Dear internets, pls do my thinking for me.
May. 2nd, 2013 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethPoll #13336 What original fic should I write?
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5
I should start writing. What genre should I start writing?
For SF I have the huge great novel I started writing two summers ago and haven't looked at since. There's telepaths and cyborgs and spaceships and I really hope I made good notes on the plot. Spaceship flies into a minefield; minefield wants to chat. It was going to be an epic story about loves lost and found and possibly being blown up again.
There's also a movie idea about a merchanter family ship with three families on it, meeting a cyborg ship that arrived straight from a war a century ago. Martial arts in space. Probably wouldn't be so interesting to read, the fight sequences at least need comics/storyboards.
Or there's the contemporary SF with the not-a-Stargate in the back garden. Englishwoman, Irishman and Welshman walk into a Stargate... I think I have a good beginning / pilot episode, and I've done a ton of worldbuilding, but as per usual I'm slightly short on the what happens next. I had a vague plan to pick a Stargate episode and see what would happen when I dropped my characters in it, except then my world got a lot more different. Also what they would mostly do is die. A lot. As adventurers they're very low powered indeed. But that means they have to rely on talking and hope.
Urban Fantasy is the series about ghosts. A woman gets a phone call from her ex, but won't pick up. The next time she sees her she's sitting in her classroom carving something into a desk, and as she approaches she vanishes. The carved message is the name of her kid her ex raised. She's in danger, and it's all to do with ghosts.
The problem with this one is I know more about the story arc than the plot. As in, I have a pilot and an arc, but not an episode 2 as such. It's frustrating.
The Fantasy is actually sort of science fiction, because distant post apocalyptic world with zombies and nanotech, but as far as the people living it are concerned it's all alchemy and spirits. Two towns face each other over the Eden valley, where the dead walk. The High Cup is famed for its healing waters, Helvellyn for making monsters. Their enmity is bitter, and none now recall the source, but it can't end while the old armies in the valley rise over and over to fight every new conflict. The rulers of both sides look for the decisive advantage, the one that will give them total victory, and the people await the return of the rightful King to lead them. Only a few seek out the truth of things.
... that's sort of the birds eye view of the story though. To start with it's about a man working in a brothel to pay for his education in metallurgy, and a woman who walks in one day looking for a job as a storyteller. Both are more tangled with politics than the other is aware, and small favours escalate until saving themselves means saving their countries.
I know how it begins, and a whole bit of middle, and an end. I have a feeling there's rather a lot more middle than that though. Especially as the bits I know about cover 20 years.
I don't know, I'll probably sit around thinking up plot bunnies or waiting for more inspiration to hit. I do that a lot.
... if I could just persuade myself that not knowing what happens in book 2 is no reason not to write book 1 then I'd have far fewer excuses.
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Date: 2013-05-03 10:55 am (UTC)On the other hand, I never won at this sort of thing.
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Date: 2013-05-05 01:48 am (UTC)