[Khida's Scrapbook] The Curve of the Wind

[Khida]

Developing Khida's Incarnations

I am totally procrastinating on everything I should be doing this morning. In that spirit, I thought I'd write up a bit about Khida's past lives and how (and why) I came up with them. While several of her incarnations are documented in my plotnotes, the creation process underlying them is not.

Khida is not Ethaefal, not Dreamwalker, and not a Seer. Nor does she seem likely to ever be any of these things. Given that, past lives don't on the surface seem like something that would have a major impact on her RP. But my plots are all about character growth and development in all its aspects, and there's a larger story embedded in Khida's reincarnations that nagged at me until I started writing out its shape.

In this life, Khida is a Kelvic peregrine falcon who was born and raised in Ahnatep. It was purely a fluke that she wound up moving into Cyphrus and settling in Endrykas -- a matter of responding to a matchmaker thread. Yet as I developed her engagement in and associations with Endrykas and the Sea of Grass, I realized that even before she bonded with Shahar, that area was home to her in a very fundamental, visceral way. This truth just demanded to be explored: what was the story behind her meshing so well with what was otherwise a new place?

It also happened that I was discussing past lives and prior associations with another player at that time. Her character was Drykas, which meant any associate of hers (i.e. Khida's past self) would also be Drykas, and I personally was particularly interested in the idea of the Drykas and their Striders living underground. That just strikes me as a nifty situation to write about. So I developed Renata Grassrunner as Khida's first post-Valterrian incarnation: a Drykas woman born to the caverns, but whose parents and other elders still had first-hand experience of life aboveground. Their stories inspired in Renata a fascination with the idea of open space -- something which ultimately feeds back into Khida's current incarnation as a bird Kelvic.

That Renata was herself Drykas, child of the plains and sister to horses, explains Khida's fundamental identification with the Sea of Grass; it's etched into her very soul, patterned in by a succession of Drykas lives. But it raised another question which begged to be explored, another story prompt. The Drykas are all tied into their Web, and those ties mean they reincarnate as Drykas. Yet Khida is Kelvic and was born outside Cyphrus -- at some point, she had to lose that connection.

Thinking about how that happened gave rise to Ophaelin Riverthorn, a Drykas man who lived in the 300s AV. His personality is something of what Khida's would be if she was less pragmatic and less Kelvic -- ornery, proud, decidedly independent. He shares her fundamental interest towards living in and understanding the surrounding ecology; he was also a worshiper of Caiyha. And one day, while he was out in the Sea alone, Ophaelin found himself snatched up by slavers and sold to the Eypharians. He lived out the rest of his life in Ahnatep, which both disassociated Khida's soul from the Web and is directly reversed by the journey she made in her present life. I find it all fits together very nicely from a plotting perspective.

That left one major aspect of Khida's current life to be explained: With such a history of incarnating as human -- because there's also lives between Renata and Ophaelin which would have been Drykas -- what led to her being Kelvic in this life, not to mention specifically a falcon?

Several different musings came together to answer that question. First, the race most intimately connected with birds of prey are the Inarta, so it was automatic that she should have lived as one somewhere along the way. Their common personality traits just reinforced that conclusion. Second, being bereft of the Web also meant her soul was bereft of its home community, which left her with a fundamental need for connection and belonging that her interim lives would seek to assuage. That feeds into her being Kelvic now -- there is no race more strongly interwoven with others than they -- and seemed to fit well with the communal lifestyle of the Inarta. These came together with a random element, which was that several of my threads at the time were dealing with the Drykas taking captive breeders, Khida's opinion of marriage, and (more abstractly) her feelings towards human reproduction. (Short version: eggs are way more sensible.)

All these things factored together into Miu: an Inarta hunter/falconer who was Harvested and died in childbirth. More, she died again isolated from her people and also shut away from the sky to boot; while Miu had always aspired to Endal, during her time in Kalinor she really truly came to covet the freedom of flight. This was the most recent incarnation before Khida herself, and as such feeds directly into who and what she is now: a falcon Kelvic. Miu also reinforces the common elements of hunting and worshiping Caiyha, which I consider to have developed progressively from Renata's incarnation forward.

