Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Becky Jones: The crowd surged forward.
My first thought was This feels like a prelude to a crowd panic.
Given that I'm working mostly in the Grissom timeline, my first thought was the one on Mamayev Hill, which set off the "Stalingrad Firestorm," the riots that marked the transformation of the Lanakhidzist Revolution from a merely Georgian phenomenon to one that would sweep the entire Soviet Union, and ultimately sweep away the USSR altogether. But under what circumstances is it coming up, given that Children's Crusade (the planned mega-novel of the Lanakhidzist Revolution) is indefinitely back-burnered and may never be written.
In The Steel Breeds True, Joseph Karahidze has a vision of those events which is his first moment of other-memory, as he becomes attuned to the quantum hologram, and sets up for the ghostly Stalin forcing him to acknowledge his genetic identity:
===========================================================================================
Joseph sat on one of the benches and leaned against the balustrade that separated the upper, flagstone terrace from the lower, concrete terrace. He half-closed his eyes and recalled the previous week's action. Then he'd watched it from the safe vantage point of the arched entryway to Noyes Lab, but now he tried to imagine how it would look close up. Damn, but it had been as exciting as an all-out bench-clearing brawl in a really close Blackhawks game.
Joseph's visual memory might not be as good as his verbal memory, but a little effort brought forth the image: the mill of people shouting and chanting, the arc of the police batons as they whacked their way through.
Only it refused to stay put, to remain here under the arch of the stately genemod elms that lined the Quadrangle. Why did it keep wanting to move to a park on a hill, around a statue so huge that it made the people around it look like ants? A statue of a woman holding a sword above her head -- hell, he knew that place, had seen too many pictures of it in his history textbooks back home in Gori. Soviet textbooks might have odd little lacunae where they brushed over awkward facts, but no amount of official disfavor for Gori's most famous native son could be allowed to obscure the heroic victory at the city which once bore his name.
And bore it again, by Danikidze's proclamation. Shitfire, but that was a thing to be proud of. A Georgian had undone the smear to his fellow countryman done by that fat Ukrainian Khrushchev.
Assuming Moscow didn't bring in their bully-boys to stomp everything back the way they wanted it. Those militia were looking nervous. Even from his vantage point, he could almost taste the fear welling up sour on the backs of their tongues, smell the sweat running down their backs.
"What do you think, Iosif?" The thin man beside him ran fingers through that absurd tufted orange hair.
"This doesn't look good." He narrowed his eyes, wished he had a pair of good military binocs like he'd used in Afghanistan. "They're scared, and scared cops make mistakes."
"But will those mistakes be in our favor, or Moscow's?" The orange-haired man's name popped into his mind -- Litvinov.
"Good question." He reached for the vodka bottle. Damn, but he needed another drink. Only Litvinov had removed it. Who did that genetic freak think he was, controlling a real man's drinking?
The bells of Altgeld cut through the vision, jerked Joseph Karahidze back to himself, back to the present. He sucked in a deep breath, gripped the rough concrete of the balustrade. Its tactile presence anchored his reality.
What a trip. He'd never been to Stalingrad, never seen Mamayev Hill except in photos, and he'd certainly never been a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan -- but for those few minutes, he'd been in the mind of someone who had. Someone for whom service in Afghanistan had been a gritty reality. Someone who'd been standing at some raised part of the battle memorial, watching the crowd around the Motherland statue.
A crowd just about to start the riot Pravda had been harping on. A riot now two months old, news gone stale while the paper made its slow way to Urbana.
Joseph shivered. How could he remember someone else's memories? Could he be losing his mind?
He forced himself to take deep, calming breaths. He was a rational man, an engineering student, not a superstitious fool who prayed to icons. Think rationally, sort it out instead of letting panic rule his mind.
He'd been playing with a visualization of last week's Quad riot, after he'd primed himself by reading about the Stalingrad riots. It wasn't like he hadn't seen footage -- he'd been as eager as everyone else with ties to the USSR to eat up every crumb of video Danikidze had smuggled out, of the KGB pouring in with water cannon and live ammunition after the militia broke and ran in the face of the mob's wrath.
He still remembered the static he'd gotten from certain persons in the Slavic Department two days later when he'd cheered at Lanakhidze reporting events from "Stalingrad." Remembering brought back that nagging sense of frustration at being stuck here in the US while history was happening back home. Back in his real home, back in the USSR, not that crummy apartment in Shit-cago he'd shared with his mother for the past eight years. Damn, but he knew how a hockey player had to feel to be stuck on the sidelines during a critical play.
