Just Thinking 1: Why Write

In the Fields embroidered by Rita de Heer

It’s useless to be thinking about the future when you are starting out, on anything. You start your working life putting up signs, you have no clue that one day you might be working on high rises installing in glass walls with the help of a robot.

People starting out as writers are the same. I started with writing poetry. I had no idea then that one day I’d take on an sf trilogy.

Nearly everybody here in the Discord’s Writing Cartel has a world/universe that they are either writing into or using as scene setting for any number of creative projects. Yesterday I watched a short film on Youtube, there are people developing games, writing novels, short stories, you name it, it’s being written.

Every one of these worlds/galaxies/universes are huge. Many of us have spent every spare moment of our boring work lives thinking up detail. There will always be areas in any of these worlds that will stay private to their creator, and other areas that will see heavy traffic of stories.

We’re all doing it for the love of it. World building is one of the most satisfying mind games we all engage in, relaxing and psychologically uplifting. Next comes the harder thing. Convincing other people to put their own worlds aside for an hour, and engage with us in ours. So we write stories, develop adventure games, produce visuals, film about our worlds.

The Discord Writing Cartel community is all about sticking our toes in the waters of our worlds, writing though the shallows, and finally committing ourselves to writing fully fledged stories to share first with each other, then with the world.

Only then, with that last word, can you start thinking about how much money you might make.
Though, of course, these are just my own thoughts. Take them well salted.

Ideas … don’t ignore them

#ideas #Duplo #Duplofigs

Completely distracted today by an idea. My son is 34 and my grandson is 2. My son messages me with photos of fungi. I send my grandson photos of my cat, and of interesting stuff I’m doing.

So, the idea. I got my son’s Duplo down from the attic, built a staircase to get the Duplo figures out of their box, should they be bored in there, and took photos. Sent them.

Have yet to hear of the junior’s reaction, his parent sent me the usual.

Reprise

‘Reprise’, disappointingly, merely means a repeat of something. I always thought that ‘doing a reprise’ meant making a correction. That the repeat would intentionally be better than the original. Well, that is the flavor of this post.

What I wrote yesterday? Pure verbiage. When I read such drivel elsewhere I move on. Yesterday’s effort shall join the deleted pile.

Mapping is a vast subject when there’s a whole world to be mapped. Or, in this case, when there are eleven islands to describe. And, if there are to be people on the ground doing the mapping, what scale will they use? Travelling on foot, for example, produces a whole different understanding of a world than travelling by ship.

Arit and Hellion, the couple introduced so impulsively, are on foot. So far, if Arit were more involved in the mapping aspect, she might have drawn three parallel horizontal lines in her journal: the lower one representing the edge of the beach, the next two the near and far edges of the red sand road. Beyond the road she could perhaps scribble some shrubbery and outline the wallow …

1-red-aus-road-copy — Same present day road again.

Instead, she and Hellion have involved themselves in the local life, in the story of the Eleven Islands. They’ve just treated a Skin-Torn youth for his wounds and infections. And Arit has drawn her line in the sand. Despite her lack of knowledge of any other people in the scenario, her sympathies are all for the Skin-Torn youth’s people.

As a result, they are in a quandary. As is their trip planner. It’s obvious now that the idea to masquerade them as a pair of neutral, sight-seeing tourists was never going to work. How now to proceed with this project?

Ideas Are Everywhere

Yesterday, when I signed up for another project with an original user name — Arit Reede — I remembered a free-floating, nameless character I’d once invented for an anthology, and how this made-up name would suit her very well.

She was the carbon-knitter companion of a medic at a time when almost all the useful extras of modern life had for one or another reason disappeared. With my next thought, I wondered how to get her and her partner into The Eleven Islands scenario, given that the events for which she was invented, took place in the UK a hundred years from now.

With a certain amount of clandestine shipping still happening, that shouldn’t be too hard. Arit and Hellion like to be constantly on the move. They’ll be able to show us the islands from the point of view of a pair of foreign travelers. Future backpackers if you like, working their way round The Eleven Islands.

Despite the recommendation of ~NO TRAVEL~ to The Eleven Islands, the ship’s boat landed Arit and Hellion at the Southern Ocean end of the Red Sand Channel.

The Red Sand Channel where Arit and Hellion landed

The bosun at the tiller pointed to the island to the west. “Bight, the Isle of Wizards. The wizards leave neither flesh nor bones to be healed when they take their prey.” He changed hands to keep command over the tiller.

Pointed eastward. “Souzadelay. In the north of the island are four city states strung along the coast. A feudal overlord keeps three of them honest. The east south and west are agricultural lands in part, with fortified villages, and of course the delta. People trying to live peacefully. The Clay Faces rove and maraud. They enslave whoever they find on the road or out of their proper encampments.”

Go to my The Eleven Islands page above to read more …