Station Keeping Progress at Last

Sorry for posting this so late in the day, I spend the day driving "home-home" from "school-home" and didn't get a chance to cue up the post last night. In any case, there'll be a nifty post tomorrow about something knitting related, I'm sure.--ty

With school out of session this last week and a lot of free time where I didn't have a great deal of things to do other than pack (which I desperately wanted to avoid) and worry about the future: I got a lot of writing done. I had basically eaten through my stash of TA posts, and it is once again replenished, although my cushion isn't as big as it has been. Some of this writing is even Station Keeping related, so I can offer you a proper "Keeping Meta" post!

I drafted my first two SK installments. With luck, they'll post as 1.1 and 1.3 [1], with 1.2 as a story by one of the other authors. They're both in the setup-prologue model, so they're not gripping, but some measure of that is needed. This is part of the reason that 1.2 needs to be there: to break it up.

In a lot of ways this is the first time that I've written fiction. Sat down in front of a text editor and written fiction. In years, [2] really; and it felt great. I think I'm a better writer this time around, but we'll all see in a little while. I'm not yet sure about the June 1st launch date, but I've made some progress and I feel like we'll be able to start soon, even if we don't have a writing team that's as large as I might have wanted to start. I'll have to see how my time falls this summer, but I'm feeling optimistic about the series even if it means that I won't be able to write as much non-fiction/blogging stuff for TealArt as I've grown accustomed--this might actually be a good thing.

In addition to the drafts that I wrote, I also did some work on the writer's wiki and made some space for discussion of character development and longer range plots (ie. story arcs.) I'm also working on permanently blocking off the writer's wiki from public consumption, because I can't imagine much that there is that much that wouldn't be spoiler-y for the wiki, and frankly PMWiki's native security system sucks. Hopefully with that enacted, things will go better. Anyway, one of the things that I wrote will, I hope, be interesting for you, gentle reader, and I'd enjoy hearing what you have to say about this:

Science Fiction, as I've always experienced it, is a genre of ideas. While I think dividing and separating one genre from another is not a productive venture, I think that this definition is useful for the moment. What I mean is that the reason why we write stories on alien worlds, with fantastic technologies we can only imagine, alternate histories and futures, and yes even on space stations orbiting far flung space colonies is to present an idea about the future, about the present in a digestible form. It's also fun, and I don't think that we should be ashamed of the "fun factor," in SF, while remembering that it can be distracting.

If we were only interested in character development, literary games and development, representation, and so forth the space stations, fantastic technology, and alternate timelines would be distracting and superfluous.

That's all I have folks. I'm writing this entry a bit early because this sunday (yesterday by your reading) I am graduating from college, as I'm sure you're sick of hearing by now. Expect posts in the next few days from both hadarah and myself regarding this experience.

In the mean time, be well, tycho