Failure to Write Fantasy (by sarah)

Sorry to be writing about writing again :/

I wouldn't mind but its not even like I am a proper writer I've only ever had poems published - they seem really easy to get published for me bizarlly and I dont even like poetry :/

Anyway, I have been trying to write some fantasy and failing miserably, I always start off fine with dragons or fairys or witches, monsters that lerk and then at some point - generally during about the thrird chapter I suddenly realise that what I have described is gentic engerneering, a world with different physical constants or nanotech by a different name. It doesn't matter what I dream up there ends up being some scientific explaination.

I think this is becuase for me a story has to hold together and that means the world, realm, universe, or where ever else it is based has to hold together logically. Everything in that world has to obey the same rules or subsets of otherwise the story becomes laughable. Those rules may be vastly different from those that govern the 'real world' but they have to be consistant through out or if they do change they change in a consistant way.

To me though once you realise this all you are doing is making worlds with slightly different physical constants or different amounts of elelments or some such and then I find that though on the surface the story looks like fantasy it has become scifi suffering from the problems all my attempts at scifi have as I make tables of what does what and why.

As a result of this and the scifi problem I have far far too many stories started, some quiet far through. I wonder sometimes if I'll ever finish any of them - n the plus side if I do start finishing them I'll have lots of finished books all at the same time :/

Ella's efforts during Write a noval Mounth have made me think that perhapse I am being a bit too pick nicky but I cant help it and most of all I want the sort of stories i want to read - this is more important to me than being published. I just wish I could actually settle to these stories rather than writing all this silly Romance :/

Writing Style (by sarah)

Having writen yesturdays post I felt I should write this post which I have been meaning to do for awhile.

I get told at writing groups anf clsses that I've been too that I have a distinctive style, Alaric had reackoned that it was bordering on Cyber punk and has therefore been steadily giving me books such as Nueromancer and Snow Crash to read. And yes it was close to my style but not quiet write, the dark intensity still wasn't there, I have to try and water the intensity down if I want the story to be a noval. People kept telling me that I had such a unique and strong style. I felt that I had seen it somewhere else but couldn't quiet place it.

I then thought it was time I got through my back log of books I'd been meaning to read for ages. Amoungst these books was one of those old thine penguine books that my friend had given me after seeing me hungrily devour Forty-Nine Steps on our last field trip - I had finished my book and several other peoples as my back had gone so had to be stuck in the coach whilst everybody else was crawling over rock faces. I'd picked up the slim orange book in the youth hostel and read it avidly.

This book was green and was called The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and I opened it and my writing voice, my 'unique' style echoed back off the page at me. Thinking I was perhapse being arrogant I took it too Alaric and he agreed this was my writing style though without the scifi horror content.

So why was my style so cyberpunky? When it was obviously based on all those old black and white films I used to watch with my Grandmother on a Sunday afternoon? Films with Humphry Bogart in, one of which turned out to be the very book I was reading.

A quick trip to wikipedia solved the mystery : cyber punk was trying to emulate the style of these books, and some how I had come up with this concept all by myself having been brought up on classic scifi and Anne McCaffery I had no concept that the genre I was trying to write had been around for awhile and felt lost and duanted in the vastness that it possed but now it is populated by other authors who I can go and read (I will shoot anyone who comments that that should be whom - ok!).

The style of The Big Sleep was I feel a little to intense but that was fine becuase it was a slim volume which ment that it wasn't too exhorsting to read but I think for the sort of size novels you get at the moment it would be too heavy.

Another thing that I have discovered is that I can emmulate styles very easily much to the suprise of the writing group who had assumed I was 'stuck' writting the same sort of stuff. One of the excersises they do is to give you the first line or sometimes paragraph of a book and you continue it for ten minutes. I even had them confused with one of these excersises as even those who had read the book had trouble deciding if mine was the original or not - and I had no idea what the story was actually about! I think it was called 'a metamorphosis' or something like that. The story had a natural feel to me and I followed where it lead which scarily produced something so close to the origonal as to be almost indistiguishable. This supports my current theory that the stories have a shape they want to be and that I am just moulding them - I have this when I'm carving or making things with fimo too - they want to be a certain thing I am just helping them to be that shape.

