The First Page

[robinturner]

I am taking ozarque's advice and trying to write a page a day. I probably won't manage it, but it's a good target. So here is the first page. The frequent blanks are because I don't want to put in any names before I can at least sketch out a language for this world—the "Old Speech" I mentioned, which most people don't speak, but will be used for names of characters, creatures and places to avoid the kind of thing I was complaining about in my last post.

===================

I have no experience with autobiography (in fact I only learnt the word recently) but then I suppose few people have when they write one, unless they lead lives so long and interesting as to need a second volume. I have only read a few of these tedious works, since books are hard to come by here, but I gather the way to do it is to start at the moment of one's birth (or even before, with an account of one's illustrious forebears) and write down everything in chronological order and minute detail. Maybe the boy who cleans my house and hangs on my words will one day write an official account of my life, complete with every colour I shat as a baby, but my main purpose is to recount certain events that I had a part in, and these did not take place until I was already forty years old, so I think it best, and kindest to the reader, to pass through the first half of my life as briefly as possible.

I was born in the summer of __________ in the village of ___________ in the province of __________, the child of ________ by her second husband. The birth of a neuter is usually cause for celebration, especially if there is already a wise daughter to inherit the land and strong sons to till it or, as in our case, to work down the mine. There was copper in the mountains, and so our village was wealthy; no young men had to leave to seek work elsewhere. With neuters, it was a different matter. If a village already had a chief and a doctor, there was not much else for us to do, but even a neuter who left was a source of pride, for they could spread the family's name and influence wherever they went. So it was that at the age of fourteen, I was apprenticed to a sorcerer in the town of ________. I spent two years learning to recite the Old Speech and to care for sorcerous devices, both skills that served me well later, but I had little talent for the former and less for the latter. I could use the devices well enough, especially the weapons, but the bond I had with them was erratic: I was as likely to harm a device as to heal it, and eventually, after I nearly burned down my master's house with a flame-wand, it decided that my affinity for destruction would be better put to use in the army.

Gaining a commission was easy, for neuters are much sought after as officer material. Men make good fighters, but they have a tendency toward anger and fear, those two enemies of a soldier, so it is better for them to be commanded by neuters. (Of course only a fool or a barbarian would squander women on military adventures.) I served in two campaigns with competence but no particular glory to my name. The first was one of the formal affairs with the _________ that used to spring up every ten years or so, usually on the pretext that we were persecuting their coreligionists here, even though we are a practical people who would think twice about persecution for profit, and not dream of persecuting people over a point of theology. The real reason is that once in a while their king or our triumvirate needed to impress their people and give the army something to do. As a result, few died in battle and fewer cities were conquered; by ancient custom, sorcerous weapons were limited to small arms that stunned or bewitched rather than laying waste. The second campaign was against the pirates of the ________ , whose raids had become too much for the triumvirate to tolerate. That was a nasty business: it was there that I got my scars and killed my first man. The boy listens to my stories of these wars open-mouthed; that is why I haven't told him that as well as the man I killed with my sword, I also torched a ship full of women and children. Here I should write that their dying screams still haunt my dreams, but they don't: it was an honest mistake, and besides, I couldn't hear their screams because the blast had deafened me.

Comments

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Fun! Will you have a generic word for "neuter" and relationship words to be the equivalent of "son" and "sister" and such, and special pronouns?

[solri.livejournal.com]

"Child" will do instead of "son" or "daughter", but pronouns are going to be tricky. Here I used "it", but in the actual sentence, "it decided that" looks like a typo for "it was decided that." Normally I use "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun, which has the advantage of annoying ignorant grammarians but could occasionally get confusing.

Of course I could just write the book in Turkish, which has the same word for "he", "she", "it" and "that", but that would be hard.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I thought of "child," but since neuters are special, I figured the language would have evolved with a special word for them rather than using the generic term. Since the memoirs are "translated" into English, though, the reader could assume that it's just that English is inadequate.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

(I don't want to distract from your story, but now I find myself wondering about the sociology of gender and sexuality in your world - I wonder how homosexuality and transgender identification might work in a world with a third, non-reproductive gender.)

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of neatly avoiding the whole sexuality thing by simply not having any sex in the book. But then would it still sell? ;-)

I'm envisioning the neuters as pretty much asexual, though they might form quasi-romantic relationships, probably with other neuters. My neuter hooks up with a male-female couple later on, but they're just good friends, honest. And I might make the male-female pair brother and sister. Or maybe cousins—that's nice and ambiguous, like in Troy: "Cousin. He's my cousin. Cousin. Totally my cousin. In conclusion: Cousin." (http://community.livejournal.com/m15m/1487.html) Anyway, absolutely no trisexual three-in-a-bed romps. Not at all. Unless I do so well I start getting fanfic.

