Pick your heroes carefully

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

- Douglas Adams

How science is not like literature

You won't hear neurologists say (often): "well, you have to learn how to do brain surgery correctly before you are allowed to break the rules."

Why do I write science fiction?

This is the important question for me this week. I worry that what I'm creating is nonsense, is just flat genre crap, paper dolls with lightsabers. The second TNEO deadline looming ominously might have something to do with this. My insomnia, also, although the TNEO deadline did not have anything to do with me imitating a banshee at three in the morning when I discovered that my very wonderful daughter was giggling loudly on the phone with her male friend from out of state. That was just my maternal madness. Maternal madness explains many things, including most ridiculous threats, i.e., if you don't hang up this second I will throw that phone AWAY. In the light of day, this is not much of a threat, since, a., the phone belongs to me, b., there are many more phones in the house, and c., I don't throw things away. At worst, I would have freecycled it.

Anyway, if I have a point, it is this: I am still after all these many years struggling to find my way. I want to laugh hollowly when my 20-year-olds say they don't know what they are doing with their lives. "Wait until you are 40!" I do say. But who does know their way? Stock brokers? Physicists? (I think physicists know that none of us actually know anything.)

Which brings me back to science fiction or, as I like to call it, odd little stories. The stories of people who seem to be monsters, who turn out to be misunderstood, or people who seem to be monsters who really are monsters, albeit misunderstood. The stories of the ends of the worlds, all of them. My own childhood, as tragic and hilarious as every other person's (except for stockbrokers), dressed up in scary masks and hats. But this is part of all fiction, right? So why science fiction? Maybe because I adore it so very much. I adore the great what-ifs. It is fun for me, and if I enjoy what I'm doing, it is better. It approaches art. Once in a great while, it IS art.

All the people in my life are out doing important things: working, errands, whatever Emmy does when she is out, thinking of traveling home from college "sometime soon", and so forth. The dog is nowhere to be seen.

I stayed home from errands to work on TNEO stuff. My work style is chaotic and baffling to people outside my brain, I'm sure. I have to do things in a certain way: that certain way is to follow my brain where it leads, even if it leads to running upstairs to look up a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Muses aren't will o' wisps, I guess, but usually they feel like that. I jump around the internet and go for agitated walks. Eventually, my brain says, "aha, found it!" and then it comes. It ALWAYS works this way.

But when I say to my adoring family-fans, "don't interrupt me, I'm working", what are they to think? Oh, working. That's what she calls it.

Whew. "One-Two", my second round story for TNEO, is very much under way now. It's been a little nerve-wracking waiting for the ideas to mature and the characters to come out from under the wet leaves and such.

It's an odd little story. I think this describes almost everything I write.

I may be looking for volunteers for this story, depending on my panic level.

The other writing-related news is that TNEO has high speed internet in the apartments this time. I am going to try to chronicle my adventures. I've been asked to assist with some of the socializing in the evening (!) and have inexplicably agreed to this. So I'm not really sure how much energy will be left over for chronicling. I will have all my critiques done beforehand, though. So I shrug and say maybe. How exciting!