Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

#WritingWonders 8/2: How much do you know about your side characters prior to the first draft?

Usually quite a lot. Unless they're mere voices heard in passing, I have quite a lot of trouble conjuring up a character without getting to know them in my head first, and quite a few details come out in that process. Plus, I use a worldbuild-first process, and so many of my side characters were well-developed in the course of that.

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders 8/1: If you could hang out with one of your side characters for a day, who would you choose? Why?

Elíne Septimiel. Because I'm practically guaranteed to have something to talk about with a fellow bibliophile, and since she's First Reader at what is almost certainly the galaxy's largest library, she definitely counts.

(As she's been known to point out, "It does not say Repository of _Some_ Knowledge above my door.")

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 31: Does your antagonist love anyone that's still alive and in their life?

"I don't know. But I hope so. I truly do."

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 30: Does your MC have a good fashion sense?

"Well, I -"

"Yes, she does. Not that you'd know it, most of the time."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Jynne, you'd wear your Service reds to bed, if you could. Probably everywhere else, too, if we'd let you."

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 2: Antagonist POV: How do you feel about what you do?

In two parts (1/2):

"Just tryin' to live, aina? The corps and the rich'd not miss it, and they make all this stuff on the backs of us-kind anyway. If'n I take some of it back from, who's to say I'm not the right one -"

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 28: Is your MC ever minorly inconvenienced by illness?

No and yes.

Not directly, because she has a top-of-the-line artificial immune system. Regular illness just bounces off it.

But it's a top-of-the-line AIS with the Constabulary first-responder, hazmat, and anti-bioterror packages installed, so when some new disease is borne in by a ship from somewhere off the main routes, however mild...

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 27: Does your MC respect authority or buck it?

Respect it, by and large - because her authorities are so in the sense that respects the Latin roots.

I wrote more about this a while back here:

https://eldraeverse.com/2021/04/07/author-on-authority/

But the short form is that the local kind of authority is "being, in context, the kind of leader worthy of being followed", which she respects.

Anyone who has to say "respect mah authoritah" obviously has none - and so need not be respected.

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 26: Antagonist: Do you see what you do as evil?

"Yah, for certain. If you listen to these propertarians and binders, but they're the ones that keep us bound t'the iron wheel!" <spit-sizzle> "Defying their ownership and their rules is the only way to -"

"I told you last time, Jinmi, Shareholders' Court'll go easier on you if you just tell them you wanted quick cash and don't try and baffle them with whatever bullshit you picked up at the Rowdy Rhizome."

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 25: Does your MC have any health or belief systems that restrict their diet?

Not unless "don't eat anything unless you've either recognized or analyzed it" counts, but that's more or less basic "living on major trade station" competence.

Food from thousands of worlds for hundreds of species turns up there on a regular basis. Biocoding isn't just for fun, y'know?

#eldraeverse

To expand on things previously said, I am of the opinion that "there can't be technological solutions to social problems" and "technology can *cause* social problems" are beliefs that can coexist in a coherent worldview.

My fictive peeps are even more skeptical on that point, and would generally claim technology to be value-neutral even though its _telos_ is to be an integral part of a philosophy of sophont aspiration.

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 24: What is a common occurrence in your story that would be odd here?

I write science fiction. So, basically everything, in one way or another, but that's kind of cheating.

Er. Competence? Decency?

...sorry, I seem to be stuck on "cynical with a side order of bitter" today.

#eldraeverse

(Some species developed submission instincts to get along with each other, pro-survival-wise. For various reasons, eldrae developed MURDER TO DEATH THE INTERLOPER THAT DARED TRESPASS UPON YOUR SELFNESS instincts instead.

Which made civilization rather harder to attain, but possibly more civilized - in the "we have learned to walk carefully, not presume, and reach out with gentle hands" sense - once attained. Or so it is argued.)

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 23: Have you ever wanted to smack the MC? Why?

Everyone: "We don't do that here."

You: "What, never?"

Everyone: "No, never."

You: "What, *never*?"

Everyone: "Hardly - well, no, okay? For our species, this is the sort of thing that - outside controlled and formalized circumstances - tends to escalate with terrifying speed to 'now everyone's dead and I've lost my hat'. So you DO NOT get into physical altercations unless you're happy with that outcome."

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 21: What is your MC's drink of choice?

Morrí: "She drinks esklav. Constabulary esklav. Like a walking cliché."

Jynne: "It's just esklav."

Morrí: "Normal esklav isn't blacker than a singularity's ass, so stiff with sugar and stims that they precipitate out at the bottom, and most importantly, doesn't _stain_ like that. Or corrode spoons."

Jynne: "It does if you make it right!"

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 20: Secondary character PoV: what's the biggest sacrifice you're ready to make for the MC?

Morrí shrugs.

"My life, obviously. Just as she'd do for me. We're sentinels. It says it right there in the service oath.

( https://eldraeverse.com/2022/05/29/service/ )

"Of course, people say that's an easy promise to make, given how hard permadeath is to inflict these days. But no-one passes out of the Academy without being tested on that point, and believing it real."

#eldraeverse

Also, on the topic of what exactly the Empire delivers?

"Having established as an ethical principle that to be sophont is to be entitled as of right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, it must necessarily follow that the proper function, in accordance with virtue, of the technical organs of a civilization is the abolishment of death, constraint, poverty, and misery."

- "Eternal Progress", Ianthe Claves-ith-Claves, ch. 1.

#eldraeverse

On the gripping hand: Not about elsewhere, because that's where all the crime-type problems come from, as opposed to all the other things she's trained to handle. Their status could *definitely* be made a lot quo-ier.

...not her department. But still.

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 19: Does your MC support that status quo in their word?

On the one hand: Yes. She lives in a utopia - what's not to like? If it didn't already have two mottos on its letterhead, the Empire could add "We Deliver" (see followup).

On the other hand: No. Because back in ethics & civics class, they covered the whole "how you live in utopia, why it needs constant maintenance, and that the status is never so quo that it can't be made a little *more* quo".

#eldraeverse

Farísa Cerron, incidentally, lives in a *really* awesome stalactite house suspended from Mer Dinévál's uppermost floof, and this is where I must once again curse my near-total lack of artistic talent and thus inability to show y'all the picture in my head.

#eldraeverse

#WritingWonders July 18: Do you have a muse in any sense of the word?

I surely do.

Thing is, though, it's not a person. It's a *place*.

(Like my blurb says, I woke up one day with a universe in my head. That's a clear sign of either insanity or literature, so I chose literature.)

#eldraeverse