Quicunque

While waiting for my friend to come online and amuse me, I was idly reading through some of the collaborative science fictions novels I used to write in and it struck me how many of the characters were assassins or bounty hunters or both. Almost invariably female and kick-ass. Probably with big bazookas. They are beautiful, lethal, do mercenary work on the side, are 'not to be crossed' and 'not to be trusted'. The future is gonna be a very dangerous place to live in because if one of these sexy yet bad-ass (and almost invariably female) assassins don't get you, a sexy yet bad-ass (and almost invariably female) bounty hunter will.

And I am left scratching my head over these clichéd character types...

Every angle of the feisty (and almost invariably female) assassin/bounty hunter stock character has been pre-digested and overused so exhaustively that unless employed as a clever parody, I can only assume that it's a rather sad and dull lack of imagination that makes people keep on cloning carbon copies. And what's so appealing about mass-murders anyway? (in case anyone thinks I'm unfairly prejudiced against assassin characters, I use the same argument for vampire-fanciers *grin*).

Sure, unoriginal stereotypes can sometimes still be enjoyable. Sometimes a clichéd character type can suddenly come become more interesting if an unusual or unexpected angle can be found to them, although if the angle is too obviously contrived and/or whacky and it can just feel staged and unconvincing. Superficial, recognisable stereotype characters can also be useful (even essential, some would say) in a story to provide a familiar level of comfort and reference for the reader. But not as main characters, please! A lead character needs a certain amount of uniqueness and complexity to interest me, and I don't just mean she might do tricks with a shuriken that would make a crime-lord's eyes water.

Maybe the assassin stereotype is just a high-tech replacement for the Tart with a Heart of Gold? Whatever, my ennui with the cliché has reached the stage I automatically read no further if I find one in a story - and that applies to both amateur collaborative fiction and published fiction.

Although I generally don't write fanfic, I have dabbled. One of my forays, back in 2003, was writing a couple of original characters in a Highlander novel at Panhistoria. The fact I'd never seen any of the TV series - and indeed only the first of the movies, many years previously and well forgotten - didn't stop me. What did stop me, was when the novel was lost in the infamous Crash of '04. Many the novels at Pan were rebult from the ground up, including the Highlander one, but I never revived my characters there. They went into space in a science fiction story instead.

Recently, myself and several of my original writing partners from that first venture into Highlander territory have started to pick up our story again, after a 5 year hiatus. This time it's at Pan's sister novel, Panerotica, even though the story is no racier than it ever was (ie not really at all *chuckles*). We've started by undertaking to repost everything we had saved from Version 1 before picking up where we left off - and it's been an interesting exercise to say the least. I have managed to frighten myself with the realisation I wrote much better 5 years ago than I do now.... *laughing*. Oh, and I still haven't see any of the TV series at all!

Since you have to be a member to read everything at Panerotica I thought I'd share a brief excerpt from the story here. So here is my Watcher character, Dante Sparda, newly arrived in Rome to take up his new (and first) field assignment - observing the Immortal known as Zaekim Sanburd - and harbouring a private agenda that threatens to distract him...

Making notes

Roma, August 21st in the Year of Our Lord 1585. The Woman hath taken a House in the Monti District of the City, at the corner of the Via del Boschetto, where she doth now go by the Name of Margarita and passeth freely amongst the Artisans and all People. Your Servant hath taken a Lodging nearby, and doth Keep close her close in Observing her though she knoweth him not…

Old archive entries from long ago that had been encrypted in code by an unknown Watcher and buried deep in the dusty chronicles, until Dante had found and deciphered them. He had read them hundreds of times, using them to painstakingly plot Marguerite Chauvelin’s route across Europe and three hundred years. Now he read them again on his laptop in the small room of his pensione.

Dante sighed in wry self-amusement as he realized he’d got distracted again while painstakingly transferring the handwritten notes on his present assignment to the computer. Almost without thinking he had brought up the codeword-protected files that contained information on another Immortal, one that held a deeply personal interest for Dante. Though the chronicles asserted she had been dead these last hundred and forty years, she was the reason for his existence and his secret obsession, just as she had been his father’s.

He lit a cigarette, leaned back and closed his eyes, letting his mind slide back to how it had all begun: himself sixteen years old and left without family or means after the violent death of his father in mysterious circumstances. No one had known what to do with him, until a man he’d never seen before had turned up to “tell the boy his heritage”. This was Tomas Le Haine, and what he had told Dante had changed his life forever.

