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The Story

 

 

On Happy Endings

 

“When I was writing short stories for slick magazines – it was true of my novels too – I never knew how to end them.  And my agent said, “It’s perfectly simple, my boy: the hero gets on his horse and rides into the sunset.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

 

In real life, every story has the same ending: all the characters die and decompose into dirt.  In art, we have more of a say in things.  The only difference between a happy ending and a sad ending is where the writer draws a line and says there, the story’s over.  There’s a role for the kind of writing that presents the gritty truth of life (and the gritty truth is always that it sucks, there’s no gritty truth about how amazing life can be), but in my opinion every writer is entitled – or maybe obligated – to wrap things up in a way that satisfies, that reminds the reader that there are good things in the world, pleasure and comfort and beauty.  The characters should in no circumstances get everything they want, but they should all get something good, and even if that something good is an iota of what they lost, that’s how the story should end.

 

Because why not?  Writing the world as a cruel, unforgiving place is the easiest thing in the world, and one of the more pointless.  It’s far more difficult to give readers a bit of happiness and hope, and if you can do that, then you’ve made even the real world a better place to be.  That’s what I want out of my story, but I’m not entirely sure how to do that.  I want the reader to be rooting for all the characters at different points, but I don’t know how much is too much to give them.  I always planned on Saro dying at the end as a result of Io’s cowardice or lack of faith, maybe exploding in her space shuttle over the ocean, the explosion acting as a catalyst to activate the chemical compound smuggled away in the hold and turning the sea into freshwater and Naoma into a finally self-sustaining planet, independent of Miramar.  That feels goofy, too much.  Then again: why not?  It’s my story, and I can do what I want with it.

 

Characters:

 

This is not a final locked-in story arc for any character; they are all subject to change any time I feel like it.  All of these, except Marlo, were originally thought up over a year ago when I wrote “Smoke and Honey,” the short story Spit Ghost Woman is based on.

 

 

Rita

Rita is the linchpin of this story, although she started out as just a minor side character in “Smoke and Honey.”  She was raised in the Tortoiseshell by Saro and has always been Saro’s star worker, but now Io has lured her in with promises of the afterlife, which for Rita means meeting her dead mother.  Rita gets politicized at the convent, although she eventually calls into question what Io stands for.

 

Writing Rita:

Rita first appeared standing guard outside Saro’s office in “Smoke and Honey,” the classic prostitute/ security guard with a heart of gold.  My professor wanted to see more of her, and eventually most of Spit Ghost Woman was about her and her relationships with the other characters.   Rita’s easy to write because she’s a woman my age, and I’m able to put a lot of myself into her.  The hardest part about writing her is separating myself from her and making sure she doesn’t become me.  I’ve written a few Rita scenes based off my own life, and even though those scenes were bright and vibrant when they happened to me, they are dull to read, too tied to my reality to illuminate Rita’s story in any useful way.  One way I separate her from myself is by putting her in situations I could never conceive of myself in.  Those situations form her into a different person.  Kurt Vonnegut says you have to be a sadist to your characters, no matter how sweet they are; that’s how you figure out who they are.

One similarity I refuse to compromise on is making her big and tall like me; most female characters in fiction are all waif-like and I need other big tall girls to look up to, even if I make them up myself.

 

 

Saro

Saro owns and runs the Tortoiseshell.  She was the main character in “Smoke and Honey,” but parts of her storyline are still a mystery to me.  She’s a calculating woman who treats the women she employs very well, although she doesn’t care much for any of them except for Rita.  She taught Rita to read and write and do math and her grand plan is that Rita will someday take over the Tortoiseshell.  She doesn’t trust Sister Io at all and resents that Rita wants to join Io.  She was born on another planet and came to Naoma with her parents when she was young; they built the Tortoiseshell out from around their shuttle.  The shuttle is still underneath the terrace of the Tortoiseshell, and she’s secretly having Frog repair it so she can get off Naoma once Miramar announces that it is stopping water shipments.

