Arena01B
As uploaded, now incorporates the first scene I faxed. Some shuffling around early on, with taking out things previously explained while Perry chewed her nails. I'm sure some details are blurry, but I think we're getting closer. Only problem - 9284 words, expanded from 7010, and that was even with me going through with a paring knife (hey, I'm not purely hack and slash - have some smaller sharp instruments). But I'll be maurading with the machete again. But before you lock all our joint files (never alarm a sysop!) maybe we should ask for an Editorial Ruling: what is our absolute, inviolate, never-to-be-breached word limit?

It's not so much cutting, period, as cutting the earlier material before we have the whole first draft done. It's the sense of not knowing what's getting axed because I've been away from it too long. I'm sure I've made you feel the same way, sometimes, when I've been going gang busters and you were tied up in other things. Maybe it's partly that I'd already done a pass through the first 11 chapters and was looking foward not back, at least not yet. So yes, a ball park from Cheyenne would be good, but I'd rather get the whole thing done--especially since we are so close--and then look at it as a whole cloth. Your last fax, for example, indicates a stronger crux towards the end which has emerged from your perusal of my last draft of SC. (I liked it by the way.) How can we be confident about cuts, earlier, when we don't know exactly what they are or aren't supporting downstream? And that goes for the sub plots and character evolution as well. Then there's all the "have we established this" business. When we're pretty sure of the gist we might be able to merge and dispense with things but only when we know what is depending on what and whether it is dealt with elsewhere. So I'm not saying we shouldn't cut, but only that it would be more comfortable working on the least complete sections rather than the most complete (if chubby) ones. IMHO. (lynda)

Having had a wrestle with Perry's earthy tongue, next con I go to, I'm going to propose a panel on "appropriate profanity" - ie appropriate to imagined cultures. I shall research curses. Being a scientist by nature, I shall seek a classification for them. And I shall quote this wonderful passage from H. Beam Piper's Police Operation (his hero has just had to do an ouchsome first-aid job on himself after a run-in with an alien beastie): "He grunted out a string of English oaths and capped them with an obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the Fourth Level inhabitants of his island home of Nerros, to the south, and a thundering curse in the name of Mogga, Fire God of Dool, in a Third-Level tongue. He mentioned Fasif, Great God of Khift, in a manner which would have gotten him an acid-bath if the Khiftan priests had heard him. He alluded to the baroque amatory practices of the Third-Level Illaya people and soothed himself, in the classical Dar-Halma tongue, with one of those rambling genetic insults favoured in the Indo-Turanian Sector of the Fourth Level ... "

Definitely not "Great Balls of Fire" - which should be the title of said panel. I think Rebecca should be able to come up with some curses in the same pan-cultural style.

I like that. I did some thinking about it, as you know, over the "venting" and "gap-damned" terms in TP. I think you should include a biopsych look at nature of swearing. We seem to store cuss words differently. Specific mental disorders fetch them out. If it is that deep seated, it is no wonder that alien cussing seems funny. And that old stand bys like the sh-- and f--- words are so enduring in the language. I think it breaks down into bodily functions (elimination and sex usually) and religious stuff of some description, either profanity or pleas for help.

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