Writing for fun and hopefully for profit.

Writing is one of those weird fields of human endeavor.  You work alone, or in my case in a house with a wife, a father in law and two cats, connected to the world so I can research, dawdle or not really work while working.  It happens, we all procrastinate.  But I've set goals for where I want to be and how many words progress I need to make daily.  Some days are better than others on that front.  But, that's probably the topic for another day.  There's been a couple things trending, and I thought I'd take a shot at them.


Like I said, writing is kinda strange.  You work around people, but in the end you're the only one responsible for whats going on the page.  You let other people read your creation, to give suggestions, to tell you what you what they like and dislike, but all in all you're the one responsible for it (unless you're hiring a ghost writer, or like some of the really prolific authors out there you're churning out outlines to be finished by other folks).  But try to find some help?  For years, that's been an impossibility, unless you knew someone who had a friend whose cousin was a writer, or editor.  And while in some areas of writing you might find some help - like at a convention where you submit your story to have the 'names' look it over, by and large you're limited to who you know and what you can find on the internets .  Or you can pay for a course at your local college - which I've done twice.  Learned some really important lessons on how not to write both times.
I've never wanted to write the Great American Novel (tm) aka the GAN.  But I've taken classes with folks who did.  And while I've read some really great stuff through the years, I'm sorry, most nineteen year olds just don't have the life experience to write the great novel.  Sure, there are some, but most nineteen year olds in college haven't been outside home long.  And how life changing can pledging for a frat moving out of the house and into the dorms be?  Although, these days its apparently too traumatic - people are wanting to be warned of just the thing college was supposed to do in the first place - expose you to new thoughts and ideas outside of what you would have experienced back home. But that's straying from our topic here, and lets save it for a later date.  So, as I was saying, in college I read some truly horrid attempts to write the GAN.  I'm not saying you have to suffer for your art (I'm a hack - I'd much rather be paid for my efforts than have my family get the residuals years down the road), but you have got to have some experience, especially if you want to write about suffering and pain.  Snark is no substitute for experience either.  But today, we seem to frown upon experience.  "Oh, we don't want little Timmy reading about colonialism.  His great grandparents might have been a victim of the Roman Empire, and it might make him feel bad."  Life is about how we react to the bad, not about being happy all the time.  Some of the happiest folks I know are ones that have been through the greatest amount of shit in their lives - because of how they adapted to it, not because they avoided it.  And writing is about translating that experience to the page in a form anyone can understand.  I can hear some one out there saying, but I can write as a female who has had her life disrupted by the patriarchy.  Sure you can.  But, you probably have more life experience than the average nineteen year old, and human experience is somewhat interchangeable, regardless of what the purists would say.  Sure, my experiences under rocket fire in Iraq are different from those of someone during WWII who had to hunker down under heavy barrage - but its a difference in quantity, not the soul churning fear that I'm the next person marked to receive shrapnel marked "Resident".  We've all got life experience, and writing what you know is a good way to start writing what you don't know. 

Today's Snippet:

 

I was sitting at the workstation in the north end of my study, looking at the contents of a glass tank.  Inside sat the latest conundrum from the dig going on over at what the latest maps called Tarkas Camp, still under surface pressure and conditions. Well, I was thinking about the data feed on the tablet next to the tank, anyway.  The cylinder had been found over at the Tarkas dig site, and so far had revealed exactly nothing about its nature.  Its walls were of a thin ceramic metallic composition – beryllium and local materials mostly, with a sputtered metal lining – the outer layer of which we were calling upursium in the lab – because we couldn’t see past it or figure out the composition of it.  The “real” science types were losing their shit over the name we had applied to the material, but so far, it was sticking.  An example of frontier naming practices – something that gave people with a whole lot of letters in front of or behind their names the willies.  Of course, the name of the material would be changed by the time we determined what it was made of – but it was recorded in the official and unofficial histories as upursium and would stay that way till the heat death of the universe, if I had my way.  Since I was the guy more than nominally in charge of the histories (hello, Historian Emeritus of the entire planet, thank you very much) and kept the passwords to make the changes to that section of the histories very, very close to my chest, it would stick.  Then, in about 100 years, some bright eyed grad student would write a paper on the struggles between the real scientists and us rough frontier types, a committee would kick it back, and that would be the last of it.  We knew the cylinder contained something, but until we could scan it and make sure we weren’t dealing with some sort of pocket nuclear hand grenade, we weren’t going to make any attempt to open it.  So naturally, I had one on my desk in my hab.  Sometimes being the chief researcher has its own benefits.  Especially when you’ve got a broken foot, and are closer to 100 than 80.  The cylinder had come with a note –

Dad – we found a stack of these behind that door we tagged 42 in the initial survey.  There were ten incomplete cylinders – one was still in the sputtering device, or what we think is the sputtering device, anyway, three were on the inbound side of the machine, and the other six were sitting there in two pieces – confirming our theory that the cylinders are some sort of jar that once sealed we haven’t figured out how to open.  In addition to the in process cylinders we found thirty sealed ones.  For some reason they remind me of a thermos bottle.  We photo’d and catalogued the sealed ones in place, then took the one off the top right of the stack and sealed it under surface conditions and sent it to you.  In addition to the cylinders, we found more of that really refined silicon dust in small piles in the room.  One of the piles was in a random corner of the room, kind of breaking Petrovski’s theory that the silicon was refined and stored for special purposes.  If you figure anything out, or we do, we’ll let you know.

Shannon

PS – Dad, I know you.  Don’t try to read too much into the fact that we can’t open any of the bottles yet.  We’ll figure it out eventually. 

Hug mom for me.

S.