Sporadicness

In case you were wondering, I've started trying to do more writing again. Not doing too bad so far. I'll be trying to keep doing it nice and regularly, a few times a week. Who knows what'll happen with it.
I'm writing in Google Docs, so I can access it on whatever computer I happen to be using at the time. For starters I'm just writing whatever comes to mind at the time, ideas, stories, diaries, any crap that jumps into my head, just to get in the habit of writing and thinking about writing. I'll post most of the stuff I write as I go, so there should be piles of crap, some rough drafts, and maybe some work progressing through some further drafts towards being readable.
Bugger-all, if any people read this blog (cept for you sweetie) so it'll largely stand as a record of my thought processes and how I work as I build a piece of writing. I know I'm a keen starter, so there'll be lots of stuff begun here, but not too much of it will capture my attention and imagination enough to develop. Still, it could be fun to look back on one day.

Riting 3 - A story for the kids

Every night Dad reads the boys a story. The boys love listening to the stories and imagining that they are doing the things the people in the stories are doing.
One night, after the story, the boys and Dad are talking about the zoo and the animals there. Dad asks "If you could be an animal, any animal for just one day, what animal would you be?"
C wants to be a big cat, maybe a tiger, or a leopard.
Q wants to be an elephant, a really big one!
Dad tucks the boys in and kisses them goodnight.
They go to sleep thinking about themselves as their favourite animals.

C wakes up and stretches his long stripey back, flicks his long stripey tail and prowls through the hot, steamy jungle towards the river. He sees a flicker in the undergrowth from the corner of his emerald green eye. He freezes, watches, listens, sniffs. He sees a small movement, hears a furtive scurry, and smells something tasty. He keeps low, he moves slow. He is silent, he is a shadow, he is invisible. He is closer now, he can hear his dinner breathing, he can hear its heart beating, he can hear ... a noise behind him. There is a stamping, a trampling in the forest behind him. His dinner runs away. He turns and snarls at...

Q is hot and thirsty. He shoves the branches out of the way as he wanders down to the river for a drink and a swim. Small animals rush out of his way, no one wants to be under his feet when they hit the ground. He sniffs the air with his huge trunk, he smells trouble, just as he sees the tiger turn towards him, baring his teeth. He lifts his head, waving his trunk and showing his long sharp tusks, he trumpets a warning to the tiger. The tiger pauses, the elephant can see him thinking. The tiger decides. He slinks quickly off into the shadows. The elephant trumpets one more time, then carries on down to the cool water of the river.

Riting 2 - randomish ideas

SF
Genetic engineering. Mice, cows, sheep, rats. Human DNA. smart rats have been done before. maybe some other trait.
cows as surrogate wombs. genengineer a cow with a human womb, implant embryo, wait 9 months. popular with the too posh to push crowd.

Cheap power invented. fusion or something similar, generators the size of lawnmower engines can supply more than enough power for an average house. In mass v. cheap to build, run on water, or something almost as cheap, no moving parts. For less than the price of a cheap second hand car a household can be self-sufficient for all their energy needs. Cars run on ultra quiet, ultra powerful electric motors, never need filling up, bugger all maintenance. Greenhouse emissions drop to pre-industrial levels within a decade. Fossil fuels only needed for plastics, etc, supplies will now last much longer. Huge upsets in world order - oil-rich countries now in turmoil.

Cheap, easy food. With cheap power, some kind of vat grown food, not necessary haute-cuisine, but nutricious and available anywhere.

No need to work, with food & power being practically free, only need to work for luxuries. definitions of work will change.



Kids
If you could be any animal for one day, what would it be?

Riting

So, I do this every now & then. I resolve to do more writing, and maybe get my shit together to do a few stories, or something that might have some enduring value in the world. Then I scrawl a few pages of crap and lose interest. Gotta get my act together a bit better this time.


I read a lot. I like to read. I love to read. There are some really amazing books out there that have altered the way I look at, and think about, the world. Its time I gave something back.
Its intimidating though. All those people wrote those things which changed my life. How could I presume to emulate them, how could I have the hubris to think my meagre talents could have any such effect on the world. But then I think, well, I've read a lot of books, an awful lot of books. Most of them haven't rocked my world, most of them I haven't even considered reading twice. Not that I regret reading them, or that they haven't, in aggregate, affected who I am. But, they weren't what I would call amazing.

Then there's a few (but not too few to mention) that I have regretted reading, mostly I never finished them. There are a fair number of books I haven't finished, most of them are OK, even pretty good books, some of them are classics, they're just not my thing, not to my taste. But some of them were crap. Not just pulp, or cheesy, or badly written, or derivative; some of my favourite books are one or more of the above. These ones were a combination of all those things, plus a lack of imagination, and general crapness.

The point is, there's some really shit books out there, and a whole bunch of mediocre ones, and a huge range of good ones, and just a few really good ones. I may not be able to write a really good book, but surely I can manage a mediocre, or even better-than-average one. I know how to spell, I know what good writing looks like, I can string a tale together. If I put my mind to it I can come up with a decent idea, turn it into a plot and build a story, with actual characters in it that sound like real people and do things that people will want to read more about, so that my story won't be one of those few absolute stinkers.

Theodore Sturgeon famously said "Of course 90 percent of Science Fiction is crap. 90 percent of anything is crap". I don't expect to escape the truth behind that. Probably I will write piles of stuff noone in their right mind will want to read, and stacks of stuff that just isn't that interesting. But hopefully in amongst it all, there will be a few percent that will find an audience and a few percent of that which might actually be classed as not-too-bad.

Here's to reading.