Last year, after I had finished posting all of the installments for my first SSCS (Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory),I put up a post talking about different aspects of the story and/or the writing process, in the same vein as the pieces authors sometimes do when, for example, they’re doing a blog tour to promote their new book.

Now that all of the installments have been posted for my most recent SSCS, How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters, I’m going to do that again.  Once again, I’ve stolen most of the themes for these mini-pieces from the blog sites of much more famous authors that I enjoy reading myself (so if you’re curious what these sorts of posts usually look like, head over to those authors’ sites, and maybe end up finding some great new books to try out).  And, once again, because I’m doing this for a shorter story rather than a full-length book (How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters doesn’t quite reach 20,000 words, so I think officially it’s stuck at novelette length), I’m going to do fairly quick responses to several different themes all in this one post, rather than devote a full post per theme, as is more traditional.

First, for context, here’s the descriptive teaser blurb of the story:

SSCS02
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters

Mina lives on a spire in the middle of the ocean, acolyte of the spire priestess gran-Tom.  Mostly this just means that hers is a life of never-ending chores.  But a ridiculous accident involving pigs, a kraken, and tea-time manages to dredge up some deeper truths (and maybe even a deeper purpose, as well).

Theme 1: John Scalzi’s ‘The Big Idea’

One of the big reasons that I write these SSCS’s is in order to get the opportunity to play with writing new things.  For this, my second SSCS, I wanted to write something silly and absurd.  Hence, the very first line of the story, “The pigs had got into the flying fruit again, and now there was shit everywhere,” was the seed that I started with.  Humor is something that I greatly admire in other people’s writing, but it does not come at all naturally for me.  (Same with colorful swearing, as you maybe noticed / will notice when you read/read this story – Sorry.  I tried.)  But, the only way to get better at something is to practice it.  So, here’s my first attempt at humor practicing.  If you decide that the end result is not terribly funny, at least you can take some solace from the fact that Mina probably agrees with you.  She didn’t think any of this was funny either.  Disgusting.  Terrifying.  Not funny.

Theme 2: Chuck Wendig’s ‘5 Some Things I Learned While Writing _’

As I immediately (re)learned while writing this story, humor is really hard.  And, actually it’s really hard for many different reasons.

The first of these should be blindingly obvious, but I think a lot of us trip up over it:  Humor does not a plot-line make.  Actually, I tripped over this a couple of times.  The first time was virtually right away, when I realized that running after pooping flying pigs was not going to be enough to hold my attention for very long…maybe running from a pooping flying kraken would do better?  But no.  That’s still trying to use humor as the plot line.  I needed an actual conflict to keep me attached to the story.  Then, maybe because I’d started from somewhere trying to be humorous, for real conflict my imagination back-lashed with something I consider actually pretty dark – mind control/compulsion.  So, the tone did end up turning out somewhat uneven, and you can’t really call the final story, as a whole, ‘silly’ anymore.

Another couple reasons that humor is really difficult are a) Different people have different tastes in humor, and figuring out how to express your personal taste or tastes is tricky, and b) As John Scalzi once wrote, “The failure state of clever is asshole”.  So, I started the seed of this story with something that’s basically slap-stick.  Because I often quite like slap-stick.  But, as it turns out, slap-stick isn’t super character oriented, and my writing tends to be character oriented.  To lean into the slap-stick, I gave Mina big emotions, like vexation, and terror.  But that basically turned her into someone who’s just pretty pissed off most of the time (or for most of this story, anyway).  It took letting the story reach some quieter moments, expressed in emotions closer to exasperation or resignation (did Hedwin really manage to get himself stuck upside down in that tree?), for me to start to find the sort of humorous writing that I’m maybe better suited for.

Theme 3: Mary Robinette Kowal’s ‘My Favorite Bit’

I set up this story to give myself a chance to try out some new things, but ultimately I’d have to say that my favorite bit of it comes down to something that, for me, is decidedly clichéd.  It’s the flowers.  Did you know that I happen to really, really like flowers?  (This is sarcasm for anyone who’s had a chance to see all of the garden posts on my blog.)  For this story, I got to make up a new flower.  I call them oyster bells.

Oyster bells grow down around the tide line and look a fair bit like oysters, being mostly black and shiny, with some hints of purple depending on how far along they are with their blooming.  Because Mina needs to figure out how to make tea out of the things, I get to describe not just what they look and smell like (kind of thickly too sweet and sneezy), but also how they taste and even feel like (not 100% awesome, but that’s part of the fun of it, isn’t it?).

And to concoct these imaginary flowers, I got to mentally smash together a couple of things I really like, namely the mesmerizing, oil-slick colors of oyster shell, and pasque flowers, which are, admittedly, a pretty understated flower.  They’re also the flowers that were blooming wild in the woods the weekend my husband and I got married, so I am specially partial to them.  Just like, no matter that Mina doesn’t like them (and she is definitely allowed her opinion) I am specially partial to oyster bells.

Theme 4: Sharon Shinn’s ‘An Interesting Tidbit’ (linked to the descriptions of her books, not as a blog series)

So, the magic in How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters (the part that’s not related to flying fruit) is largely to do with things like weather and tides.  As such, the Moon is called out as being important.  But there’s a sort of random little bit of the story that suggests maybe even the stars are affecting things too.  As it turns out, that isn’t just pure whimsy.  It is a little bit whimsy, but in our real universe the gravitational pull of nearby stars has a measurable impact on us here on Earth – not so much in ocean tides, but star-gravity is one of the reasons new comets show up in our skies.  All of the heavenly bodies really do have their parts to play.  That’s astrophysics, not magic.

Theme 5: (mine own) ‘The Place or Moment I Wish I Could Visit’

Finally, for my own spin on things, the place or moment in this story that I wish I could visit is not a very smart place to be, but I think it would probably be pretty cool.  I would like to find out what it is actually like to find oneself draped in rainbow-hued kraken tentacles.  According to Mina, it really doesn’t smell great.  And since krakens are scary monsters, it would probably also be emotionally no fun at all.  But, if in that moment of adrenaline panic you could hit the mental pause button and take a look around, I imagine that it might be quite spectacular and even exhilarating.  Definitely quite the view, and a great story for later.

And so, I wish you Happy Story.  And Happy Exploring.