 

Writing Saro:

I love Saro.  I even gave her my favorite name, pronounced not like Sorrow, but rhyming with Sparrow.  I got that name from a movie scene in which Iris Dement sits on the porch of a one-room house in West Virginia and sings “Pretty Saro” as her movie-husband plays violin. That’s the basic origin story I had for Saro in "Smoke and Honey"-- she came from a poor family up in the mountains.  I ended up swapping her origin story with Io, because I needed Saro to know how to operate a space shuttle.

Saro was originally intended to be the main character of the novel, but my tutorial instructor was more of a Rita fan.  Now, I have a harder time writing Saro; I need her to do bad things for the story to progress, but I don’t want to make her a villain.  It’s a hard balance to get right.

 

 

Frog

Frog comes in to have sex with Rita several nights a week.  He likes her more than she likes him, but he is her favorite customer.  He used to work in the yttrium mines at Miramar until an explosion gave him severe burns and took part of his hearing; in exchange for him taking the blame for the explosion and for the deaths of several of his crew members, Miramar gave him a little food stands by the mining docks; he built a little room above the food stand and that’s where he lives.  He ends up being secretly employed by Saro to repair her shuttle.

 

Writing Frog:

In "Smoke and Honey," I needed some pathetic little guy to be having sex with Rita when Saro comes in to talk with her, and I named him Frog.  I gave him that name mostly to designate him as an unimportant minor character.  Months later, when I needed a first story to kick off my novel writing, he was the character I followed with a close-third narration.  I picked him because I already had a name and role for him, and I needed an outside character to encounter Rita and help her through her drug trip, since she was an unreliable narrator.  Because that was also the first Rita scene I wrote for the new story, Frog and Rita are tied together in my brain and have helped each other develop as characters.  Frog will almost definitely get an unambiguously happy ending.

My tutorial instructor loves every scene I write with Frog because he’s a character on the edge of all the communities, but not a part of any of them.  As a male character, he’s just enough of a challenge for me to write that I don’t get lazy with him.

 

 

Sister Io

Io is the creator of a drug-based woman’s afterlife cult on Naoma.  Used to be a surrogate mother/nanny for Henry Marlo and his husband. Has elaborate unexecuted plans to get Miramar off Naoma; when Miramar announces that it’s leaving and also stopping the freshwater shipments, she has a hard time holding it together.  Believes that Miramar changed the ocean from freshwater to saltwater just to keep the population downtrodden, and that it has patented a chemical compound that would change the ocean back.  Militant, a little wacked-out, willing to sacrifice a lot for what she sees as the greater good.

 

Writing Io: 

Io’s original name was Sister Reagan, but Reagan was too close to Rita; Io and Saro are close names, too, but that works because they have parallel roles in Rita’s life.  I named her Io because it makes her sound a little distant.  It also opens up the question of how her parents would have come upon that name, since they were both poorly educated and had probably never even heard of Earth, let alone an obscure moon from Earth’s solar system.  Io started out way closer to a conventional Catholic nun campaigning to end prostitution on Naoma, although that storyline never actually made its way into “Smoke and Honey.”  The first scene I wrote her into in her current iteration is still the last scene, chronologically, that I have written for the novel, a scene where Io kidnaps Saro and Frog and highjacks Saro’s shuttle in order to try and rescue Rita from the Miramar train that is taking her to the now-abandoned mines. 

Io’s fun to write because she’s pretty out-there, but I’m working on both bringing her in and giving her a more solid foundation for her radical beliefs.  I’m also working on making her a little more sinister.

 

 

Henry Marlo

Marlo is a researcher for Miramar and a pretty all right person.  Used to employ Io as a nanny until she stole from him.  He bonds with Rita because she reminds him of his own daughter (he lost custody after his husband divorced him), and their relationship is a way for Io to get into Miramar.

