Ruminations Part 4 – I can’t talk to women anymore

(This post originated as “Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 5 – I can’t talk to women anymore”, but I’m tired of the sensitivity reader thread, aren’t you?)

My first rumination can be found at Ruminations Part I – “Your eyes are completely healed”
My second at Ruminations Part 2 – Numbers lead to informed decisions
Rumination Part 3-1 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 1
Rumination Part 3-2 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 2
Rumination Part 3-3 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 3 – I Take a “Writing the Other” class
Rumination Part 3-4 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 4 – Is your character POC or POM?

It started long ago, I’m sure. A slow dawning, a creeping awareness.

I’ve thought about it for a while. It started innocuously; a character in one of my works-in-progress knows what other characters think, how they’ll respond, what they’ll do.

Study consciousness and this ability shows up as Theory of Mind. The literature is full of it. While not calling it telepathy or mind-reading or whatever, most people do it automatically because it’s part of how we function in society; we hear something in someone’s voice and know they’re having a bad day. The truth is we’re assuming they’re having a bad day because having a bad day would cause our voices to sound the way theirs does (if you’re ravenously interested in exploring this, read my Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History. It’s rife with this stuff).

This works pretty well as long as you’re in the same cultural group as the other person.

Fails miserably when you’re from different cultural groups, which is why well done First Contact stories are wonderful reads.

The Foreigner, the Other, the Stranger
I mention off and on about the technology Susan and I created (it’s documented in that Reading Virtual Minds book I mention above). Give it a some digital communication – an email, a company organ, a business brief, whatever – and it can determine how psycho-emotively close the author feels to their reader (just one of its many abilities). One thing we discovered quick was lots of business communications authors viewed their audiences adversarially at best and as completely alien at worst (the technology provided suggestions for both tightening and loosening that bond).

The technology broke social distance – the bond between author and audience – into five degrees of separation: Otherness, Strangerness, Difference, Sameness, and Selfness. Phrasically these would be:

  • Selfness – I/me
  • Sameness – We/us
  • Difference – I/we, you/them
  • Strangerness – Us, Not-Us
  • Otherness – I/we/us, WTF?

Most fictional aliens are variants of recognizable earth lifeforms. That’s why most StarTrekTM aliens had two arms, two legs, a head, eyes, ears, nose, mouth… Didn’t matter where the aliens originated, they pretty much had the same bilateral symmetry humans have. Want to indicate the alien was nasty? Make him bilaterally non-symmetric. No Borg (except the Queen Mum and 7of9) had bilateral symmetry. They all had some kind of projection coming out of them somewhere or a huge prosthetic attached somewhere (simply put, they were out-of-balance). The Queen Mum and 7of9 were exceptions because their purpose (scriptwise) was to interact with and/or seduce humans (a different kind of assimilation, if you will).
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Search Chapter 14 – Wednesday, 23 January 1974

Search is loosely based on a real incident. The incident remains, the story is greatly different.

Enjoy. And remember, it’s still a work in progress. These chapters are rough drafts. I completed a rough draft of the entire novel on 1 June 2021, ~ 8:30pmET. It’s ~103k words, 42 chapters. I mention in earlier posts “…it seems I’ll complete the novel this time. We’ll see.”

It’s seen and done.

Read Search Chapter 13

 

Search Chapter 14 – Wednesday, 23 January 1974

Stephanie sat in Gio’s dorm lounge and looked up as he came down the stairs. “Did Jeri talk to you yet?”

“About what?”

Stephanie rolled her eyes. “You want me to say it?”

“Yes, in fact. That way we’ll both know what we’re talking about.”

She whispered, “About me being pregnant.”

“Are you sure you’re pregnant?”

“Didn’t you tell me I was pregnant?”

“I’m not you. Do you know you’re pregnant?”

“Is two months late pregnant enough for you?”

“Are you regular?”

She looked at the worn carpet and shook her head. “Talk about conversations I never thought I’d have with my best friend’s boyfriend. Yes. I’m regular.”

“And what do you want to do about it?”

“I want to get rid of it. What do you think I want to do about it? Aren’t you the voodoo man? Aren’t you suppose to know these things?”

Something Gio’s grandfather said echoed back at him. Do not do what you’re not asked to do? Was that it? Something about asking people three times? To make sure they understood what they were asking for? “Let’s go outside.”

“Don’t you want a jacket?”

“No need.”

They stood in the damp, ocean-filled, mid-January cold.

“What do you want me to do? Specifically. Don’t mince words, don’t speak in metaphors, use clear, plain, direct English. Tell me exactly what you want me to do for you, okay?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Okay.”

She closed her eyes and shivered. “Well, go ahead.”

Wet, heavy snow fell. A flake, then two, then more. They brushed her shoulders like epaulets and gave her a white, crystalline crown.

“Go ahead and what?”

“I said I’m pregnant. Do something about it.”

“What, specifically, do you want me to do?”

“Can you make me…you know…un-pregnant?”

“Un-pregnant? Never heard it called that before.”

“Nobody knows. I haven’t told anybody except you and Jeri. Can you take care of it for me?”

He stood still and stared but his eyes woudln’t focus. He felt…he sensed…movement. Felt himself moving. Something. Something not sensed since childhood. Since Grandpa.

No, not moving. He stood still, his eyes on Stephanie. She moved.