"Their reasons are not my reasons." The voice was soft, almost a whisper.
Joseph looked up, got a soft chuckle as his reward. "No, no, Soselo, this is neither the time nor the place to reveal myself." The voice spoke inside his mind. In Georgian.
"What do you want?" Joseph kept his own voice a low growl.
"All in good time, Soselo."
Joseph was alone again. Damn, but this was getting spooky. First a vision of the Stalingrad riots, and now he was hearing voices. Or a voice, a particularly familiar one for a boy from Gori. Maybe he was going nuts.
===========================================================================================
On the other hand, it could be Chelsea Ayles from my current novel project (untitled at the moment), as she's trying to learn the history of the Grissom timeline without anybody noticing she's showing unusual interest in things Everybody Knows.
===========================================================================================
Don't Take It Personally
Even after all these months - or lunar days, up here -- Chelsea was still painfully aware of how little she knew about the history of this timeline. Just this afternoon, she'd nearly revealed her transtemporal origins when a casual reference to this timeline's fall of the Soviet Union had taken her by surprise. She'd managed to convince everyone that her reaction had in fact been to a completely unrelated matter, but she'd been very aware of certain people's yeah, right that they were too polite to say openly.
Although she was aware that history had diverged significantly since the 1960's, and she really needed to learn as much of it as humanly possible, it was easier said than done. For starters, she had to be very careful how she went about any such research, particularly about things that were such common knowledge that any expression of astonishment would draw attention to oneself. With everything in electronic format, Chelsea wasn't sure about the risk that unusual patterns of reading might lead her account to get flagged for attention by someone in Safety and Security.
After some very cautious forays on the Internet, she realized that entertainment media were less likely to attract unwelcome attention than informational materials. Of course they were no substitute for proper research, but they could at least help her get her bearings on how the history of her new home varied from that she'd known, and some sense of the things that Everybody Knew.
Right now she was sitting in the lounge, watching a historical drama about the Lanakhidzist Revolution on her tablet. The dub was bad enough that she wondered if she'd have an easier time following subtitles, or even seeing how far her limited Russian would carry her. However, this was the only file she could find, and she was wondering if it might be a bootleg.
Given how much the scriptwriter and director seemed to be assuming that everyone knew the basics of these events, she was starting to wonder if watching it had been a mistake. She was still having a lot of trouble telling the major characters apart, let alone understanding their motivations and how their individual lives were supposed to fit into the great historical events swirling around their personal goals and conflicts.
Right now the camera was pulling back for a long view of all the people swarming around that statue that looked strangely familiar, to the point Chelsea was sure she ought to recognize it from the timeline of her birth. Even as she was trying to remember, the crowd surged forward with a suddenness that brought a gasp of astonishment to her lips.
From behind the sofa came a voice redolent of condescension. "That movie's full of errors."
Looking up to find a Shep looking over her shoulder, Chelsea fought down the growl of annoyance at the intrusion, and particularly the underlying assumption that she must be an idiot to be enjoying something so flawed. Responding with anger at this sort of barb would just get her a snippy remark about taking it so personally, never mind that it was clearly intended as such.
Which meant that any comeback had to ignore the bait guarded by plausible deniability. "Every dramatization has inaccuracies, but that doesn't doesn't necessarily mean they're errors, in the sense of being the result of ignorance on the part of the screenwriter or the director. A lot of times they're in the service of narrative, like condensing events to simplify the storyline, conflating multiple peripheral historical figure into a single character to trim the cast down to a manageable size, or injecting conflict even if it means misrepresenting someone."
She stopped, realizing that she couldn't very well go talking about the portrayal of Ken Mattingly in the movie Apollo 13, not when that mission never even happened in this timeline. She wished she could remember whether The Right Stuff still came out in this timeline, and how it differed from the one she'd watched.
===========================================================================================
When I first started exploring the scene, it led into a huge section of the endgame that had previously been pretty much a blank for me. I sketched it out on Wednesday, but on Thursday we had to load in for Indiana Comic Con, and from there on it was non-stop busy, so fully exploring the implications of this moment is going to have to take some time, once I get done with my post-convention bookkeeping.
I did manage to get a story written for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. It's a mundane one, and not overly inspired, but at least it's written.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
There will be a new word and picture prompt up at Indies Unlimited on Saturday. Until then, the polls will open tomorrow for voting on the Readers' Choice Award, and will close at 5PM on Thursday.
