Category: Worldbuilding

About Lodestar

About Lodestar Part IV
Lodestar, up to this point, was written from more or less one viewpoint per part.
This fourth installment is in effect a series of short installments (novellas, probably) where some of the main minor characters are sidelined and others drawn forward. One or two important characters are only just now being introduced.

The various people whom I asked to critique the series fifteen years ago, advised against introducing important new characters at this late stage. I thought it through at the time, but quailed at the work involved in the restructuring. Put The Lodestar series aside. Years passed while I worked on a new series. Different, I thought.

But my ‘unconscious’ a marvelous entity I am only now learning about, was well and truly in charge, and encouraged me to write multiple stories featuring a main character being invaded and controlled by a foreign influence.

I’m laughing now when I read those lines, knowing that I am absolutely ruled by my unconscious, as you are by yours whatever you may believe. Fifteen years ago, I wasn’t writing unknowingly about my own personal unconscious mind, but about an alien, about an invasive computer program, and about the implant.

Without me realizing, which is the part that still amazes me. Until I had three mostly polished novels, ready to be professionally edited. That’s when I realized. At the time I was poor and troubled, and could afford to have only one of them edited professionally. So I decided to forward the most recent work, which was ‘Mongrel’.

Five years ago my life fell apart as long-time readers will know, and after the chemo, when I set about picking up the pieces, I decided I was done with marketing. The stress of dealing with giant corporations was not doing me any good. I decided that life is too short to hanker after the pittance that I would earn for not writing in the mainstream.

That’s not to say I won’t publish them at all. They’d be a lot easier to read as novel lengths than a chapter at the time.

Fast forward to the idea of the ‘story-debt’. It really grabbed me, for after I labored over The Lodestar world for ten years, its characters and their lives stayed with me. It’s like they are real people somewhere out there. I wondered if by paying off my story-debt, by ‘publishing’ them here, on my blog, these characters would then stop haunting me?

t’s a work in progress. Below a snippet …

The Implant, 1
‘I can almost feel the textures of the nutrient jelly I rest in. I’ve imagined them so often it must be that I now feel them. The heat of my skin melts the material near me, making it silky and fluid. It’s firmer further out. A spider webbing of fibrous supports grows among and between my miniaturized cables.

Fresh nutrient mix is added to the bottom of my housing, its floor is gridded and sits on a saucer, the whole is very like the design for a bird-feeder I have somewhere in my memory banks, though the action of the nutrient mix is opposite to that in the bird-feeder.

I don’t like remembering that I don’t have a skin and that I still don’t have a body. It is not my imagination that I feel a frizzle of anger pass along my synapses. If I’d had a body to use, I would’ve been able to express myself more satisfactorily. Where is that minx Ahni? The speaker fitting is clogged and I cannot call out. I’m not happy with the level of carelessness in this place. Who is on duty? I shouldn’t have to worry about utilities. That was always the work of the host.’

    Flowers

    This excellent gerbera… in the wilderness that was the original village here.

    When I take a photo from my balcony there is always first the roof over the BBQ area that I aim to miss, then the old olive green grey roofs of the single storey cottages that made up the old village, Carinya.

    While only a few people still live there and itis generally a ghost town, the name is still often used, and a number of activities are run in Carinya’s community complex.

    I haven’t explored over there yet although the Librarian at Parkland (the new community complex) said to me that if I liked old books, there are hundreds at Carinya. Kind of a red rag to an old reader, if you know what I mean.

    Lego: Bosley’s Builders, 11

    11. The Stand Off

    Jed was pretty happy with the floor they’d laid yesterday. At this rate they’d get the walls complete and happy faces when the hardware shop’s reps arrived later. And all it had needed was him jollying everyone else along.

    Bosley is back today, he thought. Here’s hoping he thinks having a foreman—yours truly—a good addition to his crew. It’ll set me up. He made his way toward where Boz beckoned him for his site report.

    “Hey, Boss,” Jed said. “We’ve made quite a bit of progress as you can see.” He waved at the hardware store’s floor and walls. “I was thinking we could start on the heavy vehicle garage next. Then by the end of the week, lift Jackie’s and my cabin on top of it.”

    “I should be having this discussion with you and Ms Sander,” Bosley said.

    Uh oh, Boz has quite the long face, Jed had time to think. “I’ve got nothing in common with her,” he said.

    “Sez you,” Bosley said. “What do you see around yourself?”

    Jed looked round. He didn’t see anything different, he said with a hand gesture and a shrug.

    “What does he see beyond himself?” Tim said. He was repairing Wizard Nin’s shack right there where Bosley organized Jed for a chin-wag. Two against one, was that fair?