It makes no logical scense thats just how it feels to me when I fall through the page or paint or do maths (yes I know thats a weired mix).

Sci-fi and Patrick Moore (by sarah)

I have an ambition to write science fiction and this is something I really struggle with unfortunatly. I find I can easily write romance of all things which just upsets me as I hate romance but its what spills out of the pen.

Then there is horror - these are the stories that are of the level to be published, these are the stories I wish I couldn't write - I write them becuase I have nightmares of a type that cripple me with fear. I have vivid nightmares of the type that seem emensly real and the only way I have of dealing with them of not being parralised by the fear is to put the light on and write them down. I write the 'bones' and then 'feeling' of the dream and by the time I have done this there is a fledgling story which needs to be written if I am to sleep again. I don't like these stories and have tended to site upon them (ie not send them off to publlishers) even though they are the ones my writing teachers say are ready to go and are very publishable.

But I don't want to write Romance and Horror, I want to write scifi and fantasy but I have issues with both. Fantasy I completely fail to write every time I try it turns into scifi and grounds to a holt. I am planing at some point to write a seperate post on this as I think its an interesting phenominon. Scifi - scifi - this is where my true literary heart lays so why can't I write it?

Do I lack ideas?

No!

I have if anything too many ideas the brim over sometimes and now have carefully planned out story lines and books of facts and this is part of the problem - I can't write 'star trek' it has to be correct, it has to all be able to work and therefore I find myself outlining and even having written half a novel and then go - how is the science behind this going to work and so I find myself needing time travel of a specific sort that may not actually7 be time travel and then I find I'm getting books out on maths and infinities and posting questions on face book etc... it needs to all work. If I put in an ancient heating system thats all pipes and things - it may only need to spring a leak and thats its sole purpose in the book but to write it correctly I find I'm picking Als brains and looking covertly at his engerneering books (you know the old ones he collects that tell you how to build sugar refinaries and stuff).

If people are to be on space shipes they need to be viable and the planets need to be correct too and this one cuases me alot of problems - I am I think too close to this science I can see how quickly it is moving this makes me fearful of using anything in our actual solar system. Possible other planets not a problem but our solar system, actaul named galaxies they are a problem for me. At the same time they draw me - I find myself reading Astronomy Now, Sky at Night magizine, New Scientist and any old National Geographics I can find. I do this for several reasons - astronomy I am interested in and need to understand to tell the Scouts about for their astronomy badge. I also feel that being currently stuck at home but wanting to go back to college and wanting to be an astrobiologist means that I need to at least know whats going on with space missions and this is the easiest and cheapest way I have found.

But mainly I read these mags to get facts for stories in progress and also to find new concepts and ideas for stories. Now often in my writing classes I am told I worry far too much about fact but it really really bugs me when it is obvious an author hasn't even tried to find dtuff that they could have easily found out. Hence I write the story about an old man and the second world war - I go and research it. I have a teenage boy making a lighting system with LEDs I find out about it, I even have a little LED soldering kit I want to make up just to get the feel right (though Al did get that for me for another reason ie I want to make LED lighting not sure which came first the story or the reality).

There is also the issue that people seem to think that Scifi is litratures poor uneducated cousin and I get this attitude a lot at the writing groups, thats what you write to make money and its easy becuase you can just make it all up - WRONG! Worlds have to seem real, you need the reader to suspende disbelief but if you jump all over the place and make anything possible within the confines of one story you might as well just say - that god made it all ok (said like any films you've watched lately? I am legand by any chance?) This is a cop out this infuriates readers, like having a fortuatuos earthquake that just so happens to burry the bad guy but leave all the good guys with a hoared of buried treasure (I have noticed that American childrens films are very very guilty of this sort of plot line.)

Not a good story, at least not for me. Though I would say that the story should not be swamped in facts they should be there as an under current not mentioned but affecting the scifi realm in the way physics does our own world, the way societial laws govern the social groups within it. It is pattern building it, it is sytems evolving for me all over again. Writing this stuff is like running a computer simulation for me though with far more variables than anything we currently have could deal with.