He widened his gaze. Everything moved. Everything but him. He was the center? Everything happened around him?

He shook his head, no.

Too solipsistic, that.

No, he also moved. Differently.

But he stood still.

And moved faster than light.

Parts of him separated and flowed around Stephanie, whirled around her, ghosts made of wind.

He shimmered. He held it within.

I remember.

I remember.

Stephanie stared back at him. “What do you mean, no? You’re not going to help me?”

The shimmer focused. The ghosts made of wind. It collected on them. They flew off, showed him things. He watched through their eyes.

“Donnie suspects.”

“What?”

He looked at Stephanie through someone else’s eyes. Saw not-his hand reach out, cup a breast, tweak a nipple.

“He’s noticed your bras are filling out more.”

“What?”

“Especially that black one with the nipples cut out.”

Stephanie put her arms over her chest and mashed herself down. “How do you – ”

Another ghost, another body. “Yeah, he even told some people at his club – he goes to Myopia, right? – about it. Said your cups runneth over. They wanted to know if he was going to help you get rid of it. He laughed.”

Her face reddened. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook as the cold penetrated her bones.

His head wagged from side to side.

“You did that before, when you found the speedtrap on the way home. What’s going on?”

His eyes closed. He swiveled his head, one ear forward then the other, a blind man seeking out the source of a sound.

“He said you might be interested in doing a party. Entertaining all six of them. He’d get a cut, of course. Soemthing…a finder’s fee?”

She shrieked.

“They have a standing suite at the Suisse Chalet in Danvers. Party there at least once a month. He said he thought you were ready.”

She sat in the slush at her feet. “Ready?”

He felt himself slowing, returning to the earth, returning to the cold, returning to the wet, heavy snow falling, melting on him as soon as it touched, his ghost-bodies came back to him. One entered him. He doubled over with the impact.

He heard his grandfather whisper to him. “Lento.” Slow.

He opened the shimmer, gave the bodies a point of entry.

His grandfather whispered. “Esatto, Gio. Come quello.” That’s right, Gio. Like that.

The ghost-bodies entered him. Shared their information. Showed their travels. He focused on the red-faced woman-child before him.

“Something about being double-vagged? Not sure what that is, really. Seems to involve acrobatics or flexibility, something like that.”

Stephanie screamed and ran.

Gio’s legs folded under him. He sat in the snow. A raven landed in front of him, cocked its head right, left, right again, seemed to nod and flew off.

Two dorm mates found him curled into a ball quaking in the snow.

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Opanina

Opanina the Opossum needs food.

All animals forage, and we tend towards kindness to The Old Ones when we’re able.

It’s that “pay it forward” thing we do.

The Wild brings us such joy due to its simplicity.

All things are in balance.

Until Man appears.

Man does not understand balance.

I’ve previously mentioned the construction going on the far side of our wood, most recently in They ain’t tiny little raccoons no more and The Flock.

Said construction is affecting our little piece of The Wild. More creatures show up daily, often multiple times each day, foraging for anything we might leave about.

Whatever we do leave about is gone quickly.

And there are squabbles now. There always were and they were seldom and few. Now we hear them daily.

It is birthing time and there are young ones to feed; Raccoon, Opossum, Coyote, Rabbit, and others.

It is not our duty to feed them all. It is our pleasure to do what we can.

For The Wild.

Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style”

I’ve been using the so-called Little Book for years but only as a reference, not a resource. That changed recently when I’d finished editing a work-in-progress, The Inheritors, and had some spare cycles.

 
Definitely keep The Elements of Style handy as a resource. Keep it right next to your keyboard. I have physical copies near all my workplaces and electronic copies on all my devices. Because my memory could drain wet freshly cooked pasta, I pick it up several times a day and often for the same things.

Hopefully things will stick now that I’ve read it. (adding this note two days after writing this post. happy to report yes, things stuck. yeeha!)

The Elements of Style is rich in examples. My ninety-two page edition (complete with index) is now half dog-eared with notes waiting to be transcribed.

Yes, most people I know are familiar with Section I: Elementary Rules of Usage; when to use a comma, when to use a semicolon, how to form possessives, participle phrases, and all that grammar stuff.

Good! That’s what I used it for. Until this reading.

Please give yourself the opportunity to read the Introduction (it’s short and rich). Take a tour through Section II: Elementary Principles of Composition. Meander through Sections III and V: A Few Matters or Form and An Approach to Style respectively. Stroll through Section IV: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused (made myself an autocorrect list out of these).

Go slow, look around, and enjoy. The Little Book is a book mechanic’s toolchest. Get your hands dirty. It’s worth it.

Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 4 – Is your character POC or POM?

My first rumination can be found at Ruminations Part I – “Your eyes are completely healed”
My second at Ruminations Part 2 – Numbers lead to informed decisions
Rumination Part 3-1 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 1
Rumination Part 3-2 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 2
Rumination Part 3-3 is Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 3 – I Take a “Writing the Other” class

One member of a writing group told me they read a story in which a Magical Voodoo person saves the day.

The class I mentioned in Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 3 – I Take a “Writing the Other” class spent time talking about Magical Negroes and specifically Stephen King’s use of a Magical Negro in The Green Mile.

Both statements were examples of ignorance at play to me.
Continue reading “Ruminations Part 3 – Sensitivity Readers, Part 4 – Is your character POC or POM?”