Work is the strangest thing

[desperance]

As we know, O internets, I don't do worldbuilding posts any more than I do writing process posts generally, because my process is far too scatty and various and internal to be of any practical use to anyone else, and there is no point inciting the trolls to point and cry "You're not doing it right!"

However. Every writer is an egotist, even those of us riddled with self-contempt; it's all "Look at me, look at me, see what I can do!"

And at the moment, I confess, I am just intrigued by what I'm doing, because, y'know. I do not do it this way.

Writers do tend to be conservative in that regard, it's why there is so very much talk about process; each of us finds a way that works for us, that processes idea into finished book, and then we hold to that because, y'know. Some other way might not work. We most of us have a history of failed effort behind us before that el-Alamein moment, the first success that turned the juggernaut around. Extremophiles will spend the next thirty or forty years writing on blue-lined Oxford paper with a Mont Blanc fountain pen, in a particular shade of ink, at a certain desk in a certain library window; or in emacs on a Pentium II machine running a particular Linux distro from '98; or lying on a daybed in the dark murmuring to a microphone that slurrups their words away to Dragon software so that they need never set finger to keyboard, because too close an interface with technology would only kill their muse. Or whatever. Superstitions accrete, around a writer who's actually managed to get to the end of a book; we're all scared above all that we'll never manage it again.

I'm really not an extremophile. I've changed my process again and again, as technology has changed around me. My first novels were written and rewritten on a typewriter; my first computer was an Apricot, running its own personal flavour of command-line software. WYSIWYG was a dream and a rumour; colour meant amber-on-black as against the common green. Every PC was that awful dreary dirty beige. Then I was an MS-DOS fan, running WordPerfect 4.2 and loving it; then I went over to Windows, and hated it, and used it anyway; then I discovered Linux, and loved it, and I love it yet. For the last ten years I've been writing in TextMaker, which is an office suite from a German company that's lightning-fast and rock-solid and cross-platform and Word-compatible and not Word, and I adore everything about it (especially that last bit). I used to write only at home, at my desk, it was my place of work; then I got the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection, and discovered mobility, and did most of my work in the Silence Room at the Lit and Phil. Now I'm in California, and sometimes I go to the cafe and sometimes I stay at home, and it works either way. So yup: I'll change my hardware and my software and my habits, as and when it seems sensible or necessary.

But the internal process, the way a book happens, that shift from idea to expression: I'm not sure how much that's changed. Since I started building worlds, I'm not sure that it's changed at all. I buy books, I watch some TV, I browse the internet; mostly I think superficially about story and character and stuff, and the world kind of builds itself beneath that in a semi-conscious semi-automatic way. (I told you this would be no help to anyone else; sorry 'bout that.) And if it's a big project I always think that it would be good and fun to write short stories and YA and so forth in the same setting, but I almost never do, because the book's the thing, and sooner than I probably ought to I start actually to write it, and that's where I make the firm decisions about how the world works, right there in the text, on the page and underlying it, and then I know; and by the time I'm done with that book or series it's time to move on to the next big thing.

Aaaaand then, now, there's Steampunk!Mars. And it's all ... different. Partly it's because nobody is going to commission this, and lack of contract = lack of commitment, apparently; I've been working to commission for so long, trying to work without one I turn out to be a butterfly, skipping from thing to thing and never settling, never certain. So I started a YA and a Golden Age mystery in parallel, and I wrote a short story, and I'm working on Kipling which looks like a novella now, and and and. And of course I'm going to SETI and chatting up the planetary geologists and reading the internets and buying books and maps and seizing on whatever my friends send me (did you hear about the vasty river they've found on Mars? - I did, courtesy of jeanvieve this morning) and so on and so forth - but the real worldbuilding is happening in those stories, as I write them. In all those stories, simultaneously. And each of them is feeding the others, in a kind of mutual discovery/explication process. The short stuff particularly seems to be the way I'm putting the world together, making sure it works, getting the structure solid so that the novels can run like rollercoasters and not topple into the sand.

And I've never done it this way before, and it's fascinating. And, perhaps, necessary. Which is why I have both my agents jumping up and down saying "Write this! Write this now!" about the mystery*, and yet I am still stubbornly working on Kipling. Here is where I'm learning how the transit process works between the Three Worlds, what the questions are, where Occam's Razor slices down the fault of probability in re who built the canals, the starships, the world.

It wasn't me. That may be the only thing that hasn't changed. Everybody else put this together, I just unearthed it. UnMarsed it? Something. I feel more like an archaeologist than an architect, brushing the dust away and of course it's there, sound and structural and waiting like a Big Dumb Object for someone to rattle around in it.


*They are also saying "We have no idea if we can sell this, we just want to read it!" - but hey. I can work with that.