In the meantime, keep writing.
My first thought was This feels like a prelude to a crowd panic.
Given that I'm working mostly in the Grissom timeline, my first thought was the one on Mamayev Hill, which set off the "Stalingrad Firestorm," the riots that marked the transformation of the Lanakhidzist Revolution from a merely Georgian phenomenon to one that would sweep the entire Soviet Union, and ultimately sweep away the USSR altogether. But under what circumstances is it coming up, given that Children's Crusade (the planned mega-novel of the Lanakhidzist Revolution) is indefinitely back-burnered and may never be written.
In The Steel Breeds True, Joseph Karahidze has a vision of those events which is his first moment of other-memory, as he becomes attuned to the quantum hologram, and sets up for the ghostly Stalin forcing him to acknowledge his genetic identity:
===========================================================================================
Joseph sat on one of the benches and leaned against the balustrade that separated the upper, flagstone terrace from the lower, concrete terrace. He half-closed his eyes and recalled the previous week's action. Then he'd watched it from the safe vantage point of the arched entryway to Noyes Lab, but now he tried to imagine how it would look close up. Damn, but it had been as exciting as an all-out bench-clearing brawl in a really close Blackhawks game.
Joseph's visual memory might not be as good as his verbal memory, but a little effort brought forth the image: the mill of people shouting and chanting, the arc of the police batons as they whacked their way through.
Only it refused to stay put, to remain here under the arch of the stately genemod elms that lined the Quadrangle. Why did it keep wanting to move to a park on a hill, around a statue so huge that it made the people around it look like ants? A statue of a woman holding a sword above her head -- hell, he knew that place, had seen too many pictures of it in his history textbooks back home in Gori. Soviet textbooks might have odd little lacunae where they brushed over awkward facts, but no amount of official disfavor for Gori's most famous native son could be allowed to obscure the heroic victory at the city which once bore his name.
And bore it again, by Danikidze's proclamation. Shitfire, but that was a thing to be proud of. A Georgian had undone the smear to his fellow countryman done by that fat Ukrainian Khrushchev.
Assuming Moscow didn't bring in their bully-boys to stomp everything back the way they wanted it. Those militia were looking nervous. Even from his vantage point, he could almost taste the fear welling up sour on the backs of their tongues, smell the sweat running down their backs.
"What do you think, Iosif?" The thin man beside him ran fingers through that absurd tufted orange hair.
"This doesn't look good." He narrowed his eyes, wished he had a pair of good military binocs like he'd used in Afghanistan. "They're scared, and scared cops make mistakes."
"But will those mistakes be in our favor, or Moscow's?" The orange-haired man's name popped into his mind -- Litvinov.
"Good question." He reached for the vodka bottle. Damn, but he needed another drink. Only Litvinov had removed it. Who did that genetic freak think he was, controlling a real man's drinking?
The bells of Altgeld cut through the vision, jerked Joseph Karahidze back to himself, back to the present. He sucked in a deep breath, gripped the rough concrete of the balustrade. Its tactile presence anchored his reality.
What a trip. He'd never been to Stalingrad, never seen Mamayev Hill except in photos, and he'd certainly never been a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan -- but for those few minutes, he'd been in the mind of someone who had. Someone for whom service in Afghanistan had been a gritty reality. Someone who'd been standing at some raised part of the battle memorial, watching the crowd around the Motherland statue.
A crowd just about to start the riot Pravda had been harping on. A riot now two months old, news gone stale while the paper made its slow way to Urbana.
Joseph shivered. How could he remember someone else's memories? Could he be losing his mind?
He forced himself to take deep, calming breaths. He was a rational man, an engineering student, not a superstitious fool who prayed to icons. Think rationally, sort it out instead of letting panic rule his mind.
He'd been playing with a visualization of last week's Quad riot, after he'd primed himself by reading about the Stalingrad riots. It wasn't like he hadn't seen footage -- he'd been as eager as everyone else with ties to the USSR to eat up every crumb of video Danikidze had smuggled out, of the KGB pouring in with water cannon and live ammunition after the militia broke and ran in the face of the mob's wrath.
He still remembered the static he'd gotten from certain persons in the Slavic Department two days later when he'd cheered at Lanakhidze reporting events from "Stalingrad." Remembering brought back that nagging sense of frustration at being stuck here in the US while history was happening back home. Back in his real home, back in the USSR, not that crummy apartment in Shit-cago he'd shared with his mother for the past eight years. Damn, but he knew how a hockey player had to feel to be stuck on the sidelines during a critical play.
