For years now, I’ve been joking about having a gateway in the head.
Actually the experience is that of having an antenna in your head. You feel a “transmission” incoming and you can tune to it or not.
Now if this sounds like I sit around with my thumb up my– er… with my thumb in the air waiting for inspiration, that’s not it.
There is a certain amount of “turning on for receiving transmission” which mostly involves sitting down at the same time every day and making with the writing, whether there is something being picked up by then antenna or not.”I’ve always assumed this is just my mental work around for “I’ve always assumed this is just my mental work around for “My subconscious came up with this insanity and now it has to come out.”
This might not be true.
Years ago, Doc Rob (Hampson) told me that he’s encountered a structure in the brains of creative people who work this way, and it’s not in other brains, and he wondered. This segued into a request for my brain when I die, and the denial (look, I don’t want fate to have an incentive to off me) got an “oh, pooh.” As an answer.
I kind of assumed he was pulling my leg, which frankly, he’s known for doing, having a quirky sense of humor.
THEN at Liberty Con, last weekend, I found myself put in a panel for The New Weird (Which is not a thing. All of us old pros are old weird. I wish they’d stop putting me in it.)
And Sean Hazlett who apparently went down a rabbit hole because of my story and…. well, anyway, he says there are people who indeed believe such a structure exists, and serves as an antenna. And by people I mean scientists, not us no account creatives.
Also it works like this for writers, artists and musicians.
I believe Pratchett also worked this way, hence his talk of ideas raining from the sky.
Now, here’s the thing: I get the whole story but– okay, more on that later — anyway it doesn’t arrive and I listen to it in real time. It’s like it arrives and gets stored in my brain, and I’m on some sort of schedule, so I get about four novels a year, which is why I have a backlog from being ill for ten years. To make things worse (?) I’ve recently started getting six book series.
Now, you’re going to say it must be easy. Just sit down and type. Some novels are indeed like that — A Few Good Men — but it’s like they degrade a bit the longer they wait, so other stuff gets dropped in, or you know what the character had for breakfast every day, but you don’t want to put this in.
I realized the other day, on the 46 year old transmission that has been waiting that I was going down a loop of things that interested me but weren’t important for the characters at the moment, and ignoring the vital things they should be discussing, which kind of deadended the novel. So, unspooling and going back to that point.
I mean, they’re interested in it too, but it’s like I was picking their hidden thoughts, not the things that will advance the plot.
Then there is the fact that sometimes the transmission starts and stops, or there’s bits missing. So you still have to know the writing thing and plot structure, to fix the missing stuff.
It’s not like you get a pass on learning.
The most common problem though, is that you’re writing something where the transmission is… well, the next station over, so what you get is a little garbled and stepped on by static. Sometimes by an effort of will, you can “tune” it and sometimes that’s what you have to work with.
So in the end, the mix is transmission plus you. Not you alone. I could get the same transmission as another mad genius and get a completely different result.
Now that I’ve sounded completely insane and maybe scared a few of you, let me add what scares me:
IF these are indeed transmissions, where are they coming from? And why is it vitally important these novels or something like them be written?
That’s what’s going to keep me awake in the night, wondering.
Mad Genius Club 
55 responses to “The Care And Feeding of the Eldritch Gateway- Sarah A. Hoyt”
You’re just tapped into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Cauldron of Story. 😉
He mentions the idea of the Cauldron of Story in his essay “On Fairy Tales”.
And of course, authors can tap into the Cauldron of Story and their stories may be added to the Cauldron of Story.
So get busy adding stuff to the Cauldron. 😀
Kind of like Campbell’s collective unconscious thingie.
That would mean that the ‘transmissions’ are, using the Cauldron because it works better, some kind of a ladle or skimmer going into the pot and pulling out interesting things.
Which the creative then cooks with, making something new and different.
STORY CASSEROLE!
If stories are casseroles, I think I found the next Hugo winner:
Yearrrrrrrrghhhhhh!!!!!! *flees at top speed*
Just think of it as the model for the next schlorp monster….. And we can answer the eternal question: What was “the mess in the mess”? 😎
Nah, Lileks has way too good of a sense of humor for a Hugo….
https://lileks.com/institute/gallery/
LOL
I fabulate my stories, that is, I sort of live them (mentally) as I’m falling asleep, when I’m driving, etc. Maybe it’s in bits and pieces, maybe in chunks all at once. So, naturally, it’s their lives I’m tuning into, not that excerpt of their lives that constitutes a controlled narrative.
