I've been having a conversation with Ross, and some of what he's been saying - none of the particular words, but the gist of his arguments - has made me realize why I'm dragging my feet on the last two chapters of my big Fenspace story, Legend of Galactic Girls.
in short, they're not really in conformance with the Genre Directive ("This is not a dystopia"). They're too heavy on the violence.
Now, this may be a problem with how we decided to approach telling stories in fenspace at the very beginning. We set up a world where people who really wanted to go out into space and explore and colonize could do so, and the very first thing we did in this not-a-dystopia was have a war. Oops.
It's too late to change that, but it isn't too late to keep Fenspace from becoming yet another clone of spacebattles.com However, one of the things we're going to have to do - assuming we want to be not-a-dystopia - is to vastly scale back the armed conflict. And that includes me, so I have to vastly reduce the armed conflict in my stories.
I have other plotlines on the spike - the "man versus the unknown" plot of the first Zeta Tucane expedition is one example, and there are enough possible subplots in the relationships between my major characetrs to fill a novel series.
So, anyway, I'll be putting LoGG on the back burner for quite a while, and writing some stories that don't have a body count. It's past time to remember the "fen" part of "fenspace" ...
(If there's any conversation about this, I'll read it, but I think my mind is made up right now. For my own stories, at least.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
in short, they're not really in conformance with the Genre Directive ("This is not a dystopia"). They're too heavy on the violence.
Now, this may be a problem with how we decided to approach telling stories in fenspace at the very beginning. We set up a world where people who really wanted to go out into space and explore and colonize could do so, and the very first thing we did in this not-a-dystopia was have a war. Oops.
It's too late to change that, but it isn't too late to keep Fenspace from becoming yet another clone of spacebattles.com However, one of the things we're going to have to do - assuming we want to be not-a-dystopia - is to vastly scale back the armed conflict. And that includes me, so I have to vastly reduce the armed conflict in my stories.
I have other plotlines on the spike - the "man versus the unknown" plot of the first Zeta Tucane expedition is one example, and there are enough possible subplots in the relationships between my major characetrs to fill a novel series.
So, anyway, I'll be putting LoGG on the back burner for quite a while, and writing some stories that don't have a body count. It's past time to remember the "fen" part of "fenspace" ...
(If there's any conversation about this, I'll read it, but I think my mind is made up right now. For my own stories, at least.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012