I wish I had more writing news, but it’s been hard to write lately for a variety of reasons, which means that it’s hard to have anything to say about how the writing is going. Instead, I’ve been doing a variety of other things, which include thinking about something of the nature of my relationship with writing, and with the communities that orbit around the sort of writing that I do.
Some of it comes down to upbringing – I was, after all, raised in part by the sort of parent who would read Tolkien to me, and whose shelves of various fiction were there for the raiding. (Sometimes illicit raiding on my part. I was, unfortunately, rather hard on books, and would occasionally have nicking them to read forbidden to me.) I was steeped rather thoroughly in a variety of forms of fantastic fiction when I was young – and I did not entirely comprehend the common markings of genre. Everything was strange people in unfamiliar surroundings to me, whether it was hobbits or the importance of having a chicken on the Mushroom Planet or Dr. Doolittle talking to animals or defecting Russian submarines or… well, I spent a long time wondering as a kid if the Black Spot was some sort of fatal curse of a magical nature, because the idea of the fantastic in my more or less otherwise realistically framed story was not implausible.
The world is a complicated sort of place, after all.
That same person who taught me the love of books would also be the one who introduced me to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – no, not the books, the radio series; who would pop a batch of popcorn and sit on the floor with that and some Dr. Pepper so we could chant “Cheap special effects!” at episodes of Doctor Who together; who talked about playing a version Space War with one of the members of the Grateful Dead. That he also knew people who could speak Sindarin was part and parcel of all these other things.
I’m of the console game generation, though my relationship with them is… complex. But my one actual encounter with a G*Gate sympathiser (he was not blatant about it, but the thrust was pretty obvious) ended in him slinking away in silence when he realised that I, an assigned-female type person, had been playing vidyagames since, I am guessing, before he was born. At the very least he didn’t have anything to contribute once I took the conversation sideways to talk about my old Atari system. (I was waxing something about Joust, and I’m guessing it put me a pixel above him and he turned into an egg.) All that rhetoric about how maybe women just weren’t involved in that sort of gamer thing sort of started looking silly.
I read. I wrote. I did all these things. But I also learned character arcs from Star Trek: the Next Generation, started thinking about the way language, culture, and species interacted from listening to Marc Okrand talk about Klingons, and did a whole lot of rummaging through the nature of story and how they go together from Infocom games and Myst. It’s all threaded through each other, and it connects up to other things.
I’m thinking, in the end, I’ll be doing some writing here about some of that. Not least because I just spent a while modding the heck out of RimWorld and am now pondering the shape of story in there.
Still need to work on Amber Eyes, which will probably wind up being a visual novel, unless I change my mind again.
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