InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Snap into a Slim Jim!"

The All-Judging Butterfly (poisontaster) wrote,
@ 2009-09-23 10:39:00

Current mood:	amused
Entry tags:	the evil overlords strike again, the flist knows all, writing woes

Seek My Source For Some Definitive
A random spate of thoughts before I dive back into editing:

Does anyone know of any alternate history books (novels) where the South didn't lose the Civil War and, instead, the CSA and USA exist side by side? I don't really want something where the CSA took over the entire US; just something where America was split internally into two separate countries. I'm rewatching the old North and South miniseries (not the BBC one, the Patrick Swayze one) and (my issues with it aside) I'm really intrigued by that notion and what stories would come out of it. But I have no idea if any stories like that exist or where to find them, if they do.

There's posts in meta_lj and announcements about a security breach on LJ from embedded media. Some/Most embedded media has been disabled. Other LJ clones and/or forks like DW have not been affected.

Writerly Neuroses: So, the way I have AKB plotted out, there should be about 75 chapters total. I haven't announced that anywhere or posted that on the story because I wanted to give myself the leeway to fudge, if it became obvious that another chapter was needed (which has happened often in this particular story). At the same time, I find myself really LOATHE to add more chapters, because 75 is such a nice round number and I'm OCD enough to not want to end on "an ODD number" (horrors!) like 76 or 78. *facepalms* This is not productive.

Okay, back to the grindstone.

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yonmei
2009-09-23 04:13 pm UTC (link)

Does anyone know of any alternate history books (novels) where the South didn't lose the Civil War and, instead, the CSA and USA exist side by side?

This is not a recommendation, exactly, because I loathe the man (and the later novels in the sequence have writerly problems all their own) but Orson Scott Card set up more or less that situation in his Alvin Maker sequence - except that he puts the split earlier - the American Revolution didn't wholly succeed: the South is still a British colony governed by a king, and the North is a smaller United States of America.

The series has writerly problems all its own (as I recall, the main plot doesn't really get going till book 3, while a lot of the interesting setup happens in book 1, and there are not short books) besides the overwhelming problem for me that Card's homophobia makes his SFnal writing hard to read and, more and more, he seems to have been writing to promote Mormon values first and think about the story later. I stopped reading about then, so I'm not sure if he ever does get around to explaining how his changed-history works, or if he just leaves it as "this is how it happened in thisverse", but there it is, for what it's worth.

...not the Confederacy, though: it seems to happen earlier than the US Civil War.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	poisontaster 2009-09-23 04:16 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah... I heard about Card in the context of his homophobia and other Issues without having ever read any of his books and now, I'm loathe to pick up anything by him just on GP. I'm still intensely disillusioned by finding out what an asshat Will Shetterly is, after having read--and loved--his work in my childhood, without borrowing trouble, you know? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

yonmei
2009-09-23 07:33 pm UTC (link)

Oh, I know.

I became a fan of Orson Scott Card as a writer on picking up Songmaster in my school library (my school was used to be girls-liberal-private and at the time I started there, had very recently gone mixed-conservative-comprehensive - the school library, and a very few of the older teachers, were the best heritage left from the liberal days) - and that was back in 1982, or thereabouts. I didn't stop being a fan - I think I'd read literally every word of Card's fiction writing, and a fair chunk of his non-fiction, up until about 2000. I'm always a few years behind because I read things in paperback or get them out of the library - I've always been too poor to be able to routinely buy new hardbacks. (I did fall out of love with the Alvin Maker sequence, before I officially stopped reading him.)

Anyway. I had well over 20 years of being a fan of his writing, though I half-knew we didn't agree politically (other people had mentioned he was a bit of a homophobe, and I'd shrugged it off, because, well... I loved his writing), until he posted that long rant about gay marriage in 2004 (seems to have been inspired by his attending the marriage of Janis Ian and Patricia Snyder in Canada in August 2003, as much as by the change to the law in Massachusetts) and I found it hard to read: it made me feel literally ill the first time through. There's homophobia - my mum is homophobic, and we still can communicate - and there's wingnut insane sociopathic phobia.

And ever since, I think, I've been deconstructing his writing and trying to understand his views and trying to figure out how a writer I loved so much could be like that. It's pretty much what I imagine a homophobe must go through on discovering someone they liked and admired is gay...

But my need to do this rests squarely on that 20+ years of fandom before I read his essay on same-sex couples getting married. And why give yourself the aggravation? I'll never read any of John C. Wright's books now (or Will Shetterly's) just because of that.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	yonmei 2009-09-23 07:36 pm UTC (link)
	At the same time, I find myself really LOATHE to add more chapters, because 75 is such a nice round number and I'm OCD enough to not want to end on "an ODD number" (horrors!) like 76 or 78. facepalms This is not productive. nodsnods I pattern out my novels well in advance, and it can really disturb me if I have to add an extra chapter I hadn't thought of. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	poisontaster 2009-09-24 12:24 am UTC (link)
	I usually work from a beat sheet, but I can't plan too much of the story in advance or I lose the creative spark from having written so much of it out already. (Reply to this) (Parent)