The fourth of Khida's currently developed past lives, Tavika Moondown, arose purely from plotting connections with other players. She also fits neatly into Khida's overall story, being Drykas and part of a family which professionally bred hunting cats -- see themes above about hunting and worship of Caiyha. The new element that Tavika adds is that as the daughter of Vyash Moondown, a priest and now Ethaefal of Leth, she would have been raised with Leth as her primary god. Yet implicitly, that god figures minimally in Renata's life and future incarnations, and thus far not at all for Khida in the present. So the latest hanging question is, whatever happened at the end of Tavika's life to make her soul turn away from the moon god and give her primary devotion to Caiyha instead?

I have no idea just now, but I look forward to the explanation developing as I continue to explore Khida's story, past and present.

[Khida]

Posting Priority

I have lots of threads, not a lot of time, and Spring is getting shorter by the day. A few of these are going to have to take priority over others. Essentially, I will still be replying to posts in the order they come in, except that higher-priority threads may pre-empt lower ones, even if the lower one has been waiting longer. For my reference, and for the information of anyone interested, here's what my priority list looks like:

First priority

• Thicker than Water, Thinner than Blood (guest ST)
• Joined Hand in Hand... in Hand? (event - Naiya's marriage)
• Growing by Leaps and Bounds (event - settling Naiya in)
• Kindred Spirits (event - Khida's Strider bonding) complete!

Temporary priority: need to get started

• Illusions in the Grass (current job thread)
• Joining the Fold (event, large group thread)
• another job thread with Kahtra

Second priority

• A Confusion of Arrows (large group thread)
• Closer than Comfortable (large group thread)
• Dockside Discussions (large group thread)
• Along the Way (event, large group thread)
• Unbroken by Oars (event - Strider bonding pt 2)
• A Day of Gloom / Finish What You Start (old job thread & upcoming sequel)
• Out of the Ordinary Way (old job thread)

Third priority

• Like a Stone
• In the City of Blue Men
• Camaraderie and Competition
• Under an Autumn Sun
• An Afternoon at Home

[Khida]

Depth is caused by having a character be firmly in a setting with opinions and all five senses and emotions about the setting. -- Dean Wesley Smith, Writing Into the Dark

[Khida]

Apologies to all those I owe things, which seems like basically everyone right now. I am and have been working a lot of extra hours, and my brain has been doing an excellent imitation of mush lately. I'm going to make a focused effort to turn around replies this week, though, so keep an eye on those threads and inboxes.

[Khida]

Shutting Down and Waking Up

Warning: long, rambling personal story ahead.

This is the story of how an actually untenable situation masquerades as one that is great! ...but maybe just needs a little fixing. How burnout can creep up on you, seeming manageable right up until it demonstrates that it really isn't. And how hindsight is 20/20.

I started in my current job a little over a year and a half ago. The first six months were great. It suited me very well, I was doing exactly the kind of research I wanted and that furthered my professional goals, and I had a good relationship with all the other people in the group. But, as I came oh so slowly to understand, there were a few complicating factors in my situation, some subtle and rather insidious facets of my boss's management style. These were:

1. Inclarity of communcation. Not in an outright obvious way; often, we'd be using the same words at the same time, but with slightly different contexts assigned to them that neither of us realized needed to be explained. We'd walk away from the conversation both thinking we were on the same page, but I'd come back the next day with results only to find out we'd been talking around each other the whole time. The most memorable of these was one time when he said for me to use "ALL the data" in an analysis -- all caps, in writing. So I do the analysis and come back to go over results with him the next day... when it comes out that he didn't actually mean 'ALL' the data, just 'ALL the data from one of our two cohorts'.

Kind of an important detail.

This hasn't been an issue just with me, either; everyone in the lab runs into this problem... and most of us have talked to him about it more than once. He's failed utterly to change. Over time, I learned to compensate somewhat for these disconnects... mostly by having flashes of realization halfway through a task, backing up, and starting all over again. In other words, I wound up working half again as hard to get a given amount of progress made.

2. Pace of work, and the ever-useful timepoint soon. Now, it's not that my work has been grueling; at any one point, the pace was manageable. The problem was that it never slowed down, and over time, that took a toll on me. In addition, my boss chronically underestimated how long anything should take -- but not by a severe degree. No, any one task could be done in the time requested... but then there was another... and another...

...and my boss apparently lives in an eternal world of "soon". Along with shifting goalposts. Every time I thought I'd identified an endpoint to a task -- been banking on an endpoint, in fact, and a chance to slow down afterwards -- we'd get there and he'd unfurl a new array of "next steps". What made this insidious was that no one of them was daunting. No one of them was enough to make me pause, step back, and say "no, I have to stop for 'me time' first." It was just always one more step, and one more, and one more...

