So, some people have asked some good questions\/made comments, and I’m stopping the action here to answer a few of them.<\/p>\n
First<\/strong>,\u00a0 we have the on-going hilarity regarding Liadens being thought “short” at what is more or less average height for USians.<\/p>\n I am a USian, as was Steve.\u00a0 In my youth, Science showed us that people were getting taller as time moved on.\u00a0 The average height for a man in 1900 was 5 feet 7 inches. In 1984, when Agent of Change<\/em> was written, the average man was +\/-5 feet 10 inches.\u00a0 Steve was of average height.<\/p>\n In 1900,\u00a0 5 foot 2 inches was the average height for a woman.\u00a0 In 1984, that had increased to 5 foot 4 inches.\u00a0 I was a giantess at 6 foot even.<\/p>\n So, it seemed to us — extrapolating (i.e. If This Goes On) — that, if the trend among USians to get taller continued, by the time we got around to Agent of Change<\/em>, 6 foot for an average Terran female wouldn’t be totally out of line.\u00a0 Liadens would then be short at what were average heights in the 1900s.<\/p>\n I note this totally ignores the fact that even here on our own planet, there are racial groups who tend to be taller and others who tend to be shorter.<\/p>\n Steve had thrown out the idea at one point that Liadens were smaller and “more efficient” because they had been space-going for a long time.\u00a0 Which gave rise to the notion that Loopers might be shorter than other sorts of Terrans. We may have mentioned Loopers as recognizable as a “type” once or twice, and if so, that’s where that<\/em> came from. Yeah, the quickness of that bond forming between our heroes is really — wow.\u00a0 I think there are a couple of things at work there. Let me see if I can break them out:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 In the stories I had been telling myself for years, in which Val Con and Miri were the main characters, they were always together<\/em> — a team.\u00a0 So, starting out with them leading separate lives was a vary, which I now believe the characters were fighting to fix as fast as they could.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 Today’s General Social Wisdom is that, not only does Love At First Sight not<\/em> exist, but it’s a pernicious, dangerous, and potentially deadly fable created by men to keep women subservient.\u00a0 To which I say that anything can be weaponized, given a sufficiently ruthless person or system, but to say Love at First Sight does not exist is a fable just<\/em> as dangerous to the happiness of human beings.<\/p>\n 2a.\u00a0 Steve and I had an immediate connection.\u00a0 I kid you not, they probably heard us click<\/em> in Towson, when we met.\u00a0 And the Fiction Writer’s Wisdom, misleading of course, as all good wisdoms are, is:\u00a0 Write what you know<\/em>.<\/p>\n 2b.\u00a0 On a surprising number of levels, Agent of Change<\/em> is a story of Steve and Sharon, from Miri’s Baltimore street smarts and inferiority complex to Steve’s twisty creativity and panic attacks.<\/p>\n So, yeah, I think all that’s working together in these first chapters.\u00a0 Later, of course, we find that these people are, in fact, two halves of a whole, but I don’t think that the concept of “lifemates” as a “wizard’s match” came into its own until Carpe Diem<\/em>, when Val Con looks inside his own head and realizes what he’s seeing (It was fitting; the Universe owed much — or something of that nature) — and that<\/em> only happened because we wrote Conflict of Honors<\/em>, more or less by accident, in-between.<\/p>\n Going just a little further — Agent of Change<\/em> was the first novel either of us had written.\u00a0 We had written short stories, but characters are . . . different in short stories.\u00a0 This is not to say that they’re easier to push around. In fact, if there is one piece of Wisdom I would offer to my fellow writers it would be to never<\/em> go into a fictional situation believing you can make your characters do what you want them to do.\u00a0 Do this and you will<\/em> lose — either the characters will go on strike, or you’ll produce a broken story.\u00a0 The best<\/em> thing you can hope for is that the characters will wrest the story from under your undeserving fingers and go on as they meant to do.<\/p>\n Anyway — error of inexperience.\u00a0 We were certainly aware enough to twig to the fact that something was wrong when Val Con flat out refused to do any more work.\u00a0 But we were definitely not up to the nuances of two people who were destined to work together, trying to fix An Error visited upon them by their writers.<\/p>\n Here endeth your auctorial handwaving for the day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, some people have asked some good questions\/made comments, and I’m stopping the action here to answer a few of them. First,\u00a0 we have the on-going hilarity regarding Liadens being thought “short” at what is more or less average height for USians. I am a USian, as was Steve.\u00a0 In my youth, Science showed us … Continue reading As we pause for freeform commentary<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agent-of-change","category-liaden-read-along"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2046"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2051,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions\/2051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nSecond<\/strong>!<\/p>\n