“I am here because of what your father was, and because we look after our own. Andreas Sparda was not just a bookseller, he was also a research Watcher, Dante,” Le Haine had smiled at the grief-numbed boy gently. When he returned to the Watcher Academy in Geneva, he had taken Dante to train him to follow in his father’s path.

But although he was studious and often found pouring over old manuscripts in the library, there proved to be a secretive and wild streak in Dante. He was often missing for hours or even several days, from which he would return inexplicably cut and bruised as if from a fight.

He told no one, not even his beloved mentor, that he had now discovered something to focus his bitter vendetta on. It was in his father’s personal notebooks recording their own family history that he had first found the name of the obsession that had drawn Andreas Sparda into this secret society, and hence to his death.

… Shit! The forgotten cigarette had now burned down low enough to threaten Dante’s fingers and he quickly stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray on the writing desk. A glance at his watch showed he had spent longer simply sitting here mulling over the past than he could afford. Shaking his head and muttering at himself, he closed the Chauvelin file, and dutifully began a new one to continue transcribing notes on the one who called herself Zaekim Sanburd instead.

[from Highlander: For All Eternity, all rights reserved]

For many of us who write in places like Panhistoria and Pan Erotica that are collaberative/roleplay communties - call it what you will - a character whose mantle we assume often becomes more than simply a fictional being. Over the years we become so familiar with that character that it becomes ourself. The avatar and name we've chosen becomes our public representation; we are known, measured, and often influenced by our alter-ego. They are more real than a childhood invisible friend, and yet insubstantial as a daydream.

"Jerry Cornelius" or "Jerry C" or even "Jerry" is not my real name, but I have travelled under it to the extent where it feels like it is. It's no longer anything to do with the selection of the name of my favourite Moorcock character for my new Staff persona at Panhistoria, since my Jerry swiftly took on an identity all of his own. He was always much more outgoing and cheekier than his shy and introspective creator, and maybe sadly, he was also outspoken *chuckles*. But he was for a brief time even popular I believe, and he opened doors for me and grabbed me by the hand and dragged me through winding corridors and dusty attics and soaring ivory towers.

And now I don't know what to do with him.

He was never a character I wrote in fiction, with one brief exception (a role as mad scientist Professor Willi Van de Graaff in the pulp scifi episode of Pan's version of Survivor!), and the purpose for which he was created is no longer valid. Baldly, he is excess to my now-modest requirements, a shadow, a relic no longer needed. I considered terminating his existence, but even as my fingers hovered over the 'delete' button next to his name, I just couldn't go through with it *chuckles*. I've always been sentimental and nostalgic about even my lesser alter-egos, so it's probably unsurprising.

Maybe one day I will have grown away from him enough to sever the umbilical cord, but for the moment, my beloved brat continues to linger in precarious limbo, endlessly chain-smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes and passing wry observations on life, the universe and everything else he's not at all qualified to judge.

Today when I went out for my walk, I took along a small notebook tucked snugly into my hip pocket. Ideas for my next collaborative fiction posts, snatches of conversation and description often come to me as I’m walking along with my brain disconnected, but by the time I get home I’ve forgotten them and they’re lost for good. So, I thought I could perch on a stile or fallen tree and scribble these flashes of brilliance down in the notebook as-and-when I think of them. Okay, so this idea is probably a no-brainer to any creative writing gurus who might happen to read this, but it was a giant mental leap for Jerry-kind.

Tomorrow, I will even remember to take a pen too….

Thinking about the notebook idea, it occurs to me to wonder if, after declaring for years that I am a humble roleplay writer, with neither talent or aspiration to be anything more literary, all these writing tips and advice I’m surrounded by in the communities I frequent might not be rubbing off on me – am I starting to take my writing seriously, egads?! No, no, I can quickly reassure myself on that account! Writing is, and always will be, nothing more a modest outlet of personal creativity for me. I admire those with ambitions, but I’ve long since learned that for me, the moment I undertake something too seriously it becomes a duty and not a pleasure.

I leave you with one of my favourite thought-provoking quotations from Jung: “But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”

Another piece of fiction from me. The beginning of a fantasy story that started out as the familiar old 'portal between the worlds' scenario but was beginning to incorporate all kinds of wierd, disparate elements just before it's host 'novel' at Panhistoria came to an end.

Yes, I suppose really one day I should post a sample of what I'm writing NOW rather than older, defunct stuff. But this is as much for me as it is for you (my hypothetical reader, maybe I have one!) and I am shamelessly prone to nostalgia. I can see the faults in these pieces now, and even ways to improve them (though I haven't), but that's half the point of this exercise for me.