(Now here's an idea—get people to start posting slash about my characters before I've even finished the book. Then people will start saying "Hey dude, what's with all this Solri fanfic?" and I can then post a long rant at Salon.com about how I utterly despise fanfic and how awful it is that people are doing icky things with my characters, and then there will be a deluge of fanfic so someone will finally have to publish the goddam book just as a reference work for all the fanfic writers.)

I'm not sure about transgender issues. Transsexuality in males is now thought to be related to some gunky thing in the brain: male transsexuals have the same sized thingy as females. (Note how my terminology betrays my almost complete ignorance of neurology.) We could assume that in my world, these individuals would have ended up as neuters anyway. I know pretty much nothing about female transsexuals. In my world I can imagine women identifying as neuters but probably not as males. Also it would be pretty easy for a woman to pass as a neuter, since neuters look like uncurvy women. Hmm, could build that into the plot somewhere.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I like Steven Brust's line - an author's second work of fiction set in the same world is also fanfic.

[solri.livejournal.com]

And then there's this counter-attack (http://swiftywriting.blogspot.com/2005/11/in-defense-of-fanfiction-guestblogger.html) to Robin Hobb's anti-fanfic rant: "And...as for definitions, to what extent is Paradise Lost a fanfiction of the Bible? To what extent is Tennyson's 'Ulysses' a fanfiction of the Oddyssey?" [sic]

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I especially liked the part when the writer mentioned Shakespeare. I remember looking at the Holingshed version of the Macbeth story and going, whoa! Surpassing the original work indeed.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

or you could go with the Mandarin Chinese option and *pronounce* all third-person pronouns the same but write them differently, which has the advantage of irritating *everybody* and remaining sexist, because the third-person masculine-human written form is identical to the third-person generic written form, but the third-person feminine-human written is distinct, as is the third-person animal written. Yet they're all pronounced /ta/.

on a more serious note it does seem like you want to distinguish a 3sg-neuter human form (I slipped on that apparent typo as well).

Unless you want to work around it by deciding that in this world neuters are never referred to directly, only passively, with some kind of taboo.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

and i like how the narrator is forming as a character as well.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That's what you get when you skip over forty years in one page ;-)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

no seriously -- I hear his voice as quite distinct from yours, including his own fallibility and defensiveness ("and besides," he says, "I couldn't hear their screams"). And I don't get that he's cracking wise, I've rather just learned something about his personality and culture: he gets that the boy would be offended, but can't quite bring himself to care. clever.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Bingo. Actually, s/he cares about people in a way (after all, this is the character who SAVES THE WORLD) just not a very normal way. I'm also trying to have the character write like someone who isn't used to writing, so some of the clumsy phrasing is deliberate.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I am starting to suspect that Aborigines invented Dyirbal just to give linguists a run around, and when Lakoff published Women, Fire and Dangerous Things they all pissed themselves laughing.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I hear the difference in Mandarin written forms came in quite late, after contact with Europeans. Blame the waiguo guize.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I've heard the same thing, that this distinction was brought in contemporaneously with the half-hearted attempts to reform the huge diglossic gulf between written and spoken forms of the language, roughly late 19th early 20th c.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

... so where's page 2?

flees!

[anakaratengiz.livejournal.com]

is it a sign of my being "patriarchally conditioned" that I immediately visually imagined the narrator as male, although "it" is not? probably because 1- it is a narrator, hence the author-itative voice and 2- immediately mentions science and warfare as professions, which imply masculinity...
btw, I'm glad the links proved useful, master ;)

[solri.livejournal.com]

If you're who I think you are, then I would have thought you'd be more conditioned to see the narrator as female!

Actually, I don't yet have a good idea of what the narrator looks like. I have to keep banishing this picture of a brawny but slightly pot-bellied bearded guy, because that was the character I had in mind when I first started thinking about this story, before I came up with the hermaphrodite idea. I also have a kind of David Bowie (circa Low/Heroes) picture in my head, which is also wrong because of the pale skin and fair hair. In terms of Earth races, these guys look generically South Asian.

[anakaratengiz.livejournal.com]

Hee hee! You said "guys"!
Well, you'd think lots of Brontes and Austens would condition me to a female narrator, but to me, this one simply was non-female (not just non-either sex). Possibly also because the whole premise rests on It being cold-blooded, unsure of what It really wants (or wanted) to do with Its life, definitely not prone to being emotional/ passionate... This is very unlike the typical feminine heroine/ narrator/ focalizer. Actually, who the hero of these first (brilliant) pages most reminds me of is Barry Lyndon. Unsurprisingly, again Thackeray, who was also one of those few male writers really good at decoding heroines.

Three genders

[elderly-vrouw.livejournal.com]

Sorry to come late to this - my favourite example of what can be done with three genders is Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (nowadays known as the Lilith's Brood trilogy, a dastardly dumbing-down). Alas, the third gender is anything *but* neuter - but she handles the language very nicely.