Re: Speed Dating Question Ideas

Michelle Bottorff <mbottorff@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina Hall <Tina_Hall@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Michelle Bottorff <mbottorff@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina Hall <Tina_Hall@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I can think of several of mine who at some time in their life
would be interested in their culture's equivalent to dating.
Getting them to try *speed* dating is a bit more problematical.
:/

The problem with my characters is that I teamed them off already.

Me too.
That's why I said "at some time in their life".

I tend to use the latest version, unless an earlier one fits the
situation better.

"Latest version" isn't really a term that applies to my way of
thinking.

What I mean is that the situation around the character changes. So
Arentus in ME#1 is not in the same postion as Arentus in ME#6. Without a
city to play with anymore, what he talks about could be different. (For
example.)

It's no more a different _version_ than I'm a different version of Tina
Hall than I was 10 years ago (that would mean there are two Tina Halls),
it was just lack of better words.

One of my favorite Black Flag characters dies before the start of the
first book.

Characters like that tend to not be very much alife for me. (Pun not
intended, but appropriate.)

I can grab them *before* I teamed them off, at which point they are
still loooking (unless I teamed them up before they got around to
looking, which I do sometimes, just not always.)

The time I speculated about two characters perhaps ending up
together, they weren't interested in each other at all, and both
found someone else.

<snip>

There's more behind all that, of course. But the thing is that they
pick their own partners. I just record the events.

Of course they pick their partners. I just tend to know in advance
who they are going to pick, and then I conspire with the plot to
make sure the getting isn't too easy, but that nothing irrovokable
intervenes.

Why shouldn't it be too easy?

In the S&E, the travellers (searching the bad guys) pick up a girl (just
adult), and take her along because she's the only one who at least
somewhat knows the area they're going to. On the trip she heats, and
there's nothing to stop that (she's just been healed from injury to
magic and body - magic being responsible for the heating - and the
Priests worry that doing something about it will smother for good what
only just tentatively comes back and catches up with her actual age).

As the group's not too large, her choices are rather limited; she has to
pick one of the males present and he'll have to agree.

So, after getting as good advice as she can get, she goes to one of the
males and asks "Will you be my mate?" And that's pretty much that.

(And no reason to make it any less easy.)

The difficult part about the whole thing, later, was inserting an excuse
why she doesn't pick <other character> (never mind that the 'the Priests
can't do anything about it' can't be changed), because as the story goes
on, her choice turns up consequences that mean it doesn't work out in
the long run (the very reason that caused her choice; the child will be
of a particular tribe due to the combination of magic of mother and
father, which by itself is a benefit to it, but utterly incompatible
with the mother because of the environment each needs).

(It's a good example for how what comes earlier is fixed and influences
what comes later; as the choice was made, and the one she picked is the
father. I have to make it reasonable even though later reasons against
it turn up. Not only that it happend and that's that, everything that
happens since depends on this detail, and all the others. All I can do
is adjust the conversations, reasoning, and stuff like that.)

--
Tina
WIP: [Witches]: 18354 words
WISuspension: Seasons & Elements trilogy | Magic Earth series
Posted to Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition.

.

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