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Today I:
- drove Ben to the airport
- went to my writing group
- came home and ate lunch
- went to the dentist for preparatory work for my crown
- came home and finally had a chance to read DW/LJ/FB/tumblr.
I haven't done much in the way of writing, except go to my writing group. I read the bare bones summary of the story so far, and one of them was like, "why is this SF? Why don't you set it in Earth now?" >:[ Because that's not what I want to do? Duh? To be fair, she doesn't read SFF at all, so she isn't familiar with things like the Vorkosigan series or Alliance-Union. (Foreigner ff have aliens, at least.) "Where's the science in the fiction?" she asked. *grouse* There's FTL travel and space stations and asteroid mining, what do you want?
And that starts to get into the question of what is science fiction, and does SF have to contain whiz-bang gadgetry and gee-whiz ideas? Some of the most compelling SF I've read recently is SF only because of space travel and aliens and superpowers (PS: Go buy Fly Into Fire. Do it.). Is hard SF the only true SF? I sure hope not, because so much hard SF I've read is excruciatingly dull with flat characters and pages of infodumps--because all that is sacrificed for the ideas and the nifty science stuff.
It's hard for me, I guess, to explain the characters' aspects of the story, because that's not how I think. I dunno. The characters are important, and well-drawn characters are vital to getting people's interest.
There's one scene I've written where Sahar gets home from work and goes to the kitchen to start dinner while her husband is picking up their daughter from school. She doesn't feel like cooking after the mentally-taxing day politicking, and she doesn't feel like she can manage Azar while her husband cooks, so she orders in Indian food. People can relate to that, right? We've all had those days where you just want to flop down and not think about anything while the nice people at Papa Johns or whatever make your food and bring it to your door.
But that isn't in the 2-sentence summary of the scene, you know? And I don't want to write a 500-word summary of a 1000-word scene, because that's far too much. So I focus on the main highlights, which is "Sahar receives a video from her sister, who thinks there's something fishy going on with the Alliance." The video also has a message from the whole family (including Atesh, age 10, with a cast on his arm from judo class). See what I mean?
- drove Ben to the airport
- went to my writing group
- came home and ate lunch
- went to the dentist for preparatory work for my crown
- came home and finally had a chance to read DW/LJ/FB/tumblr.
I haven't done much in the way of writing, except go to my writing group. I read the bare bones summary of the story so far, and one of them was like, "why is this SF? Why don't you set it in Earth now?" >:[ Because that's not what I want to do? Duh? To be fair, she doesn't read SFF at all, so she isn't familiar with things like the Vorkosigan series or Alliance-Union. (Foreigner ff have aliens, at least.) "Where's the science in the fiction?" she asked. *grouse* There's FTL travel and space stations and asteroid mining, what do you want?
And that starts to get into the question of what is science fiction, and does SF have to contain whiz-bang gadgetry and gee-whiz ideas? Some of the most compelling SF I've read recently is SF only because of space travel and aliens and superpowers (PS: Go buy Fly Into Fire. Do it.). Is hard SF the only true SF? I sure hope not, because so much hard SF I've read is excruciatingly dull with flat characters and pages of infodumps--because all that is sacrificed for the ideas and the nifty science stuff.
It's hard for me, I guess, to explain the characters' aspects of the story, because that's not how I think. I dunno. The characters are important, and well-drawn characters are vital to getting people's interest.
There's one scene I've written where Sahar gets home from work and goes to the kitchen to start dinner while her husband is picking up their daughter from school. She doesn't feel like cooking after the mentally-taxing day politicking, and she doesn't feel like she can manage Azar while her husband cooks, so she orders in Indian food. People can relate to that, right? We've all had those days where you just want to flop down and not think about anything while the nice people at Papa Johns or whatever make your food and bring it to your door.
But that isn't in the 2-sentence summary of the scene, you know? And I don't want to write a 500-word summary of a 1000-word scene, because that's far too much. So I focus on the main highlights, which is "Sahar receives a video from her sister, who thinks there's something fishy going on with the Alliance." The video also has a message from the whole family (including Atesh, age 10, with a cast on his arm from judo class). See what I mean?
