Why is this here?
Sanne and Marcus stories have been floating around in my head for a long time now, often inspired by weird science I run across, and geologists' field stories of course. While I didn't see the "driftless area" map until later, it looks a lot like how I imagine maps of the Desolate Areas do. And I suppose the name of the Desolate Areas was inspired by Captain Cook's name of the Kerguelen Islands, aka Desolation Islands.
But so sometimes one gets this horrible brain itch (no no, not bitch) to read a book. A particular book. There's just one problem.
This book doesn't exist. Nobody's written it.
One solution is, well, to write it. Unfortunately, I am not a writer. Also, my characters have decided to be geologists (this was not my choice!), and I am not one, nor do I handily have any in the vicinity. I'd rather have someone else write these stories, who can actually write and knows what a geologist knows. But, you know, with exactly my characters and my events and the exact descriptions of everything and interactions between it all and... all that stuff AI can't do (yet?).
(Oh hush. I'm poor enough that I've gone the route of writing the damn thing myself, which costs nothing but time, energy and frustration—but don't think for a second that I've got the cash to pay an actual human writer to make my little mental-masterbation fantasy sci-fi weirdo... whatever-this-is thing real. If AI is taking away creative jobs, just know that this job would have never been given to a human anyway.
...That said, I've considered paying people to make me some actual visual art for these stories. Even though I draw, my drawings don't scratch that itch. They don't look the way they need to.)
I do wish I had access to more information... about everything. Whatever's not weird in my Alt-Canada-esque world, I'd like to be accurate. Buuuuut again, I'm not a geologist, geochemist, ecologist, economist... (like, seriously, what would North American fast food/diner food be like if cows and horses and a bunch of other ungulates were basically wiped out? And what would happen to the forests etc??). Oh and with the techniques and technology common around the turn of the century—most of my searches online only get me recent stuff. And uh, can you take apart a magnetometer to stow away in a car? They're so long, I'm sure they must be. But I don't have anyone to ask and I think my Google fu must be awful.
One of the things I've always deeply enjoyed about some of the fiction I read is the facts I learn along the way. Heck, it was some "werewolf pulp" that taught me chimpanzees sink in water compared to humans, due to their high muscle to fat ratio. That's just damn interesting. And when a fiction, sci-fi, or fantasy book gets things horribly, hilariously wrong because the author clearly never bothered to Go Find Out? Damn, I hate that.
So, that's a source of frustration while writing this stuff. The other big one being time. I feel lucky to have 5 minutes to quick boot up the laptop and scp a little bit up to the webs.
And so, here's Sanne's Notebook. It's a labour of love, a work in progress, not particularly good and even embarassing enough that I don't tell anyone who knows me that I'm doing this. I do have it on a public server so I can open it on any device and (re)read it whenever I want. And I do. I'm re-reading it all the time. Writing it is not scratching the itch, but reading it is.
I enjoy watching Sanne go from a swearing, immature, insecure and frightened young scientist into an understanding, confident person who learns courage isn't being fearless, and figures out how to accept her body and love herself. I guess that's her character arc.
I just love the sad invertebrate weirdness that is Marcus. He's a little too excited about things, but that's good, right? He taught me to stop fearing inverts and love their wriggly segmented antenna'd little bodies, sometime around the year 2020 (thank you!). There's not really a character arc though. Maybe he's too old, but he just is.
I really, really like these Desolate Areas. They freak me out in a way that I know I can't really get right in words, but they can scare me like the strongest nightmares.
And anyway maybe, just maybe, someone else might enjoy it too. I'll probably keep this online for as long as I can afford a Linode and a domain name.