I am pleased to see that New York State has legalized gay marriage.

As an alien, I realize it is not for me to take sides on earth issues, and I don’t. My main reason for being pleased is that intemorphs like myself exiled here are now one step freer to marry and to have their partnerships recognized by law.

This affects hospital visiting rights, immigration rights (did you know that same-sex families are torn apart every day because citizens are not allowed to sponsor their spouses for immigration unless they are heterosexual?) and a host of other things. In other words, it affects our lives in many ways, even if we do not particularly care what schizomorphs think of our relationships or whether they “accept” them.

Even if we have deep amity-relations that are not “marriages” in the Tellurian sense of (pseudo-)procreative unions we can have them protected under the rubric of marriage, which seems to be the only non-blood relationship western earth-folks understand these days.

As for the concern of some earth folks to “defend traditional marriage”, it may surprise some to hear that I do understand and sympathize with it. I certainly would not like to see anyone messing with the fundamental social institutions of my Motherland.

But the point no one on either side seems to get is that the “messing with marriage” has already been done. Marriage used to be a social institution. It used to be a contract not just between the people concerned but between them and society as a whole. It had dynastic and societal repercussions. It was part of a fabric, not just a private contract.

Several legal changes, but most notably no-fault divorce, have altered that completely. The law in western earth nations now recognizes marriage as a private contract between two private individuals to be made and broken entirely at their discretion. It does not concern anyone else (except any children of the union). This was a huge, radical change which was fought fiercely in some countries at the time. But that time was long ago. The law recognized and helped to consolidate the role of marriage in a deeply individualized (or atomized) society – as a private contract involving no wider social duties or implications.

At the same time, with the breakdown of the extended family and the weakening of local communities, this private contract took on a new importance as the main emotional “home” of the individual. The fundamental change in the nature of marriage had been taking place over the preceding century. No-fault divorce completed it and made it official.

Having made this change “traditional marriage” was ended. And with marriage as a purely private contract made solely for the benefit of the parties, there is no reason to withhold that increasingly-necessary private support mechanism from any couple that needs it.

Of course none of this is my affair. But as an outsider looking in, these are my thoughts.

And as an outsider forced to live here, the latest developments are comforting.

Something happened – it doesn’t matter what: that is another story – that was completely unexpected and warped one’s usual conception of what is possible and how things are. Since I was alone it did not seem amazing, or even greatly remarkable to me. If someone had been with me we should have talked about how amazing it was and it would have seemed amazing. But when one is alone, nothing is amazing. Everything just is what it is. There is no shared consciousness, no group-world-perception, to measure it against.

That, at least, is my experience. Do others feel the same? I am thinking that if one were more “enculturated” into a surrounding social perception of reality, one might be amazed by something even alone. I am thinking that if I were in the Motherland, sharing every day in a social and agreed reality, I might be amazed at anything that seemed to run counter to it. But living in a world in which I am completely alien and having no “people” to call my own or to share any common reality with, nothing seems out of the ordinary, because there is no ordinary to be out of.

I am not actually talking here about “social norms”. I could be talking about the laws of physics, for example. If the front door were to say “hello” to me one morning, would I be amazed? If I were alone? No, I am sure I wouldn’t. A world where front doors don’t behave that way is part of one’s shared reality. Take away that group-consciousness and why is anything more surprising than anything else?

Of course the destruction of what one could reasonably accept as social norms is undoubtedly a part of this. One sees people speak and act in ways that, in the Motherlands would be just beyond any possible pale and would be instant social death. Nothing, however grotesque, shocks me about outlanders. It may make me sick (quite literally), but one has long since realized that these are people with no civilized norms left to violate.

One’s inured state is, in one sense, a different thing from feeling no amazement at apparent violations of the laws of physics but it is not really so. To be amazed is an emotional and social state. It is not really a rational reaction. If we see natural laws suspended, we may find it interesting, we may ask why it has happened and indeed whether it has really happened. But the emotion of amazement has nothing to do with our rational assessment: it is a reaction to the violation of a socially defined and agreed reality.

A maid without a society is therefore without the capacity for amazement.

In my case, if I am with someone, and therefore, ipso facto, sharing in a common reality perception/definition, I could be amazed by something. If I am alone I will only be amazed if I have internalized a social reality to the extent that it governs my reactions even outside an immediately present social setting. And in a world as alien as this, and having been cut off from all family on a daily basis, what could I possibly have in the way of an internalized social reality?