So with no further woffle, here is Burn - a Fire Elemental, resident of Faerie, and reluctant guardian-to-be of that pesky portal.

The Earth Moved in Faerie

Something was terribly wrong. The Land knew it too, and moaned and trembled with its unease. The rumbling echoes of the groundquake and following rockfall faded back into silence, and after a brief pause during which everything seemed to hang in tense stillness, the birds began to sing again, though tentatively. The black horse, which had lifted its head from cropping the sparse grass to stare with anxiously pricked ears at the mountains facing them across the forested valley, gave a soft snort and stamped a hind-hoof, nosing at its master’s shoulder.

Burn absently murmured soothingly to it and patted its strong arching neck. “And what was that?” he mused. It was a rhetorical question – he knew what it was, just not what had caused it.

I don’t know but I don’t like it, said a small leathery voice from inside his jerkin. I think we should move on. Wherever we’re going.

“Hmm.” Burn looked across the valley at the hillsides beyond and frowned. There wasn’t much that could make a more-or-less immortal fire-elemental uneasy, but the series of unusual events he’d encountered over the past few days were getting close to it. Two days ago, he’d been drawn by the smell of fire and smoke to a meadow down in the valley below them, where he’d found nothing but ash blowing amongst the trees and long grass. The work of dragons, he’d assumed, scenting sulphur and brimstone on the hot breeze, but the mighty creatures generally kept to the mountain fastnesses and were rare visitors in the valley without good reason.

He thought he understood the reason for the dragons’ presence when he went a little further, and in a small clearing in the woods he found a rift in the fabric of the world, a rippling shimmer in the Spring sunlight that as he stepped closer revealed a view into another world beyond. The world of the humans, Burn had decided, creatures he generally had nothing to do with, not even those who had passed into Faery years before and stayed. He never went near their small, scattered settlements. He saw no point in it although he didn’t resent or regret their presence in the Land.

Small rips in the continuum were not uncommon and generally easily sealed, but Burn could see this one was something different. It had a force of its own that hissed in the wind and rippled in the aether, as if in defiance of any attempt to close it. Not that Burn did even think of trying to close it: he was Fire and this was not his responsibility. He had simply ridden away, assuming those who could, would deal with it.

But since then, he had begun to wonder. The next day he had found something wandering about in the valley that had no right to be there and had aimed a small metal weapon at him that spat fire. Burn had retaliated in kind and left the ash to mingle with that already lightly dusting the leaves of the trees. And then today—the Land itself had spoken and Burn realized that the rift he had ridden away from was of more ominous significance than he’d thought.

But still, he was a fire-elemental and such things as holding the boundaries between the Worlds were not his business. He gathered up his horse’s reins and swung into the saddle, careful not to squash the salamander that lay quietly beneath his jerkin. Normally Pyro would have been up riding on his shoulder and filling his ears with its chatter, but today the little creature was silent and hiding.

The big black horse moved sure-footedly on the rocky slope down to the valley floor, ears flicking back and forth as if it too had caught some of the salamander’s unease. As the ground levelled out and became more thickly wooded, Burn turned its head into the trees and crossed the valley floor at its narrowest point, fording the small stream that meandered along its length until again the land began to rise towards the foothills on the other side. What had made him decide to see for himself the aftermath of the Land’s protest he couldn’t say, and he never asked himself because he never questioned his own motives for anything.

Like many other creative fiction writers, I have a virtual cigar-box full of beginnings that have no endings. A good collaborative fiction writer tries on many different types of character and ventures into a variety of scenarios and histories during his journeys. Although my experiments have not always worked, I would like to think I have at least voyaged, and my virtual cigar-box contains a collection of old posts from my early days at Panhistoria when I was trying on various characters and novels as if they were hats.

Some of these posts are the only ones I wrote for that particular character. Sometimes I found the hat I tried on just didn't suit me, or it was too constrictive or cut from the wrong cloth. Several of the posts are for novels long since lost to posterity. None of these characters exist in my current fictional dabblings, although some of the names live on in different roles.

But I cling to these outdated and defunct introductions, not simply to revisit them and (hopefully!) consider how I might have improved since, but also because although they are no longer tied to their original novels/storylines, maybe they will one day fly again as something else altogether or provide inspiration for future stories.

This one is relatively 'recent' - from 2004. It was the beginning of a story in the pirate-themed collaborative fiction group at Panhistoria called Ile de Torture, and although neither the character nor the story came to anything, I was fond of him - Christophe Malheur, mixed-blood plantation foreman and local voodoo priest. Somedays, I feel he may still have a story to tell....

