The Cool Bits

[icarus_chained]

Taking the idea from mithen . Ah. Long. It sort of ... got away from me a bit. Which wouldn't be bad, except I'm pretty sure I've barely tipped the iceberg here. Turns out, fiction-wise? I'm pretty easy to please, provided whatever you write, you write well.

The Cool Bits

Honour. Honourable adversaries, who may hate each others guts, but would never cheat or dishonour each other. Enemies who would die for each other, and unite against a common threat, not because they secretly like each other or any such thing, but because he's mine dammit! Enemies turned allies, particularly if there's a little bit of heroic self-sacrifice from characters you never expected. Dying at the gate, together to the end. Trusting another to kill you if you need killing, and knowing what it will cost them.

The comedians. Characters who are the butt of everyone's jokes, but soldier through anyway. Characters who seem stupid all the way through, but somehow manage to accidentally make everything work around them, and who you're never completely sure aren't secretly laughing at the world.

Ships. Sailing or space or sky or ether or whatever weird medium the author can devise, I don't care. Ships that seem alive, not because of magic or science (though those too), but simply because the people who crew them hold them as something more, something intangible, something proud. The captain going down with his ship (oh, so very, very much!). The crew going down with the captain. Yes, I like me some tragedy, alright. But usually only if it's heroic tragedy.

Exploration. Ancient wonders. Crusty victorian gentlemen wandering into exotic and deadly temples (yes, so very last century of me, but who cares?). Arabian Nights-style fairytales, with gore and gold and simplistic but relatable morals. Rich worlds, tapestries painted over the minds eye, full of vastly improbable wonders like flying cities or shells of giant seacreatures, where you're so blown away that you actually don't care that it could never, ever work. Vast and intricate monuments, alien or ancient, natural or constructed, that make you stop and just go wow!

The sea. Oh, the sea! All her faces, all her moods, her vast and secret power, her storms and her acceptance. Anything going, I'll take.

Inventions. Science. The vision of what man can be, what he can do, for better or for worse. The intangible thrill of discovery, of invention, of touching the future, making it between your hands, and watching it poured out into the world to better it or destroy it. Electricity. Fire. Prometheus and the price of knowledge. The scientists themselves, the crazed inventor, the innocent genius, the wonder that can live behind one person's eyes.

Aliens, things that are other, things that do not live or work by the rules we think they should, and the way such being interact with the more mundane world. Fairies. Gods. Little green men. Metahumans. Mutants. Beings more or less, and the debate for which is which.

Values. Morals. Discussions of which belongs to who, and who, if anyone, is right. The tragedies that result not from evil, but from two good but opposite agendas meeting and anihilating each other. The costs of morality, the depth to which you can go into the grey before you forget what black and white look like, before you realise that maybe it doesn't matter. Characters who straddle the line between black and white, sheer and uncompromising. Characters that fit fluidly between, and never seem to be one or other long enough to pin them down. And then ... characters beyond either, characters with motives so unknowable, so distant and vast, that assigning any mortal moral value to them becomes ridiculous (incidentally, this is what I would like to see in the real world, as regards religion especially. If there is a god, and whatever that god happens to be, I think there is a fundamental stupidity in trying to judge their actions or lack thereof according to human logic, morality, or idea of justice).

Bastards. Magnificent bastards. Bastards with a heart of gold, and bastards who are genuine, card-carrying bastards with no redeeming features whatsoever, aside from the fact that for some reason or another they happen to be on your side. Bastards who make absolutely no apology for their status as such, who don't need hearts of gold because they've hearts of wrought iron instead, with all the strength and hidden fragility that entails.

Happy endings, my love of tragedy aside. Soft stories without much purpose, except to show a glimpse of how nice life can occasionally be. Snuggles and morning's in. Dog-piles of people who love each other, snuggle each other and fight for each other, but don't need to be romantically attached to each other. Team stories, of people working and living together, and growing into families. Romps, that never have to end. Seriously. I wanted the A-team to live forever, and never have to change.

Food. Smells. Vivid colours and sweeping vistas. All the sensory candy a person can cram in, provide the thing keeps moving nicely. Motion. The sense of space and swiftness, swooping cameras and panning shots, action close and immediate and great battles flung out over huge seas or endless skies.

Technobabble. Orders and commands, and military sensibilities, and crews ready for the order. Organised panics and purposeful chaos. Coming together in crises, finding a place to do some good. People relaying sit-reps over radio, with some snark and banter on the side. Bustle. Energy. Snap and crackle, and go go go! Deploying. Ships moving in tandem, organised and deadly. Planning. Major operations, bulk and people and logistics, and making all that shit work.

Systems. Efficient systems, and people coming in and blasting beaurocracies out of the water while making things actually work for a damn change! (This is a long-running fantasy of mine in real life - my gods people! Do you realise how shoddy most of the systems we work with really are? Seriously?) Taking old and battered things and making them work on the fly, pushing stopgaps in and duct tape, and hoping to hell the whole thing holds together long enough for it to do what needs doing. Fighting against all the odds and making it anyway, running on spit and will and prayers. The Scotty school of engineering.

Doctors. Detectives. Old gunslingers. Legends grown old. Acrobats and circuses, and the lingering creepiness of the sideshow, the beauty under the lights, in the darkness, fading with daylight. Things fading in general. Old scraps, little hidden treasures littering the world. Old buildings, creepy and kooky, full of nooks and crannies. Haunted houses, and houses/shops where things are not quite as they should be.

Old horrors. Classic supernatural, and the darker twists. Mannequins and dolls, clockwork automatons, mama-mama echoing in the darkness at midnight (read one of those when I was a kid, never quite got over it, and add in The Great Mouse Detective and Ratigan crushing that doll ... yeah). The real, slow-creeping horror when you realise that something normal has gone very, very wrong.

Dialogue. Great lines, from the powerful speeches to the domestic nothings to blistering harangues to the banter and snarky one-liners. I love characters who can really use language well.

Mazes. Clockwork. Spiderwebs. Fabrics. Bodies. Intricate things.

Language that evokes eras, moods, genres, locales. Steampunk, historical, futuristic, the orient, middle england, the old west ... language that settles you in time and place and makes you live it. Period accuracy, to a degree, although I'll forgive almost anything if it's cool enough (though not the Nautilus in LXG, because willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far and that thing would no way in hell have fit in the Thames). Sepia tones. Mood-setting, particularly for sombre pieces.

Music. Dance. Celebrations. Food. People being happy, in ways simple and complex.

Vice. Not graphic, but ... victorian, maybe. The kind of sophisticated vice you can only get in a society doing it's damndest to appear moral and virtuous. Big cities, especially centered in time. Victorian London. Cavalier Paris. 20s New York. 40s LA. Period pieces, high-steel, low-brow and high-society. Detail. I'm a broad-strokes girl myself, but damn I love someone who can work in seemless details.

People. Of every shape and size and temperament and origin, preferably thrown in one big melting pot and shaken thoroughly. I like my characters shaken, not stirred, with healthy dollops of careening plot to keep them on their toes, if we're going for light reading. You can slow down if you want me to get philosophical. But people, I demand. Faceted and three-dimensional, for preferance. Real people, people you'd believe in even if they happen to be made of gas and from the planet Snagglethrump. No apologies made for them, for the way they are, no attempts to cushion the reader and make these being acceptable to them, just presented as they are and as they will be, in all their complexity and probable foolishness. Remember, I do like a good tragedy.

Bascially? Anything at all done well, and interesting, and preferably as far from my life as possible.