I love the old style scifi as well and love trying to work out what would happen if certain systems had been adopted instead of others, this was what I was trying to do whan I was informed that I was dipping in and out of the steam punk genre - I still havent managed to read any books from it. Alaric Also got me Snow Crash as I was apparently trying to write cyberpunk. The other thing I tend to be trying to write is a sort of social scifi i.e. I extrapolate one or two things from our own or other cultures - I take those things to varing degrees of extreme and see where logic takes me with veery human characters (though not necassarily human and sometimes mucking about with what characteristics are genetically there or not is fun too). But again all this takes thought and so these stories can not just appear on the page from nothing like the Romance or horror.

I have been worrying about trying to fit it all in with what is actually known and working with current theories when I opened Febuary's Sky at Night magizine - this is the third issue of the mag I have bought and I had just finished reading the first few articles and thinking well its not relaly helped advanced what I know but wow I've just had yet another idea for a story where is my pad and pen - oh yeah I'm in the bath :/ So I moved on to the next article which happened to be Patrick Moore talking about Scifi. This article has made me feel alot better about the fact I track down all those pesky little facts, in it he mentions all of the poeple I grew up with - the main authors dad used to read to me at night (and yes I did have nightmares when he read War of the Worlds to me at the age of 7). Of course I already knew that Jules Verne had based his stories on the science fact of the day as my dad had been telling me this from a very early age.

But it was probably the bit towards the end of the article that has got me thinking perhapse I am doing things the right way - he points out that with current scientific advancement great avenues of potential are opening up for writers. I hope to be a proper scifi writer one day. Alaric tends to write scifi too though his time is very very limited but what he has produced with his miticuouls planning and nested data structure of facts is mind blowingly brilliant (I am saying this objectively not as his wife) the imagery is fantastic and the concepts geniuos of course his reading speed is about twenty times faster than mine :/

This has made me slightly nervous though as he is mottoring through what is supposed to be a joint venture in scifi and I have writen nothing of this story yet and I am feelingabit duaghnted as to how I can match this vibrant energised style.

Apologies for such a waffly post and erm.. I probably should have put in more about Patrick Moore - oh well. If you are trying to write scifi its probably a good article to read to be honest.

Moor Rain (by sarah)

It keeps pouring down at the moment here and it is so heavy that you can't really see through the rain - I tried to catch one of the medium showers in this photo - hasnt really worked but thought I'd post it anyway.

Roman Urinal (by sarah)

The work men have been sorting out the water falls tunnel which they have been putting metal joist things in to keep it from collapsing. The two guys doing the waterfall look remarkably like they belong in either the RSM or the caving club or as is often the case both!

I asked them if I could come down and take photos - they put a step ladder in the dry water fall for me but I didn't realise (yes I know its a large thing not too notice but then this is me) and clambered down the actual waterfall - when I say dry I mean that there isn't the normal cascade of water flowing down it however most people would consider it actually quiet damp still.

Here are my photos of the tunnel.

The tunnel is at least 400 yrs old and is basically dry stone walls with stone slabs on the top - one of these ceiling stones appears to be a urinal - or so I am informed and is probably Roman in age (or though that is quiet along time period in the UK). Most roman sites in the area where canabilised for other local structures so this seems quiet likely. I actually went straight past the slab as it is in the ceiling and even when they first pointed it out to me without saying why the rock was special I got side tracked by calcified worm casts on its side :/

I did however then see that the rock was cut and the interesting funnelly bit i spotted by myself!

I am quiet excited by this as its sort of like having Time Team in my back garden, but it is a bit laughable that the one really old thing we have (thats of human origin before any of you remind me about all the fossils we have in the garden!) just so happens to be something that men relieved themselves on about 2000 yrs ago :/

I had to take a photo of these nobely calcite deposites 🙂 There where also lots of the little coral type growths that I orinial mistook for teeth when I did the work in the anthropology lab in paleo! (I can not spell the word so it is staying abbreviated but its the place with the fossils at the Natural History Mesuem).

Also I just had to take a photo of this being a geologist. The urinal pics where all taken in a cramped space with me having to lay down on my back so apologies if they are wonky angles!

I really really enjoyed this as I got to where my hard hat for the first time since Kin Loc Leven! But it did unfortunatly cause my pelvis to remobalise for three days :/