I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon with my face hanging out in front of the tube, but I was also looking at the three books in the UPSUN trilogy. It’s really not a work to everyone’s taste, but it doesn’t have to be. The things I’m best at when I am writing are:
- handwaving regarding the plot BUT IN THIS CASE I HAVE STRONG CULTURAL REASONS FOR NOT WANTING TO CHOP PLOT TOO FINE
- snarky social commentary – Fun in Hi-Skule John Brunner, kinda
- snarky dialogue between people who actually love each other but are behaving badly
- pretty much anything to with Sixers, my current and forever fave alien
- snarky dialogue by people who don’t have anything to do with the action but are seriously pissed off at the moment (people in crowds yelling rude things a specialty)
- godawful family dynamics (nothing drives action like shitty families) (It’s a trope) (but I enjoy my own family) (however much they enjoy, or don’t, me)
- RESEARCH like the time I wasted a day inventing what the city elders rename all the Vancouver bridges to and did you know that psychologically we won’t actually understand how many fucking bridges there are in this town until access is cut to them? Bridges are extremely important to Vancouver, we won’t function well if they fall, are blocked, are damaged ….
- saying things are just so AFTER I DO ALL THAT RESEARCH
- inventing things like the ‘sproing’ which I think is one of the best things I ever came up with
- writing an entire side project – BOOK LENGTH – which is an internal fanfic for two of the characters, whom I’ve since decided do not belong together anyway, and it sure gave me some insight into why destiel is so annoying to some fans
- yes kids I wrote a 55000 word, elaborately researched and fabulously queer /non-conforming/whore-positive book and will never publish it because it isn’t canon in my own universe AS A THOUGHT EXERCISE about how to run a brothel in Vancouver after landback
- gamifying a revolution is not a new concept in sf but tricking an entire generation of mostly white, Chinese and Desi Vancouver gamers into mapping the city so that the Indigenous infrastructure techies can get a tree-by-bush overview of what food is growing here, that was irrestistable