Writing and Real Life in the Middle of May

My clone-sibling spent part of this morning working on his current WIP (the novel formerly known as Stars’ End) and has informed me that he’s on chapter twenty now. That’s roughly forty percent of the way through what he has already written for this book, but some of it will undergo major revisions, since it won’t be dealing with the “Stars’ End” sequence of events — we’ve decided to save that for a later book, probably one in the chronological gap between series in this setting (which seems appropriate, since the physical setting for much of it will be in a literal gap).

Yesterday evening, we had some disagreement/confusion concerning what one of the minor characters in this WIP looks like. Got it all sorted out okay, but I was worried for a little while. “He can’t look that much like us!” was the gist of it. I generally prefer that my imaginary friends don’t resemble me physically. On the other hand, rumor has it that there will be a couple of very minor characters in the long-awaited sci-fi novel Greyspace who will look just like Paul and me. (Remember, Greg: Green eyes and dark brown hair, not black. 🙂 Do feel free to write us — I mean, the Spence clones — as being stronger than unaugmented humans, though.)

A few days ago, I commented to Paul that if I ever become famous enough that someone writes my biography, I want it to be titled Irony Is Flammable.

…And speaking of things that burn, tomorrow is Jason Grey’s birthday. When discussing the birthdays of most extremely long-lived fictional people, I often say, “Don’t bother with candles on the cake — just build a bonfire, cause it’ll look the same anyway.” However, it just doesn’t feel appropriate — or maybe far too appropriate — for a character whose real surname translates into English as Greyphoenix.

Something closer to “real life”:

The clone and the sister-in-law are planning to attend part of a large SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event at the end of this month. Don’t want to go for the entire week-long thing, but just the next-to-last day will give them enough time to do some shopping for medieval-style goodies: new gauntlets, shoes/boots, and maybe some arts-and-sciences supplies of various sorts.

There are days when I’m really tempted to attend one of these gatherings, too, if only for the ‘OMG, there’s two of them!’ reaction. Or, as the POV character in the not-yet-written, novel-length version of Finder’s Fee exclaims in a scene that probably shouldn’t ever happen, “Damn, they cloned him!”

…Which reminds me of something said at an SCA meeting (that I didn’t attend, obviously) not long ago. SiL told me about it, but she didn’t hear all of the conversation, only the part when Paul said to Dinah (not anything like her real name or her SCA name, by the way), “I’m ambidextrous, so if I had an identical twin, how could anyone tell us apart?”

So misdirection. Much clever. Very irony. Wow.

*sigh*