So I finally banged out a first chapter of my long-delayed Nano project, "After the Change." It's set (initially) in a near-future East Lansing, though the plot will be moving to more exotic locales fairly quickly. I'm doing another go at an aborted novel I did the first few chapters on shortly before Clarion, from scratch and from a different perpsective.

Since I've often been accused of writing protags very similar to my own demographics (male, vaguely ethnic in similar ways to one aspect or another of my own family background, same age or younger) into stories, this was an interesting experiment in embracing that and taking it in a different direction. The stuff going on is in some ways a transreal version of the spring of 2003, when I was knee-deep in anti-war movement organizing in Michigan (only much higher-stakes and nastier, given the SFnal context), viewed from the perpsective not of a participant, but of a much older outside observer. He's basically the the possible-future self I always kind of dreaded growing into, since I saw the same basic character around everywhere so much growing up in East Lansing, the middle-aged professor type, totally fixated in his academic and professional interests, who sees all other aspects of life ironically and tends to view political activism as kind of cute, through a nostalgic condescending prism of, "oh, when I was your age, I was into that..."

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On a completely different note, I was killing time in the Philosophy Department offices the other day waiting for classes to start, and flipping through Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," when I found this quote:

"That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves, 'these birds of prey are evil, and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb--would he not be good?' there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might viewit a little ironically and say, 'we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender little lamb.'"

Although I don't tend to do talking animals, that last bit would make a lovely bit of dialogue. (Come to think of it, it sort of has, centuries earlier. There's a lovely, nasty line like that at the end of Henry V, about Henry's love of France.) Good line, anyway.