I got my hair cut last friday and while I was waiting for my turn in the chair, I did a little writing with my ipod touch, which was an experience onto itself.1 But this is a post about what I wrote, not how I wrote it…

In recognition of my need to work on a new story I began to work on developing a new story. For the past year or so I’ve been working in a much “harder” context than I might otherwise be prone to. No FTL, no aliens, and if we ignore station keeping, no alien worlds, no terraforming, and nothing more than say 500 years in the future. I mean I’m not particularly rigorous from a technical perspective, and while I have a rough grasp of Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Lagrangian points I don’t exactly do the math to check if there’d be a fuel efficient launch window arriving on Mars in “late 2542.”

Also at issue is the experience of my first-highschool-era novel which was very FTL/military/alien worlds/terraforming/etc and as I went back I found all that absurd.

So I figure, I have a fiction blog, I could write something short, play with a world briefly with hyperspace and aliens and what not, and if it sucks, it’d be over soon enough. So I sat down, and began to write some notes for the world and for the character that I want to (re)use.

Guess what?

No FTL. Alien worlds and terraforming, and outlandish technology on the interstellar ships, but no FTL.

It seems that no matter what I do I really want to write stories about isolated populations of people, because that’s where cool things surrounding group identities/histories develop, and if people can hop on a ship and be “home” in a week or two, the creation of new worlds doesn’t provide a cultural situation that is fundamentally unique from our current globalized world.

Sigh.

Thoughts?

Onward and Upward!

  1. So it went well. I’m clearly not very fast with the keyboard, and I don’t think that I’m missing something by not having hardware keys, but once I learned to just “go with it,” rather than worry about accuracy, I think I got more accurate, because the corrections were spot on. It’s smart. Here’s the thing that sucks. There’s no good text editing program. I’m using Endnote which has good syncing but but it’s a bit… rough. I think in the future, if I try and break from my “take notes in one giant text file,” it might work a little better. Alan, it wouldn’t be too much to ask for for an ipod textmate? maybe with git hooked up as a plugin? Thought so. Anyway. ↩︎