"Their reasons are not my reasons." The voice was soft, almost a whisper.
Joseph looked up, got a soft chuckle as his reward. "No, no, Soselo, this is neither the time nor the place to reveal myself." The voice spoke inside his mind. In Georgian.
"What do you want?" Joseph kept his own voice a low growl.
"All in good time, Soselo."
Joseph was alone again. Damn, but this was getting spooky. First a vision of the Stalingrad riots, and now he was hearing voices. Or a voice, a particularly familiar one for a boy from Gori. Maybe he was going nuts.
===========================================================================================
On the other hand, it could be Chelsea Ayles from my current novel project (untitled at the moment), as she's trying to learn the history of the Grissom timeline without anybody noticing she's showing unusual interest in things Everybody Knows.
===========================================================================================
Don't Take It Personally
Even after all these months - or lunar days, up here -- Chelsea was still painfully aware of how little she knew about the history of this timeline. Just this afternoon, she'd nearly revealed her transtemporal origins when a casual reference to this timeline's fall of the Soviet Union had taken her by surprise. She'd managed to convince everyone that her reaction had in fact been to a completely unrelated matter, but she'd been very aware of certain people's yeah, right that they were too polite to say openly.
Although she was aware that history had diverged significantly since the 1960's, and she really needed to learn as much of it as humanly possible, it was easier said than done. For starters, she had to be very careful how she went about any such research, particularly about things that were such common knowledge that any expression of astonishment would draw attention to oneself. With everything in electronic format, Chelsea wasn't sure about the risk that unusual patterns of reading might lead her account to get flagged for attention by someone in Safety and Security.
After some very cautious forays on the Internet, she realized that entertainment media were less likely to attract unwelcome attention than informational materials. Of course they were no substitute for proper research, but they could at least help her get her bearings on how the history of her new home varied from that she'd known, and some sense of the things that Everybody Knew.
Right now she was sitting in the lounge, watching a historical drama about the Lanakhidzist Revolution on her tablet. The dub was bad enough that she wondered if she'd have an easier time following subtitles, or even seeing how far her limited Russian would carry her. However, this was the only file she could find, and she was wondering if it might be a bootleg.
Given how much the scriptwriter and director seemed to be assuming that everyone knew the basics of these events, she was starting to wonder if watching it had been a mistake. She was still having a lot of trouble telling the major characters apart, let alone understanding their motivations and how their individual lives were supposed to fit into the great historical events swirling around their personal goals and conflicts.
Right now the camera was pulling back for a long view of all the people swarming around that statue that looked strangely familiar, to the point Chelsea was sure she ought to recognize it from the timeline of her birth. Even as she was trying to remember, the crowd surged forward with a suddenness that brought a gasp of astonishment to her lips.
From behind the sofa came a voice redolent of condescension. "That movie's full of errors."
Looking up to find a Shep looking over her shoulder, Chelsea fought down the growl of annoyance at the intrusion, and particularly the underlying assumption that she must be an idiot to be enjoying something so flawed. Responding with anger at this sort of barb would just get her a snippy remark about taking it so personally, never mind that it was clearly intended as such.
Which meant that any comeback had to ignore the bait guarded by plausible deniability. "Every dramatization has inaccuracies, but that doesn't doesn't necessarily mean they're errors, in the sense of being the result of ignorance on the part of the screenwriter or the director. A lot of times they're in the service of narrative, like condensing events to simplify the storyline, conflating multiple peripheral historical figure into a single character to trim the cast down to a manageable size, or injecting conflict even if it means misrepresenting someone."
She stopped, realizing that she couldn't very well go talking about the portrayal of Ken Mattingly in the movie Apollo 13, not when that mission never even happened in this timeline. She wished she could remember whether The Right Stuff still came out in this timeline, and how it differed from the one she'd watched.
===========================================================================================
When I first started exploring the scene, it led into a huge section of the endgame that had previously been pretty much a blank for me. I sketched it out on Wednesday, but on Thursday we had to load in for Indiana Comic Con, and from there on it was non-stop busy, so fully exploring the implications of this moment is going to have to take some time, once I get done with my post-convention bookkeeping.
I did manage to get a story written for this week's Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge. It's a mundane one, and not overly inspired, but at least it's written.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
There will be a new word and picture prompt up at Indies Unlimited on Saturday. Until then, the polls will open tomorrow for voting on the Readers' Choice Award, and will close at 5PM on Thursday.
In the meantime, keep writing.