think a certain degree of coldness and unsympathy in the writer, being mean to our characters as I've heard it described, will actually get more sympathy from a reader, whereas some of the best horrors are very amusing or sympathetic in tone. I haven't found the magic, but I keep trying.

For now, I've finished a couple of quilt tops and now have much quilting to do but neither that nor blogging will get done for about a week and a half, so no posts meanwhile. Let your imagination play in other worlds but come back in a couple of weeks!

tension and dialog

Cerel is obviously heavy in dialog, probably too much so, but for this draft it's a good way to practice dialog and making it interesting. The scene just posted went through a lot of revision, going from a tame dialog to an expression of tense emotions, weariness, arguments, changing perceptions. At least that was what I was aiming for, though it's hard to ever be sure that readers see what I tried to present. I suspect I still need to work on some of the word choices. What words make a sentence sarcastic or angry rather than merely factual? It's not something I've ever found guidance for. Mostly I've done it through side comments and physical actions, although I want to do more of that, too. Anger through shorter sentences is one of the few "rules" I know. Terse, less philosophical content in an argument, but what if the argument is philosophical in nature? And each character has their own speach patterns, though sometimes I'm not sure even I could define them well unless I've exaggerated them. How does the pattern change for accusation, anger, weariness... I've made some stabs at all of them here. Does it work?

A career suggestion

Between ads, census, chance encounters, and young people at work, I think a great career choice these days would be geospatial information system stuff, especially if the student combined it with studies of communications (journalism perhaps) and maybe a regional minor. In the end, the region doesn't matter; it's just a way to learn how to apply the GIS stuff to something substantial, but with all the GPS, census, weather, and other data being collected every which way around us, any company with sense is going to be hiring the GIS analyst type who can make order of the data. And they'll be looking for people who can communicate the technical gibberish to customers, sales people, and managers quickly and effectively. It's a rare skill combination with endless demand soon to come.

characters

I considered, especially on days when keeping the prisoners all straight becomes hard, or when I can't quite figure how much and what to do with everyone, of having fewer prisoners to accompany Candice. Part of the reason for adding more in the first place was to offer contrast between scenes, not only in the content, like how the Cerel treat the military or govies vs Candice, or how they treat men and women, but in the texture and flow. Many scenes with Candice are one-on-one discourses, but as fun as that is to write and for some people to read, the reader needs a break. According to one study, we have about a ten minute attention span, after which point the topic can stay the same but something needs to change. In writing, that can be pace, mood, the flow of a discussion, a shift between dialog and narrative, scene description and action, emotion and physical activity. I figure one way to achieve the same, and give opportunity for those kinds of changes, is to have scenes focused on Candice and some Cerel, and scenes with several characters chiming in. The group scenes can be messy, but if they come out well, they can add a richness of texture that I don't think scenes with fewer prisoners could achieve.