It Came From Outer Space…

I was talking to a friend the other day about how thoroughly you have to plan out characters and settings. I was picking up a notebook of graph paper to map out layouts of houses and ships that are in a few of my stories and also in some games that I have going on, and we were talking also about the importance of knowing your characters inside and out, being able to picture them and know how they’ll react even if it’s not going to be mentioned in the story it’s often important to know certain motivations.

I was explaining in “Sanctity” that the character of Hajime is adopted, that’s a minor factor, she’s an Asian child with white parents. They couldn’t have children, but then add to that the extra layer that when she was twelve her Mom got pregnant and had a son, and then within two years had another daughter, and then had her tubes tied, that adds more depth. She’s a graphic artist, she’s marginally obsessed with the Japanese culture having spent so little time there and trying to understand more about her biological heritage. She’s also very determined when it comes to things and harbors various insidious feelings towards her family that she can’t help, because she finds herself fearing that she may be displaced especially as she’s going away to college and they’re there by themselves now that whole biological family and her the outsider. While those fears may be unfounded, I feel that her family, of course, love her as their own, because they’re not so shallow people, they’re still a part of her.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time deciding how the college area will look. I admit a lot of the idea of it came to me while I was at college myself and I’m bound to use that place as a basis for a lot of things, but there are other things to look at, are their copper sinks or stainless steel ones or are they porcelain? are the staircases wooden or stone? what kind of bricks are on the outside of the building? are the windows square or rounded? what do the gardens look like? is the entire campus isolated or is it integrated throughout the town it’s in? what is the town itself like? what sort of shops do the students have access to?

All these things are important to figure out because the college itself is as much a character in the story as the people are, and the way the town is set up affects very much the way certain parts of the action are going to pan out.

I’ve spoken at length about writer’s block quite often and how I find it hard to get any inspiration at times. The other night as unexpectedly as if I’d found myself participating in rv towing I found myself writing.

I wrote, by hand, about six pages of something that was completely unrelated to anything that I’d currently been trying to work on. It flowed from my pen almost as if I were channeling it. I read it the next morning and was floored by the content because it’s not something I generally write. I recognized one of the characters as one I’d written about a few years ago. I’d been mapping out his world and it’s political environment and some of his history, and here was a scene that I had glanced around because, frankly, it’s hard for me to write things involving sex at times, and here was a scene where not only was their sex, but multiple partners. However, I’m taking it as a good sign that my muse is coming back, even if she is being more than a little perverse.

This was originally written when I was in college, about my now ex. I have tried to pare it down some so that it is less fully of whine and hopefully conveys the image more succinctly.

I cry icy tears that burn my eyes,
This weakness holds you strong around me,
A sanctuary I remember fondly
Embracing wave,
inside a fountain,
beside a waterfall,
despite my innocence we proved wise,
despite conversation we remained
yet now desolate again

It’s funny how lost love tends to cause poetry but also how it tends to cause sucky poetry that has to be improved once the emotion is less fully active.

It’s a bit like arranging the patio furniture in the shed so that you can get to it the easiest once the weather is suitable to use it again. That’s the way I’ve been working recently.

I’ve been making logs of the different stories I have that I’ve started. At one point when I was in high school had about 63 different story ideas written down in various notebooks. Since then I’ve realized that not all of those story ideas would work, or I’ve been able to combine some of them together to make them better.

Still my thoughts are generally cluttered and I jump from one to the other to the other without finishing something entirely. This is not a good thing. If I ever want to be published I need to actually be able to finish something, so I’ve decided to be systematic. I’ve been writing out all the various ideas, in brief, and then organizing them. I have several stories which would work along the same “time line” but be at different points, so that shows me I need to actually work on the timeline overall to make sure that I can make each story work and compliment each other without poking holes in my own universe. Others are stand-alones so they could be worked on independently or even in tandem — if I’m feeling particularly masochistic.

Sorting out the time lines and synopses is a good thing though because it means then that I can plan out my method of attack and how I’m actually going to get one story finished and then another, and then another.

I know from previous work experience how much romance novels make, and how many of them come out each year. When I worked at the library one of the largest sections was the romance section. Most of the romance books were in amongst the regular collection, but marked with a little heart sticker on the spine so you could spot them at a distance. We ran out of those romance stickers so much more quickly than we ran out of the others.

When you add to that our paperback section which was divided by genre and had a romance section twice the size of any of the others and it’s hard not to wonder if writing romance is the way to go. However it’s not a topic that comes easy to me. I tend to view romances not exactly as lazy writing — but as predictable. I’ve read a few romances and for the most part they’ve been thinly disguised porn. Most of them open with one of the main characters dressed up in sexy bra sets riding their wild stallion of a lover until something usually goes wrong they break up, find others and either work their way back to the first lover or find someone who suits them better.

Stories that I write do some times have romance as a part of them but it is not the sole point of their plot, generally they focus on exploration, aliens, supernatural wars or things of that nature and while characters within them do find love with each other I try not to focus solely on the smut.

This move is, I have to admit, partially because certain romantic scenes can be hard for me to write. I realize that means that I should practice that particular style of writing and I will. I’m no longer going to avoid writing those scenes just because it’s difficult. Learning and growing in your writing capability is a very important factor. However even when I am able to write those scenes in a less stilted fashion I don’t know that I will change my focus entirely. Science-fiction and fantasy work are always going to be my passions.