I asked him for structure. For a roadmap. To actually pin down what he wanted done when and plan it out in a way that enabled me to balance my needs against the job. I asked multiple times. He expressed understanding, said sympathetic things... but actually did nothing to change the situation.

3. Lack of autonomy. Everyone else I've worked for has pretty much just set the bar and left it up to me to figure out how to hit it. Definite the starting parameters, define the goal, and get out of my way; that's how I do my best work. My boss here has to have his hands in everything. He wants to know what the results are. He wants to be involved in designing the next analysis. He wants me to tweak this parameter and try leaving out those samples and compare these three other conditions, then have me bring the results back to him so "we" can go over it "together".

Now, part of what brought me to this job was a need to learn more practical statistics and large-data handling. So in that respect, going over things together seemed like a good idea. But this crept up from once in a while to at least three times a week -- even every single day -- and over time, control of what was going on slipped out of my hands and into his. It's to the point now where I'm not even thinking critically about what I'm doing or why -- I'm just making the changes he asks for and returning the results to him. Which is an absolute waste of my graduate degree. That's not what you hire a postdoc for.

This tendency combines very badly with points 1 and 2. Because he fails to explain his thought process clearly, I often don't understand what he's looking for or trying to solve. Even when I ask. And because he will not lay out a discrete long-term plan -- or even a middle-term plan -- I have no idea where he's expecting to go after the next step or two. So there's nothing I can actually do to help this process along.

The worst part of it was, we really ought to match up well in interests and manner. I haven't described that so much, and I've already rambled on lots with more to go, so just take my word for it. For a very long time, we seemed to work well together -- everything I detail above, I've only teased out after a solid year of experience and introspection. And really, we're only half a step out of phase.

My boss is young faculty, fresh from his postdoc, new to the running of his own team; I was literally the second employee he'd hired. I fully expected he'd need a little experience, some on-the-job training, take some time to get used to managing instead of doing. But as I have since learned, he doesn't adapt -- he hears everything I've said, but it doesn't stick. Anything that requires he change his approach... just doesn't get implemented. So throughout, that half-step dysjunction hasn't gotten any narrower, and I've been paying the price for that.

First I paid for it in time. I dropped hobbies that were fun, but not important. Then I stopped writing creatively, which has been a fixture in my life for fifteen years or more. I stopped doing anything at all during my 'home' hours on weekdays; come evening, I didn't have any energy left. I was also slow to crawl out of bed in the morning, so I didn't have any useful time on that side of the day either. I did chores on weekends. I did continue to read.

I read a lot. There were weekends where I read compulsively -- cover to cover, gimme the next book whatever it is right now, ten to fifteen books in two days. It was impossible for me to do anything but read. (Obviously, this was a coping mechanism.) And as you might guess, on those weekends, I didn't get anything else done. Then I started punting chores on most weekends, whether there was binge-reading involved or not. I reached a point where I could either go out to buy groceries, or do my cooking for the week -- I couldn't do both in one weekend. It was just too much to tackle. (Solution: groceries delivered.) There were weekends where everything was too much to tackle. That gave me a whole new, firsthand appreciation of "spoon theory", among other things.

The one thing I was still doing, of course, was working. I wasn't ready to leave.

All of this was a long, slow, slow decline, playing out over about nine months. There were ups and downs, holidays and vacations, times when I seemed to level out or even have something of a rebound. Also, I will make a point of saying I never had any dent in my self-esteem or sense of self-worth throughout, never had any physical health issues of any kind, and neither did any of this come accompanied by any of my usual stress symptoms (which, after grad school, I am extremely familiar with). I wasn't stressed in the classic sense. I was just chronically spending more mental energy than I had opportunity to recover, running a small deficit that over time seriously added up.

There were (many) times where I thought I saw a light at the end of that tunnel, that when I reached it there would be a moment of "done", a chance to slow down. They proved deceptive, but hope does very nearly spring eternal.

I went to see a counselor. We met several times, I told her all about my situation, about the things I'd done to try and handle it, both in terms of managing my own life and trying to negotiate some sustainable plan with my boss. She ultimately concluded that I had very good habits, covering everything she might suggest I do for my own benefit, and I was being proactive in trying to get my boss to meet me halfway. The only suggestion she could give me was to consider meds, which I admittedly wasn't keen on. I study the brain; I know enough about how complex it is not to want to muck around with mine. Especially since, so far as I could tell, there aren't any actual treatments for burnout specifically -- it's just not well-understood enough.

