How chameleons change their colors

I was reading about chameleons (for research for the reptilian fauna of my fantasy world, indulging the inner child who read every book about animals in the school library, use whatever rationalization you like) and I ran into this page by the San Diego Zoo, which includes a great short description of how they change their colors. Really, it's more wonderful and complex than I imagined:

Chameleons have four layers of skin: the outer, protective layer called the epidermis; the chromatophore layer that contains yellow and red pigments; the melanophore layer that contains the dark pigment melanin and can create brown and black colors or reflect blue; and the nether layer, which only reflects white. Nerve impulses and hormone changes cause the color cells in these layers to expand and shrink, and the blending of the different layers creates the colors and patterns that we see.

I guess this page is aimed at kids, but I wouldn't be the first to notice how useful material designed for kids is when you want to get an initial handle on a topic. My goal here was to find some info on the unusual aspects of chameleons -- the fun facts -- so a kids' page was perfect. I can always get more detail, now that I know some of the variety that's available for chameleons.

I think I mentioned chameleons earlier. Oh yes, here. The chameleon idea came from my nine-year-old daughter Chloe. They're to be domesticated riding animals. I'll have to change their feet. Maybe they'll have three horns and you can tie reins to the horns.

I'm enjoying this novel work

Okay, I believe this is becoming something of a mantra, but I'm finding that I enjoy working on this novel, this world, this project Dragon Matrix that derives from my Elf and Troll story.

I find I most enjoy it whenever I work on it long enough to get into it. Really short sessions aren't good enough. I need about an hour to really get into it.

I am surprised by how long I've been working on this project, counting all mutations and permutations of it. But that's why I chose it. I'd already proven I would stick with it, even though the short-story versions of it have been awful.

But this is heartening. I feel like I made the right choice. I'm kinda scared to put these optimistic words to net, I have a strong knock-wood reaction. I was just reading something about how this part of the novel project ends eventually and the work gets harder. I guess I'll walk into that wall when it gets here.

A novel idea....the Dragon Matrix

It's probably way too soon to get excited about it, but I am excited. I'm excited because I had a new idea for an organizing principle for my novel this week.

This started when I was talking about titles with my friend Bill Woodburn, an excellent writer himself, and he remarked that any story for which he'd had trouble finding a good title never seemed to gel.

Cue ominous music and a raspy voice. His words sounded dangerously like destiny where my current project, "The Wonder Kid", was concerned. "The Wonder Kid" is only the best of a bad string of titles that started with the working title "Elf and Troll." And I'd floundered for a central organizing principle, and so it never seemed to set up.

But I decided not to treat this as destiny, and to apply the theory in reverse: to try to find a title that did work, and thereby come up with an organizing principle that would help the story to congeal.

Yeah, I could go for some jello right now.

Then this week I was doing some world building, something I'd somehow not let myself do much of for this story, and was working with ideas about gems that you store auras in. All the magic in this world, which I refer to as my Elf Refugee Setting (the world itself is called Hame), is based on auras, and auras are described as patterns of threads, strands, or tendrils.

There's nothing terribly unique about gems that store magic, but what I'm working with are gems that serve to store aura patterns and thereby store information. I'm thinking of a gradient of possible uses, starting with bare info, moving through memories, and going all the way up to a full recording of someone's aura, which would amount to storing their soul -- or a copy of their soul -- in a gem.

That led to the idea of calling the stored patterns "matrices", but that's what the magic gems in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels are called. So I may come up with something better.

But the matrix idea, the idea of the pattern of someone's aura being a separate thing, a copyable/storable thing, led to my new title idea and organizing principle: the Dragon Matrix.

I've already spent a thousand words just setting up this anecdote, so I'll try to get to the point. In this story, there's a danger of someone reaching a state where their aura becomes a sort of vortex that sucks in the magic of everyone round them, absorbing and destroying people in a wide range. When this happens, that person is called a dragon, because of the way they flare up and burn out the people around them. So, their aura, when they achieve that state, would be a Dragon Matrix.

I like that a lot. When you tie it to the idea of storing or recording auras, then you have a dangerous and powerful thing that someone unscrupulous might want to capture. So the matrix becomes a useful macguffin for the plot. And everything in the story can be tied back to the dragon matrix.