What I do about it is look for a place for the narrative to digest the randomness usefully (else suppress). I’d rather have too many ideas (“Oh! Of course that’s how he should find out about X!”) than not enough of them while a character teeters on the edge of a narrative precipice or putters out in a dead end. I get lots of my more colorful non-obvious details & connections this way.
Same here: as late as my thirties it was routine for me to come up with story ideas by going: “Tell me a story!” to myself as I was drifting off.
I call it the Quantum Gestalt.
On a podcast I was listening to, they said ancient peoples did not think that we came up with our own thoughts; they believed that we received our thoughts – from deities or other beings.
I think that has to be at least somewhat, if not completely, true.
Feels like it.
Lots of cultures believe in inspired (spirit in) creative works, the muses, the genius (a spirit), etc. Others do not. Chinese culture, for instance.
I wish it was as clear as a transmission. I constantly worry about knowing what happens next. Then I figure it out, but I have to do a lot of tuning.
OH. Well. AFGM only appeared a chapter at a time. I had no idea how I was going to get out of some set ups. But I knew it was there, it just didn’t….. let me see more than a little.
There’s Heinlein’s “World-As-Myth” theory, where Creators are actually making new worlds when they write stories.
(If this is true, I feel a great wave of pity for some of the worlds created by the Usual Suspects of bad writing. I’ve had to read some books where I just want to organize a Universal Railroad to a saner world. Like somewhere in the Warhammer 40K canon.)
I also know that the few times I could brainstorm off people, my worlds grew very large…but trying to brainstorm the creative thoughts in my head with most muggles is a disaster in the making. They don’t understand that you’re playing with concepts, not actually planning on doing things in the real world.
(Yes, I’m well-versed in the process where you turn an ordinary girl into a well-trained harem slave or streetwalker. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to start “getting” girls for this purpose…and my mother would rise from her urn of ashes and beat me until I was pissing plaid if I actually tried this. I’m also understand things like what exactly counts as a military atrocity and how to turn a military atrocity into a proper reprisal. Doesn’t mean I’m going to be hanging people from lamp-posts any time soon…)
But the world is a different place for creators. If you look at it right, there are so many things that still have a beautiful sense of wonder…and regrets that others can’t see those things, even when you explain them.
“There’s Heinlein’s “World-As-Myth” theory, where Creators are actually making new worlds when they write stories.”
Which was also Tolkien’s thought when he referred to Man as Sub-Creator in “On Fairy-Stories”. I wonder if either of them read each other’s works, or if they were hearing the same Voice.
“There’s Heinlein’s “World-As-Myth” theory, where Creators are actually making new worlds when they write stories.
(If this is true, I feel a great wave of pity for some of the worlds created by the Usual Suspects of bad writing. I’ve had to read some books where I just want to organize a Universal Railroad to a saner world. Like somewhere in the Warhammer 40K canon.)”
Given some of the more inventive tales I’ve read, both pure fanfic and supposedly ‘serious’ works, I now wonder what happens when the created beings of these twisted hellholes get to meet their creator? Or the fans who demanded more and more cruelty and perversion for their ‘favorite’ characters of a creator willing to provide?
There has to be a story in that.
Some of us can only hope that when we die we go to our created/written about worlds . . . and some of us really, really hope we don’t!
It’s mixed in my case. depends when and where.
And what I am when I arrive . . .
yes.
S. M. Stirling had one of his characters (who had written stories) thinking about some of his characters wanting to meet him in a dark alley. 😈
There’s been a couple of stories along those lines, I know Steven King and Terry Pratchett wrote a short story in those themes, and a few authors have done the same thing.
I also recall a story by David Gerrold when he did that whole “take a chance to talk with your characters” thing and he talked with the MC in his Chtorr novels. According to him, David barely escaped being killed by the MC, trying to rip his throat out with his teeth.
(I also suspect why most authors don’t read fanfic is not the liability reason, but the shipping. Dear GOD the shipping! I still have nightmares of the yaoi shipping discussions among female Naruto fans and the combination of characters were terrifying…)
Moderately sure Gerrold had it coming:
This was back in the days when he was an actual science fiction author, not an “honored elder” handing out wooden asterisks.
But I suspect that even then, he had it coming. (War Against The Chtorr novel number five is still unpublished and for even fewer reasons than The Winds Of Winter. Rumor has it that the entire series is finished, but for some reason it can’t be published. The theory I like is that the book company that owns the rights to the series won’t publish because they won’t make money selling the novels, but they won’t let David buy the rights back because they want to make any profits from selling the books when they are published.)
