Futuristic

1.

My current novels are set somewhat in the future.

I’m not sure that I know how to deal with that.

2.

After an urban war, I can’t imagine that any city would look the same again.

I thought that would make it easier for me, to set it in London.

It hasn’t, really. Especially when one of my brighter ideas was to have Imperial College, London ‘reused’ as some other kind of building – Imperial being only an example, but I had/have plans for other university buildings in London and other cities.

Maybe not after all.

3.

There’s the technology. It’s not something I really thought about at the time, when I decided to pick up the story wholesale and set it down fifty years later.

I was writing a scene today and I wrote about the books that filled the shelves of my sooperwoman.

Then it occurs to me that maybe she doesn’t have books. Real books, that is. And it’s ironic that I wrote that because I love ebooks more than I do print.

4.

The structure of the sexual relationships is surprisingly archaic.

At some point, said sooperwoman becomes sooperman’s mistress. The stereotypical Other Woman.

In sooperman’s circles, pretty much all marriages are contracted for politico-economic reasons. In regular people circles in the same part of the world, it’s usually because the couple is genetically compatible.

Sooperman’s marriage, in particular, was contracted because of the first, though the latter also held true.

Then in the next section, which begins a minimum of 20-30 years after this one, the pendulum swings the other way. All the other way.

5.

I think when you’re writing something like that, at some point, your past/present will collide with the future you are creating.

In my construct – a term I prefer to world – reincarnation is a continuous process, and given certain conditions, each person (character? damn. this gets confusing sometimes) remembers all of their past(s).  So that collision happens almost constantly.

I don’t know how to handle that either.

1.

This re-write has run into another snag.

My sooperwoman needs a new sooper dooper power that still meets the parameters I’ve already set out.

I could fiddle a bit with the parameters, but I don’t think I have much breathing room. On the other hand, the alternative is to throw this out altogether and start over.

2

I do have a partial solution that I can use if I can’t come up with something better.

It’ll tie everything up better with another book that I may write someday, but I’m not about to toss a significant amount of plot out just to make it fit better with that book – which, in any case, stands alone.

There’s never anything such as a perfect solution though. Or rather, they exist in your head but cannot be applied exactly so in real life.

Rather like economics.

3.

I’m not looking forward to yet another period of unwriting. Don’t think I have a choice, however.

4.

I suppose I can always stitch in the interim.

I am half-way through Winter White, and have just started Prairie Moon’s The Red and the Black, which puts me happily at 3 starts into The Year of Starts.

1.

Morning pages have yet to happen.

I am thinking about turning them into night pages. To empty out my head so I can start afresh in the morning. Maybe it’ll help me sleep.

For now, lunch pages seems to work. We’ll see when my schedule fills up a bit more.

2.

TLOL continues to percolate. I’ve essentially reworked the plotline for the third act, but I still need to fix the first.

I have found my not-so-pretty protagonist’s defining trait, so the first act must change. The plot works, but not the way it is currently written.

3.

MO has titles. Now it needs writing. I will probably work on this in parallel with TLOL, because it has so much in common.

Themes, worldbuilding, timelines even. I think the characters in MO will appear in TLOL and vice versa.

4.

The weather…OMG the weather!

It was freaking chucking it down yesterday. An actual Snowgasm in February! What. The. Fuck?

Talk about January-in-February! Which is, thankfully, going much better than the weather.

1.

Exams are over.

Immediate metamorphosis into social butterfly.

2.

Unwriting to commence as my Model has collapsed, partially due to lack of brainwork and mostly due to an attack of the Heebie-Jeebies.