Practicality rises from the ashes

I created this blog to encourage myself to just write, and not worry about the quality or the editing. Just write little things. But it pretty quickly turned into a rehashing of my writing life to date, involving snowball-like stories that get bigger and gather weight until I'm afraid to even approach them anymore. Or not like a snowball but a marble sculpture... once I realize it's looking nice I become too terrified to put my chisel against the stone any more, for fear I'll gouge some heinous irremovable dent in it.

Which is wrong on at least two counts, one being that my writing is looking all that nice, the other being that "dents" are permanent (what the heck is rewriting for)? but I still plan on weaning myself off the perfectionism with smaller pieces first.

I love Keith Wright. I need to finish that story, but no more of the "if you write, you have to write about that, you have to finish it" goading. So while I'm taking this breath I might as well say now (to the three or four spam-bots who are my only current readers) that the idea of not editing stuff sounds really romantic in theory, but is hideous in practice. What gets me most right now is the van. I'm not sure what kind of transportation we'll have 150 years in the future or whenever the hell I set the story, but it probably won't be vans.

I get myself into a trap with science fiction because I'm not really interested in writing about the science, I'm interested in writing about the people, and the wild possibilities of the future are just an excuse to explore little-taxed muscles of human nature. My story doesn't fit the definition of "real" science fiction, in which the story itself would be impossible without the precise inventuations of the setting. I meant to say "inventions and situations" there but what came out amused me.

My story wouldn't be impossible in the present. It happens every day. It's just a story about a person who bases a decision on the sorts of things you're not supposed to base a decision on. No Matchlinx or moon required. It's rather similar to the writer's decision about setting, now that I think about it... I chose the moon because it's so much more infatuating a metaphor than, say, Arkansas. But if you're choosing settings for your story out of infatuation you're probably going to end up the same way our narrator does: in a situation that reflects your lack of internal direction.

The way our space program is going I figured 150 years was a minimum estimate for civilians on the moon. 150 years is a long time. Long enough to require some dedicated thought on what kinds of society and technology we'd have around us. Dedicated thought that somebody trying to write a character piece really wasn't interested in thinking, and it shows. But what if I were to put in the effort and construct a solid, believable world of 150 years' hence? Would it then become a story about the world and not about the characters? I don't want to overshadow what the story's really about. If I end up rewriting it I expect I'll focus on one element to put detail in -- say, by beefing up the Matchlinx concept -- and say as little as possible about the rest.

The other thing that I noticed that bugs me is the terrible repetitiveness of the story. Some of that can be forgiven. I started out thinking it'd be like Kendlin where there'd be a break in between each installment, so readers would need to be "caught up" at the beginning and would need a dose of foreshadowing at the end. But all that looks very silly when the installments are sitting right next to each other. There's so much foreshadowing I think I have foreshadowing poisoning.

The Kendlin stories are all right. The character doesn't really grab me. Maybe I'll write more and maybe I won't.

The "heaven is full" stories are terrible. I still like the idea of heaven being full, but I think I'll take a different treatment of it.

Enough for now.