I was thinking more in terms of the Chtorr setting being such a grim place that the characters would resent being there if they became aware of Gerrold.
There are more grimdark universes, but the Chtorr setting does definitely pile-on the disasters to a terrifying degree, doesn’t it?
Very true.
It’s one of those “and then it got worse” stories that never quite gets out of the hole it digs for itself.
Perhaps, the later Chtorr books haven’t been published because Humanity lost. 😦
I suspect that might have been what happened-no matter what, Gerrold might have written himself into a corner with how bleak he made everything and nobody wanted to see how worse it would get.
Perhaps, including him. 😈
…after what happened at the Hugos, couldn’t have happened to a better guy.
From Wearing the Cape: Young Sentinels:
Megaton, new super: “So, Astra, what’s the worst thing about being a superhero?”
Astra: “It was just one word, but the way she said it, it was absolutely filthy: “Fanfic.”
So, the story memory is like an old eight-track tape, that you’re now trying to play on a more recent and advanced piece of equipment? Hisses, pops, “what did he just sing?” – and it sometimes skips to a completely different track?
Hmm. Maybe explains some things about my wetware.
The transmissions need to be better organized.
It feels to me like when I’m replaying a movie I just watched. Interesting scenes come and go. What I’m doing then is to transcribe the scenes playing in my head.
The scenes tend to come to me in non-consecutive fragments, and I have to apply all the boring logic and craft stuff to connect the dots. I just spent the evening plotting the second half of a WIP backwards from the climax, trying to find appropriate places for the must-dos.
How true. It feels like trying to take an armful of ball bearings sometimes, in the early stages, before they fit together. (Or don’t. Some ideas just don’t fit.)
Last week Naomi Wolf had a column where she talked about supernatural energy, and related it back to how the ancient Greeks saw color based upon what was written in their stories. Something like, they didn’t see blue (or at least not the way we see it) because the word “blue” never appears in The Illiad, The Odyssey, etc. So they saw what they had words to see and it seems like a lot of earth tones if I remember correctly. This concept is certainly true, since my wife looks at a traffic light and sees it blue when it’s actually green (in Japan they say the lights are blue [ao] but even there they look darned green to me). Back to Dr. Wolf’s column, she wrote that it is entirely possible that ancient peoples were better able to tap into their spirituality because they had words for it, and thus they were able to use the parts of their brains meant for talking to God to actually talk to God (or angels or prophets or whoever). The antenna could be our way of tapping into that, but since we don’t have the vocabulary to identify it (better) we’re not able to tap into it as strongly as we could or should. Our culture has been trying to get rid of religion and spirituality in favor of The Science (but not actual science since you can’t really form a cult around that).
The Greek words for colors included concepts of “tone” as well as “hue”, hence “wine-dark sea”. Think of the glisten of wine in an opaque mug and then the seething ocean from the shore, and it makes much more sense.
In various languages, there are different numbers of fundamental color (hue) terms, and the order of differentiations seems to be similar across languages much of the time:
1) Black vs white (dark vs light)
2) Red
3) Blue/Green
4) Blue vs Green (vs Yellow)
The (1) grouping is why there is an etymological relationship in English for “black, bleak, bleach (no color)”
I had forgotten on my last trip to the library, but I am absolutely going to re-read The Illiad and The Odyssey.
I really love the etymological stuff. I know I don’t know a lot about it, but what I do learn I find fascinating.
The color term that we render as “fair-haired Achilles” is used for horses, for the color we call “chestnut” — a bright, light-red. Impossible to tell if the Homeric Greek usage for people meant “blond” or “red-head” — the light-bright aspect was what was important to them.
Describing color is fun. Or maybe I mean interesting. In the “Chinese curse” sense.
The buses on the Air Force base in Biloxi are supposedly blue.
…they’re purple. They are totally purple.
Which got some of us to pick up a color line, and ask people to draw the dividing line between “blue” and “purple.”
We all agreed there were definite differences, but nobody drew the line in the same spot.
Came to mind a few years later, when I spilled a glass of wine in bath water… and it *did* look blue, a lot like some sea I’d seen in the Navy. “Wine-dark sea.”
There’s a fascinating study in there across the entire color wheel.
Strawberry blond, perhaps?
If the vast majority of people around you are brunettes, then maybe blondie versus ginger doesn’t matter that much?
Right. Brightness, for the Homeric Greeks, not hue.
Also with “blank.” And the French “blanc.”