 

Writing Marlo:

Marlo has always just been a way into Miramar for me.  The first scenes I wrote with him and Rita were pretty creepy, but not sexual, and I wasn’t entirely sure why I wasn’t writing him as being sexual with her, until it made sense that he just wasn’t attracted to women.  It’s interesting, though, that the only way I can imagine a man not trying to have sex with Rita is to make him gay.  Sometimes it gets exhausting to write sexual scenes, especially with so much of the book set in a brothel, but for that matter I might have too many faux-parent figures for Rita to handle right now, with Marlo and Io and Saro.  Another concern I have with making Marlo gay is that he and his husband are the only Miramar employees we really get to see, and that makes the whole technology divide more blatantly gendered than I intended.

Marlo is a big challenge for me to write.  Originally he was based off one of my professors (down to his original name which I will not say), which made things easier, but he’s fairly flat right now.  I avoid writing scenes with him because he bores me, but all he needs is some more development.

 

As of April 4: I'm dropping Marlo as a main character.  My advisor suggested that he might be boring to write because he's unnecessary to the story.  I've been primarily using him as a mechanism to bring Rita inside knowledge about Miramar, but I think Frog will work in that role instead.  Frog is already a developed, multi-layered character, and he's already acting as a link between the Tortoiseshell and the convent through his trading activities.  There's no reason he can't expand and link Rita to Miramar somehow.  Marlo is now DEFUNCT. 

Settings:

 

Every book that I treasured growing up gave me something important: a sense of place, a place I could imagine myself in even without the presence of the book’s protagonist.  I’m thinking Hogwarts, Edoras, Winterfell, Redwall, fantasy novels mostly – science fiction locations tend to be dark and dystopian, not the kind of place I’d want to imagine myself.  The Firefly universe was the first truly escapist sci-fi exception for me, and I wanted to do a similar thing, except in novel form.  I haven’t been able to do that in a satisfying way yet, but I am working on it.

 

It was very difficult to finally decide on a setting for Naoma; it was much easier to make the setting of each scene fit what I needed for the scene.  That’s one of the potential problems with building my own world for the story – if I’d set it on Earth, the climate and environment would be set, determined by pre-existing conditions, and any alterations to that would have big implications to the plot.  It’s not at all realistic to have the world from scene to scene go from misty fog to arid desert, but it felt limiting to have to settle down into one setting.  I did limit myself to have the plot on a small island on a primarily oceanic planet.  The sea of salt water was very important to the plot of water restrictions, but I wasn’t sure how to translate that into the rest of the setting, as I’ve spent very little time in saltwater ecosystems. 

 

Reading Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness pushed me to finally just choose a setting.  That book is set on Winter, an appropriately named planet where they have dozens of words for different kinds of snow.  The clearly defined setting restricts the plot, it’s true, but through that restriction it is allowed to shape the plot and bring out the themes of solitude, exile, and isolation.  While I was reading The Left Hand of Darkness, I realized that my own story needed that same shaping force, or else it wouldn’t be able to suck the reader in to absorb the rest of the plot.

 

 

The Settings of Naoma

 

 

The Tortoiseshell

The Tortoiseshell is the brothel that Saro owns and Rita works at.  It is built haphazardly out from around Saro’s family shuttle; an ugly assortment of metal on the outside, but a beautiful tiled courtyard on the inside.  Rita and the others have their rooms on the second floor, along an outdoor corridor which circles around the courtyard.

 

Writing the Tortoiseshell 

This is the part of the story that all the rest of it formed around.  I dance Argentine Tango, and one of my Spanish professors was talking with me about how that dance was created in turn-of-the-century brothels in Buenos Aires.   The setting really appealed to me, especially because I wanted to do something very woman-centric (and obviously women can’t do anything except have sex we all know that).   I named it the Tortoiseshell because I imagined it being made up of a motley assortment of metal on the outside.

That setting presented a challenge that I hadn’t really thought of when I started the story: writing multiple sex scenes that I then have to show to my professor.  It turns out I’m pretty good at that, though, so if the glorious sci-fi writing career doesn’t work out, I could move into Fifty Shades of Grey territory.

 

I have a character named Val who I’m not sure if I’m going to use.  I originally meant her as a character to introduce Rita and the Tortoiseshell from the outside, but that may be unnecessary.  The first view of the Tortoiseshell I wrote is from her:

 

"The red light of late afternoon was paling into a grey evening, but the terrace still kept its heat from the long day.  Even after all the years Val had worked at the Tortoiseshell, her breath still caught in her throat when the sun caught the fountain’s long shadow and turned the terrace a soft golden red. 

