Separation Anxiety [purplecthulhu]

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As some of you may know, I've been spending rather too much of the last several months writing a novel. It's nearly finished, at least in first draft. Tonight I came to a realization. I'm going to miss my central characters when it's done...

Phil's occasionally misdirected youthful exuberance, Jo's quiet geekiness, Gee's attempts to be a quiet centre to it all, doomed to failure because she cares too much for her crew, Althea's spiky academic arrogance. I'm even going to miss Bourbaki, the evil composite AI, superiority complex and all. I've spent a lot of the last few months with these people and when it's done I'm going to miss them.

Is this natural?

Yes, some might come back if I have a reason to write one or two of the planned sequels, but I don't know that that's going to happen. I feel responsible for them. I don't want to abandon them to the dark authorless void, but at the end of the novel that's what has to happen...

Am I being entirely sane here?????

Mood::

sad

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There are 17 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Am I being entirely sane here?

No.

You're being an author.

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As far as I can tell, you have a perfectly normal reaction.

Rest assured: if you pick up the story from the beginning, they will still be there. If you love your characters, set them free.

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It's completely natural: you've lived with them and been deeply involved with them for a long time.
And it's not a void, it's a future of their own form them to pioneer and share with readers.

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You've not quite finished the first draft, so the characters aren't going away anywhere anytime soon! I keep discovering new things about the characters in my novel and I've been working on it for 5 years nearly now (and it's been "Almost - shot me if I haven't sent it out in three weeks - finished" for nearly eighteen months. For instance, I was listening to "In Our Time" on multiverses recently Fay Dowker mentioned her work on non-string theory-based theories of quantum gravity. This was good because the female protagonist is a theoretical physicist at Imperial who has said some snippy things about string theory, but now I have to fit her into Fay's real life work (so to speak) rather than just winging it.

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If you're writing fiction and not documentary I think it's unnecessary to be hung up on who's really at IC and what they're doing. You're never going to know enough about the real Faye to fit your character around her - is important for you to know, for example, that Faye is married to another theorist at Imperial, or about their children or... The list soon becomes endless.

Stop angsting and send it out!

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Indeed, but it was reassuring that the idea of a non-string theorist working on models of the early universe at IC is plausible - in *this* universe anyway! (The novel is set in eleven different universes.) It would have been annoying if IC had been a pure string theory shop, for instance.

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>>> Stop angsting and send it out!

This is what my Scottish writing chum Caroline (author of "Teach Yourself Your Baby's Development") keeps telling me. It will be ready to go out after Easter.

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you probably are quite sane in those terms. These people come form your mind, and are invested with aspects of you by necessity. They are friends of your own consciousness and so hard to leave. But then, this meshes well with your later posting about 'write something every day' - never mind sequels, what about backstory, out-takes from their lives, stories in which they are the spear-carriers, but nonetheless appear to give you and us clues to their doings... Hey, YOU'RE the writer here, YOU think of the ideas...

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You are sane. You know these people, you care about them, they're your friends (or possibly unfriends, in the case of Bourbaki), you don't want them to just disappear. Don't worry. They won't.

And I'd like to meet them sometime... need a beta reader?

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Thanks for the offer!

There's a fair amount of reworking needed. Once that's done I will definitely be looking for beta readers, as long as you can cope with 100k words of hard SF!

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I don't see why not... I did some science O levels a helluva long time ago, I read a lot of "intelligent layperson" popular science nonfiction and occasionally NEW SCIENTIST (and the BMJ regularly), and what contemporary science I do know, I mostly learned from SF (I prefer the sugared pill, but I *like* learning new stuff...)

Looking forward to it as & when...

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I am delighted that your AI is called Bourbaki.

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Thanks :-)

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As others have said: Yep, that's fine. Good, even.

The big (OK, quite daft) question is: 'Have you cast the film yet?' Try it, it's fun.

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If you're allowed to use CGI then you could do it, but it wouldn't be cheap.

Doing it on location... Ooooooh that's gonna hurt - probably the gross planetary product for a few years, and that's only going to get you then opening scenes around Saturn...

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Aha, now here we see, elegantly expressed, the difference between a 'soft'/character-based SF writer (me) and a hard/proper scientist SF writer (you). You talk of FX shots and the marvellous scenery of space, whereas I just meant 'Who's playing Bourbaki then?' I wouldn't have asked, but the original post *was* about the characters.

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I blame the dyslexia... I misread that as 'cost the film', not *cast* the film...

Doh! How can I write when it seems I can't even read!

So to the real question, and not what I thought you were asking...

Bourbaki (or at least Bourbaki's mouthpiece du jour)...

Brian Cox in younger, fitter Hanibal Lector mode - the real movie Lector not the nightmarish caricature that Anthony Hopkins came up with.

Either that or Alan Rickman - the velvet glove around the iron fist from Die Hard, happy to discuss men's fashions and then blow your brains out a moment later.

Viewpoint characters...

Phil - a young unknown. Matt Damon in an early movie maybe - a bit naive, a bit behind, but able to ask the right question at the right time, but not knowing enough to not get into trouble.

Althea - whoever it is who plays Alex in Ashes to Ashes. Brilliant, spiky, damaged, out of her time and with a superiority complex that keeps getting her into trouble.

Supporting cast:

Gee - Sigourney Weaver or Jamie Lee Curits if she wasn't so thin.

Jo - Summer Glau or maybe Grace Park - hmmm - I haven't actually pondered her ethnic background. Doh!

And the other baddie (well, baddie here - she'll be in a rather different perspective in Book 2, if there ever is one), Colonel Cho - Michelle Yeo.

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purplecthulhu

Separation Anxiety

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