Maybe not. The French “blank” is a different root, related to our “blink” — to make something stand out, to shine. Both that concept and our Germanic “black” set relate to colorless, but the “dark vs light” aspect varies between them.
Blank is borrowed from French “blanc”, and blink (if not a borrowing) has speculative connections at the IE (via Germanic) level.
(OED: “blank”): “Etymology: < French blanc white, a common Romanic adjective (Provençal blanc , blanca , Spanish blanco , Portuguese branco , Italian bianco , medieval Latin blancus ), < Old High German blanch (Middle High German blanc ) < Germanic *blanko-z shining, referred by etymologists generally to the verbal stem blink v., as a nasalized form of blik- in blîkan, Old High German blîchan, Old English blícan to shine. But *blink, *blinch is not actually found in any of the old dialects; and the origin of *blanko-z thus remains obscure"
(OED: "blenche"): Origin: A variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymon: blanch v.1 [French "to whiten"]
Etymology: A variant of blanch v.1 (The confusion is partly phonetic, as in blanch n.; partly of sense, since, with fear, the cheeks blanch, the eyes blench.)
Of so called "false friends" in etymology there are no end… It can be very difficult deciding if a French-related term is borrowed (via the Romance language branches of Indo-European) or inherited (via the Germanic language branches). The divides between the Romance and Germanic branches are significant, but then there’s all that shared history that gets in the way, like the Norman Conquest…
Where are they coming from? I have a few ideas, but they range from Divine Inspiration to too-much-cold-pizza-at-0300.
Why is it vitally important? Because we create possibilities. It could be that we are sub-Creators, making new worlds for characters to live, love, grow in. It could be that we are the bards who praise the praiseworthy, shame the transgressor, and entertain and encourage those who need it. The world needs encouraging stories where the good guys win and the bad guys get what they richly deserve. (And where problems are clear and solvable by mostly-ordinary people.)
My post next week is sort of about this, sideways, ish.
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/three_decker.html
“No moral doubts assailed us, so when the port we neared,
The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered.
‘Twas fiddle in the foc’s’le – ‘twas garlands on the mast,
For every one was married, and I went at shore at last.
I left ‘em all in couples a-kissing on the decks.
I left the lovers loving and parents signing cheques.
In endless English comfort, by county-folk caressed,
I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest! . . .”
I would not presume to speak for anyone else, but mine appear to come from 67 years of being the outcast weirdo and reading WAY too much science fiction my whole life.
Basically, I would very much like to go to those places and hang out with those heroes, because this place is stupid. Besides, who doesn’t want to meet the incomparable Deja Thoris?
But, I can’t. 😡
The closest I can get is to pay attention to the constant babble and churn of ideas in this weird brain of mine and pick the ones I like, then write them down. I can what-if and problem-solve to my heart’s content with no downside of failure.
By the Power of Handwaviuim I can create machines to solve the problem of Eldritch Horrors Invading Our World. According to me, you get a Really Big Gun and you shoot it in the face. The bigger the horror, the bigger the gun. For the really big ones you’re going to want to nuke it from orbit.
Why one of those E.H. things? I don’t like them, that’s why.
Bunch of squids!
So now I need somebody to go stand in front of Mr. E.H. and shoot him like he deserves. Who’s going to be crazy enough to do that? Alice Haddison, as it happens. What kind of car does she drive? Does she have a boyfriend? What kind of guy hangs out with a girl who can shoot the intolerable demon thing in the face? What’s her breakfast cereal of choice? Where did she go to school? Where did she get that huge freakin’ gun?
What made her crazy enough to shoot that thing? Hangnail? Or deep and profound Mystical Reasons? Chosen One? Or poor sucker standing on the corner minding her own business, drawn into events against her will?
Getting on with the story, is Alice going to just going to toss her 30mm anti-tank rifle in the pickup and drive downtown to whack this thing, or is Mr. E.H. going to be difficult and she has to work for it? That would be the difference between a short story and a novel, I suppose.
Any transmissions from the Etheric Overmind I might receive consist of following Alice or someone else around and writing down what they do. Sometimes they don’t do anything worth talking about for days at a time.
As a writing method I don’t recommend it. Plotting and outlines are much better. Unfortunately, I can’t do them. When I try, Alice scoffs at me. “I’m supposed to do what now? Pfft! I would never do that. You’re an idiot. Try again.”
I usually don’t discuss where I get my stories. I terrify enough people as it is. (Big Evil Grin) I did know, after seeing an actual professional contract, that would be more akin to hostage negotiation for me.