The Tortoiseshell had been built up in haphazard chunks around the shuttle that Saro had landed in years and years before.  The outside had the same ramshackle look as the rest of the planet, a mix of different colors of plywood and cement and linoleum, as did all the girls’ rooms.  Val had spent the first few years she was there dancing in a plain dirt courtyard and spending hours each day washing the dust off her clothes for the coming night.

            Now, Saro had girls sweeping up behind the men as they tracked dirt in from the street.  The terrace was tiled in a gleaming design of gold, red and deep blue.  A large fountain was the centerpiece of the place, graced by a great stone statue of what Saro told Val was a bear, some animal from her home planet.  Water poured from the bear’s open mouth, and its huge front claws were outstretched.  When the fountain had first been put in, before the water was turned on, Val and the other girls had pretended it was a customer and had taken turns dancing with it.  Val had made all the others laugh by grinding her pelvis up against it.

Saro had even gotten a special permit from Miramar to have the fountain run on freshwater, as long as no one was caught drinking from it.  Saro was impossibly proud of that freshwater fountain.  It showed the whole world that she and her little whorehouse had truly made it on Naoma."

 

 

St. Agatha’s: Io’s convent/encampment

Io's convent/encampment is built up exclusively with tents, originally up in a cedar woods in the mountains but potentially changing to a marshland.  The ruins of Io’s childhood home are nearby, as are the cliffs.

 

Writing St. Agatha’s

The name is a remnant from when Io’s religion was far closer to Christianity than it is now; I haven’t been able to think up a new name yet.

I initially decided that Io’s convent would be on a mountain in a red cedar wood because pine forests are beautiful, spacious, and light.  Those are the trees that used to be outside my bedroom window and they were beautiful, red bark and bright green needles and Queen Anne’s lace growing underneath.  Cedar trees are also pretty much the official plant of Latin American cemeteries.  They represent ascension, apparently, which I thought was good for Io’s place, considering her focus on the afterlife.

I’ve been recently considering changing the nature of the planet to be a boggy, perhaps acidic, wetland.  The damp dark stickiness of a bog feeds into the damp dark sticky womanhood that plays a large role in Io’s religion.  The idea of going back through the story and editing for that change in setting in mind is appealing to me, because I’m hoping that the bogginess of the area where Io lives will lead to a more sinister aspect of Io’s religion, which is what I really want right now. 

I think I will still keep the red rocky beaches of the peninsula that I originally planned, but I might not have a mountain altogether, even though that’s always been a part of my view of Naoma.  I think a broad marshland presents a similar geographical/ mental barrier from civilization as the mountain did, and it’s also less of a spiritual cliché than going up a mountain.  This change is one of the things I’m most excited about moving forward with in my story.

 

I wrote this part of the story before changing my mind about the setting, in a flashback section for when Io comes back to the mountain to look for the home where she grew up.  I wanted to present it as a beautiful place of plenty; that view would change if I change it to a bog.

 

An hour later, she knew she was lost.  The gold pine needle needle trail had faded into the shaggy moss that carpeted the stones and hung off the spruce trees to either side.  Io hadn’t realized it was vanishing until it was already gone.  She tried to retrace backwards, but the moss had already bounced back from her footsteps.  She wandered a few minutes one way, then turned around the same direction she came from (she thought it was, at least), then veered a little to the left, thinking she’d over-corrected to the right.  The sun had been to her back when the trail had faded out, but was it going in a straight line?

            She had enough protein blocks to last her four days, six if she was careful.  Her plan had been to plant right away when she reached the house, and hunt for food in the meantime, gather what she could from the forest.  Although she was lost, she was not afraid.  Her mother had taught her to recognize the food of the forest and she snacked as she wandered.  There was sweet purple moss that draped from the low pine branches, bitter tender fern leaves, tiny golden pinecones to crunch up and spit out, and nutty red mushrooms popping up out of the green moss.  Io passed over the shriveled brown caps – her mother had warned her that they were poisonous.

