May 19, 2006

The writing of this story is proceeding at a much slower pace that I wish due to demands of life. In order to keep a sense of progress going I've decided to post the results of some of my "writing blitzes". A "writing blitz" is an exercise I do; it's stream of consciousness writing in which I explore various story ideas and questions. Some times the ideas make it into the draft, some times they go through various mutations. If the story is the first draft then the writing blitz can be considered the zeroth draft.

It has already been established, or hinted at, that Kuno was a childhood friend of Dreamer's, and that Kuno's family left the village when he was young. Dreamer has vague recollections of the event but Teacher does not have any. She was too young when it happened.

Who were Kuno’s parents? What were there names? What were they like? Is it necessary to answer all these questions, or is it going too much into backstory? Well, let’s make an attempt at answering these questions, as the information that comes out of this exercise will be useful in writing the sequel to chapter 2.

So let’s come up with some plausible answers here – what are Kuno’s parents’ names?

His father – what are some possible names? Migua. Anything else come up? Let’s go with Migua for now.

What is Kuno’s mother’s name? Stefa. Jilka. Romunika. Yisheka. Mifutska. Yimputnowa. Staraskaya. Gubishmenka. Whatever.

Why did they leave the village? Remember what they said – the village is too small. What did they mean by that? The village is an agricultural community. Everyone in the community is a vital part of that community – recall Speaker’s words that even an embarrassment like Dreamer was needed. Most of the villagers accept their part in the village. Some, like Kuno’s parents – did not. Some, like Dreamer, and Teacher, become disillusioned. Why? Got to keep asking that – why? Dreamer keeps having these dreams – of a world that he alone can see, but cannot exist yet. It would have been a similar thing with Kuno’s father.

How do I write for these characters without having them come across as some backwards, conservative, stuckies? That’s not who I want the villagers to be. I want them to be primitive, simple, likeable. Yet I do not think that is how I have painted them to date.

So let’s say Kuno’s father – I’ll continue to call him Migua for now, though I’ll have to consider the question of whether he ever had an earned name – let’s say Migua felt a certain restlessness, a dissatisfaction with life in the village. He wanted to explore the boundaries of the village, to explore the river, Blarik.

He was perhaps a hot-tempered man, and when his dissatisfaction reached a peak, he would have picked up his mate, his young one and left quite loudly and aggressively. He would have felt scorn for the treemva of the time.

Let’s keep chipping away at this character, Migua.

By the time Dreamer meets up with Kuno, Migua has become an old man.

I’ve envisioned the idea that there is a community of people who live outside the village, that Kuno who is now grown up leads them, and that Kuno’s parents are old now and live quietly in this community. But where did all these people come from?

The presence of all these people imply that they came with Migua when he left the village, or they followed after Migua left the village, or they were not from the village at all but were outsiders that Migua met in the woods. Or, Migua sired several children and they are all his!

I never had the sense that other people left with Migua when he left. If they did, how many? Not too many, I don’t think. Maybe three or four. That would have made the treemva upset. Maybe several more people left after Migua, and caught up with him. Hey, isn’t that what is going to happen to Dreamer and Teacher? So maybe within a year of Migua’s leaving, another three or four people leave, or just disappear?

Maybe things stabilized after a while and people stopped leaving the village for a long time, long enough that the memory of the emigration faded. But now it’s coming up again – Dreamer is infected with the same sense of adventure and belief in something larger than the life they know in the village that originally infected Kuno.

So let’s say Migua and his mate left and took Kuno – that’s two adults and one young one. Four adults left with them, that would be two couples, bringing the tally up to four adults. Over the following year, two more couples defected from the village, bringing the tally up to four couples, or eight adults. Assume Migua sired another two or three children, that would be up to four children including Kuno. If each couple had three children, that would be four times three which is twelve children, including Kuno. That sounds like about the right size for the community that I imagine Migua would have created.

The idea that they would have met outsiders might have large implications. The villagers don’t know, don’t care, don’t have any imagination that there might be any other people living on their planet (or what they perceive the planet to be). So to meet someone from outside the village would imply a large shock value to their system.

This thought opens up some interesting possibilities. Perhaps some believe that there are in fact other people who live outside the village. Perhaps this belief is considered heretical – though I was going to try depicting these people as being free of any religious belief system. Whatever it is called, let us say that such beliefs are scorned by the so-called normal villagers. Perhaps that is why Migua left – to look for others. There is an ironic parallel here to the notion of humans going into space to seek other life forms, other civilizations.

So maybe I’ll say that this desire drives Migua to leave the village, drives his conflict with the treemva of his time.

Next - let's do some explorative thinking about how Migua's name would have fit in with the established village naming convention, and what Dreamer's name was before he earned the name Dreamer. Remember that Kuno was gone by the time Dreamer earned that name.