Answering Marie's summons

On this wildest of nights, the boy sent to fetch Christophe Malheur found him sitting on the storm-torn wooden verandah of his house with the wind whipping his long black hair about his face and lightening reflecting a yellowish hue in his ebony eyes. Thunder rolled back from the hulking black mass of Mont Pelée and lightening twisted in brilliant flashes through the torrential rain, but Christophe’s quiet observation of the storm’s wrath was more of appreciation than concern. They said he had been born at the height of just such a storm, his mother’s agonized cries muffled by the roll of Shango’s vengeful drums while the mambo-midwife called on the loas to give life and protection, and something of the storm had always remained in him.

He didn’t seen either surprised or much concerned to see the boy appearing on his doorstep in such weather, but simply got to his feet, took hold of the boy’s thin arm and hauled him inside the house out of the tearing wind and rain before remarking softly, “Not a good evening for a stroll, mon p’tit, so what’s wrong?”

“Madame Leveau sent me,” stammered the child, breathless with the force of the storm and the exertion of running. “They found a man washed up by the storm at Anse Ceron and took him to Colline Plaisante.” He danced from foot to foot nervously under the steady regard of Christophe’s ebony gaze, wide-eyed with awe of this man the gens de couleur called Nwa Kònèy, the black crow.

Most people on first meeting the facteur of Marie Leveau’s plantation tended to assume from his looks that Christophe Malheur was white—maybe even one of those pure-blood but dirt-poor haute Français one could find around the island. But he never troubled to conceal the quarter of his blood that was Dahomean or his servitude to the loas, and this had brought him a certain respect amongst the people of color, both slave and free, around Anse Ceron.

Christophe nodded his understand of the situation, calmly pushing long wind-tangled hair off his sharp-featured face. “I’ll go straight away. Has the doctor been sent for?” he asked the boy. “Good. Now you stay inside, mon p’tit, you may shelter here til the storm’s passed. But mind you don’t touch anything.”

“Non, m’sieur, I won’t!” The boy glanced nervously round the room, which was dimly lit by a single candelabra standing on what appeared to be a small shrine against the wall: Nwa Kònèy’s djab-spirit was said to be possessive and fierce if you were not safely protected with its garde.

“Mesi,” Christophe smiled at him and touched his head gently, then like a storm-crow was gone into the raging night.


If you wish to explore the stories told in Ile de Torture further, you can use the guest login option at Panhistoria to read there.

Wyatt has posted in his blog - Plotting Between Collaborative Writers - about the fact that most collaborative fiction stories at Pan Historia are presumed to keep rolling on eternally into an indefinite future, which can make coming up with new plot ideas all the time a real challenge.

I have to confess that I personally often find difficulties with very long-term stories because I run out of inspiration, or get bored and distracted by something new and fresh. Sometimes you just have to accept you have hit the end of the story's trail and know when to call it a day - to continue dragging it out beyond its natural end would be akin to aging rockers trying to wring out one last tour for a yawning audience before they kick the bucket.

The first time my co-writer gently explained to me the story we'd been writing for years was to all intents and purposes now told and that we should write "The End" beneath it, I felt - weird. I had learned to write in a culture where stories didn't end (at least not deliberately). I had grown to love our characters and feel comfortable in their world - how could I simply set them aside?

We compromised. We told ourselves we would close this story arc and put our beloved characters into retirement, a little hiberation period, give them a holiday - just until we had fresh ideas for them, you know? The next time was easier, and the time after that it was I who suggested "The End" was due.

Now, I don't embark on a storyline with the assumption it's going to be a forever thing. I have learnt that ending a story can be a virtue, not an admission of failure. Since I generally write one-on-one, my partner and I now set off knowing our story is likely to have a definite end, and that when we reach it, we will sign it off with a cheerful flourish and start a new one. There are so many stories we want to tell, and only a limited amount of time to write them, after all!

For this reason I am a huge fan of the anthology novels (a 'novel' in this context is Panspeak for a collaberative writing group) that we have at both Pan Historia and Panerotica. Like their fleshspace equivalents, anthologies such as Tempest's Sanctuary for horror/fantasy and Shadows and Smoke for speculative fiction are volumes of short stories rather than a single full-length work. They are ideal for those who want to write a finite story, and also great places for writing solo, or for those new to collaberative writing to dip their toes without committing to a long-term relationship.

So if you think you want to give this collaberative fiction writing lark a try but are daunted by the prospect of narrative eternity, why not grab a partner (or two) and run through a short story first?