Monthly Archives: August 2011

I’ve been busy lately, working on a new story that, as stories sometimes do, came to me almost fully formed in a nightmare.  The writing is going extremely well, and the characters are talking to me.  It’s going to be a short story, probably coming out at somewhere around 12-15,000 words when complete.  I thought I’d give a bit of a preview:

Keane sat up with a grunt, rubbing at his back where the ridge in the hard fiberglass bench always pressed into it. Around him, others were also sitting up in the dim light, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes in response to the polite “Ding!” coming over the loudspeaker.

“Another day, another dollar,” the woman on the green bench said, standing and walking to the back of the car. She didn’t even bother holding on anymore. No one did. They’d all gotten accustomed to the swaying of the train. Sometimes Keane wondered if he’d be able to walk on flat land again, if he ever got a chance.

Keane leaned back and sipped carefully from his water bottle. It had his name on it, in black sharpie marker on white masking tape. He took two small sips, barely enough to wet his mouth, then closed it tightly again, tucking it into his backpack and standing up, throwing the pack over one shoulder and grunting a hello to the man on the orange bench ahead of his. He was looking out the window at the station they were passing through.

Keane didn’t look out anymore. He didn’t want to see the shambling passengers waiting for the train that would never stop. Instead he walked back, to the last car on the train, trying to ignore the stench that made his eyes water, grateful that it wasn’t his turn to clean. Someone had left a small cosmetics mirror over the bucket, not that it did any good to care about your appearance here, where they’d not seen enough water to wash with in over a year. Keane had a full beard now, black and rough, and his face in the broken mirror looked foreign to him. He shook off and tucked in, then reached up to snatch the mirror down.

Subway trains weren’t meant to have bathrooms. But they weren’t meant to be lived in either.

Keane walked then to the front of the train, carefully closing and locking each door for each car as he walked through, frowning when he found one barely fastened. If the train was compromised, they needed to know that the other cars would be safe. He added the door problem to his mental checklist and kept going, nodding or grunting hellos to those he passed along the way. Eventually he made it to the driver’s compartment and inserted his key into the deadbolt, thumbing it open.

Once upon a time, terrorist threats had ensured that the driver’s compartments on each end were the most secure areas of the train, that no one could get in without a key, that the window was bulletproof and the door unbreakable. Keane barely remembered that time, anymore, when brown-skinned, turban-wearing terrorists were the thing they were told to be most afraid of. He remembered shooting some of them, in the desert, but it seemed so far away now.

He leaned against the open doorway, staring out at the barely lit tunnel stretching away before the train. Lynn (Tan Bench, 3rd Sleep Shift) sat in the driver’s seat, looking just as dreadful as he did, her once-blonde hair matted and tangled and a good inch-and-half of brown roots coming out at the skull. Keane supposed she might have once been pretty. Now, she was just Lynn.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

Keane shrugged. “Well as could be expected.”

This had been their standard greeting for the past nine months. They switched places, Keane handing over the key to the door. He would be locked in for his shift. Standard procedure.

“Anything on the radio?” Keane asked.

“Just repeats,” Lynn said. This, too, had become standard in the last two months, when the occasional bulletins from what remained of the government finally ceased to come.

“Got two of them last night, just standing there in front of the train,” she said with a grin.  “Trisected.”

Keane grinned and sat back in the seat, his arms behind his head. “They’ll have trouble getting up from that.”

© 2011 Jennifer L. Davis, All Rights Reserved.

It’s no great secret that I love steampunk. And Minecraft. And when those two things collide, well…

Most of my first worlds were mostly still “getting to know the game” worlds, where I built some pretty neat things, but which weren’t particularly remarkable. Now that I have a good feel for things, I wanted to try something really challenging and creative. It was time for my Victorian paradise.

My Spawn Point with "Jules Verne" seed

So I downloaded a Texture Pack suited for this (Glimmar’s Steampunk Texture Pack) and started a new world.  Since this was going to be a steampunk world, and I couldn’t find a seed I liked for it online, I entered “Jules Verne” as my world seed for the world generator.

I am very pleased with the world good old Verne provided. Neat looking mountainous islands off the coast of a larger continent, interesting arches, a nice forest. A very pretty world indeed.

From my spawn point, I wandered over to punch a tree and make friends with the local wildlife (two cows), and then find a good spot to make my first mine.  Around the side of the mountain from where I spawned was a little lagoon with a nice hollow in the mountain – the first day it’s always easiest to make use of the landscape. Since I had a lot of wood from the two trees I dismantled, I built my first craft table, and started building up the walls and door for the entrance to my mineshaft, which usually also serves as my home for the first few days. At this point I hadn’t yet found any stone, so no furnace to make charcoal for torches and it was almost dark, so I cowered away in there for the first night, listening to the scary noises. I am usually much, much better prepared when the first night comes.

Using what Nature Provides

I spent several day/night cycles (and several play sessions) just gathering materials, building an obsidian farm underground at a lava flow I found, collecting those things, like glowstone, I knew I’d need from the nether. I was rather overjoyed to find that this world had an almost ridiculous overabundance of clay, something I’d always had trouble finding before. Lots of clay means lots of brick Victorian townhouses.

There was an awesome natural arch just off of my lagoon that I immediately saw potential for. I knew that I wanted to make an airship port with multiple ships, and the arch would make an easy scaffolding to build on.

Everyone wait their turn! Passports to the right, Airship tickets to the left!

So I set forth to build my first buildings, one of them part of an eventual port authority complex and the other a traditional train depot to start my train service from my mine to my Airship dock. My initial building for my port authority was nothing terribly special, just a square smoothstone building about four stories tall, with the top story being an observation deck of all glass windows and the roof being the docking station for my first airship.  I happened to have an overabundance of iron, so I made the roof out of iron blocks to add to the industrial look of the thing, and installed a counter to sell tickets and check passports, which, of course, would be necessary to any proper airship port.

And finally I got to work building the airship of my dreams. But that’s a build for another day.

Fanfiction was the first public forum for my writing.  I’m not the only fanfic writer out there to turn pro, not by a long shot, but most of us tend to keep our fanfic identities locked away in a shameful closet.  It’s a dirty little secret. And of course,  there’s the spectre of Copyright Infringement and Cease and Desist orders hiding in the shadows, making writers afraid to indulge.

“Once upon a time,” a writer whispers in the confessional, “I slashed Harry and Snape.”

Fanfiction isn’t just about Writing Bad Porn.  It’s about relaxing, letting your creativity free in a low pressure environment where the characters and settings are already established and you don’t have to worry so much about that and can just get on with the story.  For a young, inexperienced writer, it is a way to practice a craft and get fast feedback if brave enough to post it online.  For a published, professional writer, it can be a quick creative break from the pressures of The Real Stuff.

And there is an organization of professional writers out there trying to defend the fan’s right to play in their fandom’s playground.  The Organization for Transformative Works exists to help and to protect fans and to protect fanworks.  I wanted to give them a shout-out here to help promote their work, because it is important and because it helps to give some legitimacy to the fanwork community.

I support them because I am a fanfiction writer who turned pro, and I hope that one day someone will write fanfiction using characters and a world that I created.  And I will not look upon this as theft, but as compliment.

Fanfiction writers do not write in their fandoms to steal from the rightful creators of the work, but because they want it to keep going. Because they love the original so much that they never want the story to end.