            The sun was dappled brightly over the emerald moss, and Io’s fur hat kept her warm from the cool morning breeze.  She was lost, with no idea of the direction home or even back to the road.  She couldn’t remember if she’d ever been this happy.

 

This is the first impression that Rita gets of St. Agatha’s:

 

Rita was woken up early by an uncontrollable urge to pee.  She had seen the chamber pot along the edge of the tent but couldn’t bring herself to use it with Zinnia snoring lightly just a few inches away.  She picked her way around the bodies wrapped in green bodies, clenching with all her might to keep herself from sprinkling onto one of the sisters.  Once out of the tent she sprinted behind the nearest tree and barely got her pants down in time.  It was a tall red cedar like all the others.  Rita patted the soft red bark fondly and groaned with pleasure as her bladder emptied out in a long unbroken stream.  Nothing better, she thought as she stood and smoothed down the front of her green shirt.  It was a grey and misty morning and she could barely make out the shape of the red tent, even though it couldn’t have been fifteen yards over. 

            Rita’s heart jumped when she heard a voice behind her — maybe someone had seen her taking a squat.  The voice, singing huskily in a language Rita didn’t recognize, belonged to a green form that was approaching out of the fog.  Rita gasped as she made out bloodstains on the green robe, and pressed back closer to the tree, hoping that the mist would hide her.

 

 

Miramar

Miramar's headquarters is located on the end of the peninsula that curves around the bay; you can see it from Sand Creek, and it’s quick to get to for anyone with a space shuttle, but it’s a long way by land; that’s part of the technology differences.  It’s donut-shaped, with a huge domed climate-controlled park in the middle.

 

Writing Miramar

To be honest, I based the headquarters almost entirely off of the design for the new Apple headquarters, including the domed climate-controlled park in the middle. It’s interesting to have a controlled natural utopia accessible only to employees.  That’s often how it goes: the people who are able to restrict others’ uses of natural resources for profit are the ones who can afford to create and access sanctuaries for their own use.  For example, look at the safari reserve system in Africa, most of which forbid hunting from the people who have lived there for thousands of years so they can charge foreigners thousands of dollars to hunt for sport.

Miramar’s working name was “Lifecorps,” but I thought that lacked subtlety.  Miramar came up when I was doing Spanish homework; it almost (not quite) means, “look to the sea.”  I thought it was a pretty name, and the mar at the end made it sound a little serious.  Also, considering their involvement with the water systems of Naoma, it felt appropriate to have a word that means “sea” in the name.

 

I am starting over in my view of Miramar now that I’m deleting Marlo, a Miramar researcher, as a secondary character.  Here is the view of Miramar that Frog gives Rita early in the current storyline:

 

"They also gave him a rare thing, a license to trade within the Miramar headquarters itself.  He only told Rita the bitter story of the explosion once — most of the time, he entertained her with stories of the headquarters.  It hovered across the water, windows glittering on a thin strip of sandy peninsula that threatened to cut the bay off from the ocean.  She could see it from her room, but she had never been.  It was a short trip on a shuttle, just five minutes across the bay, but it was hours to get around the peninsula on land. 

Frog did business mostly with the maids, the cooks, and the gardeners, although occasionally a researcher or executive bought one of his objects to display in their office for a bit of local color or to send off to nieces and grandparents on the planets they came from.  Publicly, he sold fabric, woven up in the mountains, and crudely carved wooden sculptures.  The crudest objects sold best with the foreigners, the better to distinguish them from the machine-made sculptures they were used to.

What made real money, though, was what Frog sold on the side.  The lesser-paid workers in Miramar were happy to sneak things out for him, books, models of the universe, out-of-date machinery.  Things impossible to buy on Naoma, but that they were sure the bosses wouldn’t miss.  Saro was one of his biggest customers — she had in her office a computer that had been standard at Miramar two hundred years ago.  Frog had fixed it up, and it had done everything she needed out of it for five years."

 

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