• 00:08 So that thing I was doing instead of dealing with the mold? I’ve now cut my hand & broken the grip I was building, just before finishing.¹ #
• 00:08 Today = not good. #
• 00:14 For those keeping score? This is why I like writing. When you screw up a scene you don’t have to worry about bleeding on the page. #
• 00:51 Okay, I’ve taken a break and am going to try to build this again. #
• 02:26 Yes, this is going much better. I’m installing the shoulder joints now and have the basic grip built. It’s sexy. #
• 05:17 Starting to costume the wood witch. #
• 06:07 All right. I’m going to nap for a bit. #
• 10:13 I’m leaving the shop. #

1. It was a shallow cut and I’m fine, it was just aggravating. [↩]

I’ve been reading Juliette Wade’s blog for some time now. She’s a linguist and anthropologist who also writes SF. Her insights in to culture are well-written and uniformly insightful. I look forward to her posts.

Today’s post is called, .Don’t make them all the same and deals with different approaches to creating multi-cultural fantasy characters.

Here’s a teaser.

The other thing is, don’t make every character from a particular alien or racial group exactly the same. This is what I’ve earlier referred to as “running true to type.” It’s fun to have a group of people from different races, whether that be elves, dwarves and humans, Braxana and Azeans (thanks to C.S. Friedman) or the people of Sendaria, Arendia, Nyissa etc. (thanks to David Eddings). But if the belief systems of these people are entirely uncontested, uniform across the race or alien group, the story won’t have all the dimension it could.

There are two ways to approach this. One is from the character direction, making sure that your characters are three-dimensional and have motives and inner conflicts and all those important things. That’s certainly true of the characters from the authors I’ve mentioned. The other is to think directly about the character’s relationship to the social group they belong to.

Check it out.

I don’t know about you, but I need a break from my angst.

I’m going to try to use an analogy to explain how frustrating it is when you are working on a puppet and it breaks right before you finish.

Imagine that you are almost finished with a short story or novel, you’ve been very careful and been backing it up as you go. Something goes wrong with your computer and it catches on fire, singeing your fingers. In pain, you grab the fire extinguisher to put it out, which you do, but the exhaust also clogs your backup hard drive and causes a colossal failure, wiping out not just the scene you were working on, but the entire story.

To skip the analogy, here’s my day thus far. We went to open the mold for the fog witch’s face and it cracked in four places. The two part mold is now five parts. One of the shims had shifted during the course of making the mold¹ and wound up on the wrong side of an undercut. So, even if I can repair the mold, it’s built so that I wouldn’t be able to pull the pieces free after casting them.

Frustrated, I turn to work on the control and ignore the mold. While putting the piece of wood into a vise, I managed to slice the palm of my hand with… I’m not sure what. I was just bleeding and had this stigmata. So, I get that patched up, and head for the bandsaw, which jumps off the track five times or so and finally just breaks.

I have to turn the puppets in tomorrow² so this means that I’m cutting things out by hand. Why am I blogging now? Because I thought it prudent to express my frustration before I pick up a cutting instrument.

I blithely commented that this is why I like writing, because when you screw up a scene you don’t bleed on the page. A couple of other writers commented back that they bleed while writing. Figuratively, yes, I’ll buy that. But seriously, I never have this level of frustration even when a story is misfiring. It just seems so much easier to deal with because I don’t have to deal with physics and the laws of nature in the same way.

I mean, if something goes wrong on the page, I can solve it by just thinking hard at the problem. With puppets, if something goes wrong, there’s a whole host of physical problems that I can’t fix by sheer will and imagination. Aside from the physical considerations, the process of puppet building and writing are very similar. In fact, when I’m in the midst of a design, my writing productivity goes way the heck down, because it uses the same muscle as design does.

Le sigh… I can’t wait until this is finished and I can get some serious writing in. Speaking of, it’s time I go back to the puppet.

1. I think, I didn’t make it so I’m guessing [↩]
2. later today [↩]