I’ll start by stating my prejudice. I know why Storymill is so called, because it ground a sizable chunk of my current story to powder. I call this a prejudice because I have seen angry customer reviews of various things by people who have had a bad experience, and generally they aren’t helpful. I suppose there are few products with which someone hasn’t had a bad experience.

So that isn’t my basis for writing this mini-review. My basis is that I read a number of comparative reviews before settling on which app to use for writing my next novel, and all of them compared the features in the apps. Storymill has some features Scrivener lacks and vice versa. This is perfectly true. But none of them stated clearly how much more professional, attractive and generally workable Scrivener is than Storymill, and I wish they had.

Storymill has some neat features. You can link up locations, times and characters to scenes so the app knows exactly which characters are in which scene and when and where it takes place. Very nifty. But at the same time, it has no global search function.

You read that right. Having neatly arranged your work into scenes within chapters, there is now no way to search the entire work. You have to search it chapter by chapter.

The way I lost my work was by splitting a chapter into scenes. Two of the three scenes just disappeared. This had happened before and after some struggling with customer support I was told that I needed to restart and they would appear. And they did. But then one day I tried it and they didn’t. They were gone. Customer support (after a week’s delay) told me to restart. When I told them I’d already done that multiple times they asked me to send them my save file so they could retrieve the lost work.

After two more weeks, I wrote to ask them if they could tell me what had happened, even if they just said they couldn’t retrieve the work. Nothing. Nothing then, nothing now.

Of course it might be that I had phenomenal bad luck both with losing the work and with the customer service. But what was not bad luck – what is quite standard and regularly stated on their forums – is that they expect scenes to disappear until a restart. To me this seems like an auto merchant saying “The car ain’t broke – you just have to kick it in the right place.”

By contrast in Scrivener, you just hit cmd K and your text is split at the cursor-point into two scenes sitting neatly on the zippy-looking clipboard. And the same with other things. In Scrivener, everything just works the way it is supposed to.

I don’t really consider myself competent to review either product. I am the very opposite of an organized writer and I don’t use 90% of the functionality of this type of software. From the spec sheet, either app would have served my quite humble purposes admirably. But in practice, Storymill and Scrivener are like an old Ford jalopy and a Mercedes respectively.

I used the full-screen mode in Storymill (and most other apps I write in) but with Scrivener I use the ordinary front end, because it is attractively enough designed to be pleasant to work with, and gives me instant access to all the other parts of the project, notes and other materials simply and unobtrusively. It saves continuously (every time you type a few words it is saving them quietly in the background) and it simply does what I want done.

I am not the writer to put this sort of software through its paces. Scrivener may be lacking in the fancy organizational department for aught I know. But everything I need it provides in a manner that is efficient, attractively presented and professional. Storymill just isn’t in the same league. Everything in Storymill is just a bit clunky. It has a timeline, for example, which Scrivener lacks, but it is a real pain to work with and never works quite the way it is supposed to.

If you are trying to decide between the two, I am not attempting to be definitive here, but what I do want to do is fill the gap in existing reviews which usually seem to compare specs. On the specs each app has strengths and weaknesses, but on the quality of the execution of those specs, the two apps are in different classes.

PS – a few weeks later – I finally did get a reply from Storymill’s support staff, and it was a very sweet note apologizing for the delay and telling me that regrettably (as I had already pretty much concluded from my own file-size comparisons) the missing scenes could not be saved.

PPS – when I say it was a very sweet note I am not being in any way sarcastic. Despite the fact that she could not help, the lady was sweet and civil, and I will never sneer at good manners and pleasant behavior.

From My Mailbox:

Now that The Flight of the Silver Vixen is starting to sell in reasonable numbers, I am starting to get emails from readers who are raising some valuable points that I thought we might all share.

Alastre writes “All the strong characters in Vixen are brunettes, apart from the Princess. Even Queen Ashhevala is dominated by her brunette Vizier. The blondes on the Silver Vixen seem to be just along for the ride. Is this a sexist society?”

That is a good question. Bear in mind that most of the main characters in The Flight of the Silver Vixen are either hoverbikers or military personnel: both areas that tend to be rather brunette dominated.

I have a new book in the pipeline that is rather different and has a much stronger blonde cast. The main action team in the new book consists of two blondes and one brunette. And look out for a daring blonde journalist who thinks nothing of putting her life on the line for a story.

So yes, I agree The Flight of the Silver Vixen is a little brunette-heavy, but that is just how that particular book worked out.

If you want to add a comment, please use the comment box below. If you want to write me, I am annalinde dot matichei at gmail dot com.