Plus, I'd been managing one level or another of burnout for over two years by this point. I'd survived my doctoral dissertation, and the exceedingly taxing year that preceded it. I'd survived this far into my postdoc. Every time I thought I couldn't take any more, that I'd hit the lowest low, that I was past running on fumes and the tank completely empty... every time, it turned out I could keep going. So with that record under my belt, I kept going. Besides, this job wasn't forever; I was on a three-year grant, and nearing the halfway point. There was an ultimate end to the tunnel, I just had to stick it out a little longer to get there.

In hindsight, I had a lot of warning signs. But they were beyond my experience, whereas perseverance had worked out before, so I put my head down and kept going.

I can point to the exact weekend where I got hit by the clue-by-four that yes, a bottom existed, and I'd just run smack into it.

I'd kept a number of social connections up through everything else, including some presence on Mizahar; but that weekend, I dropped them all like hot potatoes. I went into an emotional tailspin and shut everything down -- aside from work, as far as the world was concerned, I vanished into a hole. And oh, how my mood changed over the next few weeks. Normally, I have a very even keel; I'm not given to temper and I don't dwell on too much that's gone before. I look forward; I have my eye on the next thing, and I'm always moving towards it. But I noticed I was turning cynical and snide and bitter -- so very bitter. I spend an hour (each way) in commute that, usually, is given over to reading or writing. I started spending that entire hour dwelling on my situation, on things said and done, on whatever was wrong with the day and the week at hand. It wasn't even cathartic -- it was more like my world had become so narrow that this bitterness was virtually all it contained.

I didn't like it. I didn't know what to do about it. I didn't do anything except note it... and carry on.

Holidays happened. There was enough time off there for me to tread figurative water. My boss went on paternity leave soon afterwards, which was practically grand -- nearly four weeks where I was free to work and actually getting things done. A chance to rebound and recover at least somewhat. Then he returned... and I came a breath from ragequitting twice in the first two weeks he was back. Which is not at all something I am normally wont to do. The third week, I cornered him for one last attempt at a productive discussion. "This isn't working, we really need to fix it, here's three things I think we could try".

Yes, I was still offering solutions after all of this. I still wasn't ready to leave.

He came back with: "I know you saw a counselor already, but maybe we can find you a different one."

In short, all the suggestions I put on the table, any of which would have required he meet me halfway, he basically let slide off the other side and roll away on the floor. He treated the issue like a "me" problem instead of an "us" problem. I have burnout, not depression. They are closely related, yet different beasts; and burnout is a two-body problem at heart. Nothing I do by myself can solve it, only stave it off -- and I'd already exhausted all those possibilities during the preceding year.

I went to a psychiatrist. They prescribed me an antidepressant. I took it. It helped, I will say, in that it did a lot to bring me closer to my normal even-keeled self. It took six weeks to get there. Unfortunately -- but unsurprisingly -- it didn't help me with energy or motivation or any of the other actual fundamental problems. To be fair, I didn't expect it to, just to act as an assist. But I had kinda hoped.

Then another weekend happened that I can point to exactly: the weekend where the switch flipped, and not only was I ready to leave, I had one foot out the door. I'm not entirely sure what made that change happen, although I can point at some contributing factors, but it was exactly that abrupt.

I was done.

Come the next workday, one of my coworkers took a single look at me and said "You're too happy. You're leaving us, aren't you?" And near all I could do was grin at her. I spent that week firming up my fallback plan and figuring out when I would actually leave. The next week, I gave very-advance-notice to my boss. Who, unlike the rest of the lab, was caught completely off-guard: "I thought things were just fine between us."

Despite all the things I'd said to him and changes I'd asked for in the past year. Really, truly, I'd tried; and he didn't have a glimmer of suspicion that lack of support might drive me away? Ugh.

As I mentioned before, the antidepressant did a lot to help my mood, although not my energy. Knowing I would be leaving, having a next to make plans for again, a goal to move towards -- that woke up everything else. Three weeks after, I reached out to my social connections again, including some on Mizahar. Four weeks to the day after making the decision to leave, I woke up feeling exactly like myself again. Almost like the entire past year had been rewound, except that I still have the lessons learned from it. I've jumped back into writing with both feet (or hands, as it were). I've picked up beading again for the first time in near three years. I'm learning yet another programming language (because apparently there's no such thing as enough). And I've been sorting and filing and packing and otherwise getting ready to move, because once I'm out of this job, I'm also done with this city.