I have a lot of work to do with this. I'm expecting that I will find, as I try to integrate this with the plot that I already have, that it will break six or seven things. But that doesn't stop me from being excited now.

Art from Emil Blichfeldt, licensed under Creative Commons.

Novel next

So I've decided that for my 40th birthday, coming up next month, I'm going to start a novel. Only it's not so much that I'll be starting one, as that I'm converting a story project, "The Wonder Kid," one that's bugged me for three years, into a novel.

On the plus side, I've stuck with this one for a long time; I love working on it, so I believe I can stick with it for a long haul. On the minus side, my lack of success at producing a draft of this one that conveys a small part of what I'm trying to say with it is discouraging. But it feels constrained in the short form, and my wife suggested doing it as a novel, and she's always right, so there you go.

I've been working daily this month on various ideas for expanding it, and on an ending. By my birthday February 23rd, I want to working on prose. But before I start back into writing scenes, I want to have a strong ending to aim for, and a lot of work on outlining done.

I did NaNoWriMo a few years ago, and it was great, but I never quite got a full structure and I didn't write a complete story. A few years before that I worked on a novel and filled something like fifteen notebooks...but I didn't have an ending for the novel, never had a complete outline, and I eventually lost interest in the thing, found myself writing scattered pieces that took the story off on tangents.

So structure is really important to me here. Luckily, I have a lot of that work done for the short story, and a novel will let me do multiple points of view, which will make it much easier to show all the many things that are going on.

The frustration in this story has been to find ways to entertainingly show all the things that make the story have meaning. It's set in a fantasy world populated by elves and goblins, where the elves lord it over the goblin underclass. The intermingling of the races is important.

The races are quite similar, but the goblins are hermaphrodites, which is a huge thing and a very difficult one to write about. I've also got an interracial relationship, and that's tough. Heck, I write that, and I have to wonder what the heck I'm biting off here.

But those thoughts are similar to the ones that have always led me to choose to write only single-point-of-view stories. And I think they are unhealthily limiting. I know I've got something to say with this piece. So far, I've only said it clumsily. But it gets better every time.  I know that I tend to limit myself, and there's no reason for it here.  

Corey Doctorow wrote a piece about writing in the age of distractions that I found inspiring as I embark on this project, and Holly Lisle has a piece about how to finish a novel that is much on my mind. 

For Christmas, I received a long-wanted copy of the book The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. It's really interesting. I'll probably post about it more in the months to come, but the main concept I'm looking at from it right now is called premise. Egri holds that a story should align tightly around one concept, one that he often expresses like a moral. I like this idea but I find it extremely difficult to express a premise, even for a story where I think I have a strong concept. I have a story "Dragon Hunter" whose design and execution came quite easily because I always had a strong idea of what it was about. But I'd find it hard to tell you what that is in less than 150 words. 

I started to say that I want to be ready for my birthday deadline by having an ending and an outline. I've pretty much got the ending planned out now; in the last few days I think I've solved the plot issues. I'm sure there will be more; essentially, my writing process is one of happily writing along then suddenly realizing I've got something in the story that has a huge logic problem. The last ending for "The Wonder Kid", for example, has the main character fighting a monster who for some reason throws heavy things at him but never tries to charge him despite its advantage in size. I feel great about it today so I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'll probably work on the overall outline some more, but the next big step is to actually write the ending in prose.

I've long thought writing the ending of a story first was a good idea but rarely practiced it in depth. Lisle's article made a lot of sense to me though and I'm working on it here; she advocates writing the novel's ending then writing the stuff that justifies it. Luckily I have  lot of work on this plot and setting already, so I'm making a list of the things I need to have shown before we get to the ending. There were key things missing before, like making the main character, a teacher, a likeable one who clearly cares for his students, where my prior draft mainly shows how he gets irritated with his students. 

Heh. I love this contrast and am frustrated by it. This is a great guy here, he loves his students and he works hard to help teach the goblin minority as well. But you can't actually see that in the story at all, it's only in my notes. I thought this fellow's post about how a character is defined by the text alone was useful in this regard. I mean, I know this, but it takes someone else reading the story to point out that they didn't see him the way I did at all.