: More thoughts about writing fiction

Not much going on that anyone would find of interest.  I bagged out of the yearly trip to Eastern Oregon because of gas prices, fuel pumps, and lack of interest in camping during a rainy year in mediocre weather.  Sigh.

I think that I am going to send a link to this piece to JMG at the Dreamwidth Place, because it really does talk about the nature of the Haliverse and concurrent views that JMG and I hold about certain things.  I think that I might even have to split it up into several posts just to make sure that I have my arms all the way around the philosophy and techniques going into the writing.

All this thinking came around to a couple of books that I have had the leisure time to read now that I am a social-security-sucking boomer.  These books are:

S.T. Joshi: H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West

John Michael Greer:  Retrotopia

John Michael Greer: Stars Reach

William Gibson: The Peripheral

What these have in common is a little harder to come to grips with.  Retrotopia and Stars Reach are JMG’s early forays into deindustrial fiction.  William Gibson does the same thing from a different angle.  Joshi talks about how people view the interplay between progress, philosophy, and human nature in his book about Lovecraft’s auto-didact (1)philosophy.

These books taken together with the Weird of Hali universe have given me the setting and the way of viewing what I see as the future disassembly of the technical artifice that we call western civilization.

The setting of the Weird of Hali provides a way to write about this in a manner that becomes impersonal in a sense, it isn’t our world.  It is kinda like our world and while I like the idea of ice gods striding across the sky, I am too much of a skeptic or just haven’t ingested enough mushrooms to achieve this.  So it is a place where you can explore things with enough remove to let you peer into possibilities without freaking yourself or others out.

The settings of Retropia, Stars Reach, and the Peripheral show me that there may well be things that people can recognize on the other side of what I think that the future will bring us.  They talk about technology and its impact.  What folks don’t want to come to grips with is how technology creates an artificial environment and thus altered selective pressures for people as individuals or people as societies.(2)  How people act within that artificial human environment is an interesting mental exercise.  In a sense, by thinking about this, you are dabbling in the age-old debate between free will and predestination.  In a sense the concept of technological choice is in fact a evolutionary adaptation strategy for individuals

Finally, the books themselves and their “structure” have given me something to think about concerning how I best can write.  Joshoi writes “BIG” sections.  They are expansive and detailed.  Greer writes medium sized sections, not that many of them, and they are pretty wide ranging and can contain a bunch of sub-threads.  Gibson writes itty-bitty sections, addressing single vignettes of plot and letting these smallish staccato bits of prose move things forward.

I am writing in Gibson’s mode.  I just find this suits my writing habits and my way of looking at things better.  I am essentially trying to weave two different points of view together in a system which is a point-counterpoint style of writing where two views are superimposed.

I see Joshi and Greer more traditional in their approach, Gibson is a product of television and short attention spans.  I was not immune.

So, I’ll continue to write and post.  I just finished chapter seventeen and I posted chapter four yesterday.

https://lloigor.dreamwidth.org/