I'm not out yet, but the end of the tunnel is nigh, and I'm already standing in the light streaming through it.

It's absolutely fantastic.

[Khida]

Going through my notes from back when, I found this scrap I'd put together but never posted. Figured I might as well put it up now...

Imposing External Values

I've run into a few books lately where the main character has strong negative opinions about some facet of their native culture -- arranged marriages, or serfdom, or some other topic of that nature. Now, strong opinions are all well and good. But the ones that annoy me have no justification for where this opinion originated. (And yes, there are rather more than just a few books with this problem. Since I'm not naming names, that's a moot point anyway.) The author probably considers their character's opposing stance a source of conflict, and perhaps a way of showing that the protagonist is good and true and better than the people around them. But I find it contrived and frustrating, an imposition of the author's values where they have no place being -- and if it's a major plot element rather than window dressing, that tends to send me looking for another book.

The thing is, in a culture where something like arranged marriages, serfdom, slavery, or whatever other hot topic is pervasive, there are also values, beliefs, and expectations which support the institution. It's a bit like getting a driver's permit/license on the relevant birthday in modern US culture, or going out drinking on your 21st birthday. It's expected, pervasive, absolutely commonplace, and if one doesn't want to do these things, most everyone else just goes 'huh? but why not? how could you possibly not want to?' Or going to college, for that matter, which has become the expected norm (but that's a different rant).

But arranged marriage, serfdom, slavery are BAD, you might say. Sure they are -- by modern values. (And yes, in absolute terms also. But that is not the point of this rant.)

The thing is, if you're writing a historical or fantasy culture, that culture probably does not have modern values. A girl in a culture that practices arranged marriages is going to be inculcated her entire life with the expectation that that is her future. Not only that, but it will be the entree into adulthood for her, the means by which she progresses in standing and authority. (And yes, in many cultures with arranged marriages, women do have authority -- just not authority of the kinds that make it into history books, or songs and sagas.) The expectation of marriage, the idea that it is right and good and proper, will be as pervasive throughout her upbringing as the modern idea of happily-ever-after 'true love', or the modern expectation that successful people get higher education (except maybe if you're a genius entrepreneur). Similarly with serfdom, slavery, and so on. Consider the 'Great Chain of Being', wherein the world was ordered by God into inferior and superior -- the inanimate, plants, animals, men, angels, and God. Then each level was also ordered into its own internal divisions of the lesser and the greater. In the prevailing opinion of the time, that Chain absolutely justified the stratification of society. Also with the idea of divine right, that kings rule because God has appointed them. Looking back from modern times, these are all just words on a page, and fallacious words at that -- but to the people of those times, they were fundamental principles of the world they lived in, "natural laws" as profound and pervasive as gravity.

Characters do not exist in a vacuum. They are raised in a culture, brought up in its mores, inculcated with its values at a subconscious level such that they often don't even think about them, much less give matters critical consideration. It's certainly true that not everyone entirely shares the same opinion; there will be gradations, there will be opposition. But there is a context to these differences as well. To have a character go 'I hate arranged marriages' or 'I hate slavery' just because 'that stuff is BAD', in a culture where these institutions are typical and ordinary, is to cheapen the character, the worldbuilding, and the plot. Where do they get that idea from? Whyever do they fly in the face of their own childhood indoctrination? What made them recognize the topic even as an issue, much less take up an opposing view?

There are many ways to justify a stance without resorting to black-and-white polarity. To borrow an example from Mizahar, one of my favorite bits of the Symenestra lore is that there are Syms who oppose the use of surrogates not because it's an 'evil' practice, but because it dilutes the purity of their bloodlines. That's a fine example of variant opinion which is rooted in the culture, adding depth and complexity to the society rather than trivializing the protesting opinion as "just because". (To be clear, I'm not saying that Symenestra who oppose surrogacy for empathetic or moral corruption reasons lack justification. I'm just holding up the other facet as a better case-in-point for my purposes.)

All told, without a solid, in-context reason for the dissent, it becomes evident the opinion belongs less to the character, and more to the author -- an external value inserted into an environment where it doesn't belong. Which is not good storytelling craft, at all.