audio time!

If you have more time for listening to stories than reading them -- or if you just want to know how all those random names in "Driftwood" are pronounced* -- you can now download the podcast. I haven't had a chance to listen to it myself yet, but I was fairly pleased with "Kingspeaker," so I expect this one turned out equally well.


*You should see the e-mails between me and the editor on this topic. I answered several of his queries with "uh, good luck?" There's a downside to making up foreign words that maybe aren't even supposed to be pronounceable by human tongues.

Reincarnation

An exchange with kitsunealyc has got me thinking about one of the aspects I really love in Changeling: The Dreaming, namely, the fact that the premise incorporates reincarnation as one of its fundamental elements. The faerie souls are born into a series of mortal hosts, and sometimes they remember their past lives, which means you can have all kinds of fun with patterns and echoes and change over time.

Hell, that was the precise notion that set the ball rolling for Memento.

And it makes me wonder -- who out there has written fantasies that make use of this idea? Not just reincarnation, but remembering past lives, telling a story where the fixed and mutable characteristics of a soul are a central part of the tale. Katharine Kerr's Deverry books come to mind, and Jo Graham has started a series of history-hopping fantasies that appear to feature the same souls incarnating as central and peripheral figures in various periods (the Trojan War, Ptolemaic Egypt), but those are the only ones I can think of offhand. The Wheel of Time, I suppose, but that's one of a billion ideas swirling around in that series, and it doesn't get the exploration I'd like to see.

I had fun running the idea in Memento, and I had fun playing with it via Ree, my long-term LARP character. What's it like to remember -- in your early twenties -- that you generally don't live to see your twenty-fifth birthday? What does it mean for friendships and enmities when the universe hits the "reset" button on your lives? How can you take something that appears to be a fundamental part of your nature, on a metaphysical level, and work around and with it so you don't repeat the same mistakes you always have? I have no idea what kind of story I could use to explore those notions again, but I suspect I'll think of one eventually, because clearly my brain isn't done with it yet.

So where can I go to feed my brain? Kerr, Graham, Jordan -- who else?

gngggh

There's something exhausting about the type of revision that involves radically expanding your first draft. It's like being on a treadmill: you run and run and don't get anywhere. I'm four thousand words into a story that was four thousand words long, and I still have two thousand to go.

It's a lot better now, mind you, and I'm enjoying parts of the process. But tiring. And I'm on a deadline, too, because I want to submit this to a place that's about to close its reading period. Gngggh.