    “What does he see other than himself,” Drew said, stepping into Jed’s face from the other direction.

    Would’ve been funny except Jed started to feel like they were ganging up on him.

    “Go at it, brother,” Bosley said cryptically.

    “It’s a done deal in my mind,” Drew stated. “Jackie owns the crane and she’s given us the go-ahead. Jed owns the truck and he can leave when he wants.”

    “You’ll take Jackie’s crane off my truck? No! No way!” Jed cried, suddenly seeing the plot. “What’s a truck by itself?”

    “Jed! Cheer up,” Dan said. “You’ll have a ton of options.”

    Jed groaned. “Not you too? You’re supposed to be my friend.”

    “I am your friend,” Dan said. “You and me with a truck each? Salvaging. You and the hardware store? Power storage when we get you fitted with a power module and they have a windmill operating in the channel. You and the community? Say we need a performance stage? You and the herders? They need their cabin took to their pylons? No mid-size crane is going to manage that. It’ll need incremental lifting with … “

    “No!” Jed said again. “I’m leaving! I knew it would come to this. We should never have come. You’re chasing me away!”

    He stomped to his and Jackie’s cabin, and threw his things together. I don’t believe it! I’m back to camping?

    The rest of them listened further and heard the truck door slam, and the truck engine tick over. Then Jed drove toward the track out.

    “Okay. That’s the crane gone,” Bosley said. “Have we still got that shadoof thing?”

    “I’m blank on what you’re talking about,” Tim said.

    “That’ll be a ditto for me,” Dan agreed.

    “I saw it yesterday,” Drew said. “We’ve got that and the conveyor belt still. We’ll manage.”

    “You hear something?” Tim said to Dan.

    “Yes. The hardware store’s runabout. Is it both of them?” Dan said.

    “It is, but Ms Bee is tying up the boat.”

    “I’m gone,” Dan said.

    “Ditto,” Tim said. “I’m meeting Trish for a cuppa. You should come along. She said we should start planning the canteen, since this hillock,” he stamped his boot. “Will likely take two slabs. And the canteen will probably take at least two cabins.”

    “Cowards,” Drew said. “Don’t plan too far ahead of the stair building. Or the materials for that matter.”

    “I bet Trish will want more arches,” Dan said. “Do you recall where you got them?”

    “What’s this about me and him?” Ms Sander said, pointing her chin at Jed ploughing across the mudflats. She looked thunderous.

    Bosley didn’t wilt. “Both you and Jed have unrealistic expectations,” he said. “Had a look around recently?”

    “Like lift your gaze to the world in general,” Drew said helpfully.

    “My supply lines are intact,” flashed Ms Sander. “My customer base is growing. My second- floor hasn’t even been begun yet, but we all know the hold-up there!”

    “I’ll say it again,” Drew said. “Had a look around recently?” He didn’t let her get a word in. He felt like something in him had snapped during the long lay-up. “Parts are what are missing! Our spreadsheet is like a mosaic of blanks!”

    Bosley frowned Ms Sander into silence.

    Drew continued. “Supply chains other than apparently yours are fragmented! These floods,” he indicated the swamp now surrounding them, “Are playing havoc with deliveries.”

    “Making do with what we have is the name of the new game,” Bosley said at Ms Bee arriving belatedly. “In other words, when I come to do your stairs, you will gracefully accept whatever color scheme I can manage!”

    Bee smiled winningly at him. “We will, Bosley,” she said. She arm-in-armed Ms Sander away with her. “Let’s think about our interiors, Sandy. We could book Julie & Juliette. I’m sure they’ll be able to come up with a scheme to complement Bosley’s.”

    Drew laughed. “You were supposed to melt just then.”

    Bosley flushed. “Yeah, right. Me and everybody else!”

    The New Place …

    Where to start?

    The improvements on the previous place are numerous though I’m too tired now to do little more than describe the excellent light … in the lounge room, one whole wall is ceiling to floor glass, fixed panes and sliding doors, about two and a three quarter meters tall.

    Where I’m sitting on the couch typing this blog post, what I see opposite is Rainer Hartlieb’s work of timber art … the shelf units he made for me in 2014 or thereabouts, when I lived in my Mullumbimby house … put back together and adapted for the space by my son.

    This version of the shelf unit is approximately 75 centimeters shorter than the original which had a window seat included. The uprights and top length are of Queensland kauri. The short side shelves might be white pine, though I don’t recall that for certain. They made up three large handrails salvaged from a building site. The broad lower shelves are cypress pine, a width of timber that will never be seen again. These were my discovery. A $30 score from a secondhand store, they’d been used in a paint store, their undersides a thick coating of spilled paint.