Work, as she is seen by plumbers

...So I finished playing around with the urban fantasy, and sent that off on Friday; and on Saturday - thinking that I would start work on a short story that I owe - I remembered instead that it needed synopses for its two sequels, so I wrote those (oh, look! they've got plots! stuff happens! development! progress! conclusion...!) and then went out for my second Burns supper of the week. More haggis, more whisky. In a lighthouse.

And went to bed thinking that I'd start the short story next day, yesterday, Sunday.

And, um, didn't. Didn't really do anything, beyond a little light administration; but was just winding up to get started in the evening when friends phoned, just in from a day on Hadrian's Wall, and would I like curry and drinking and company?

Well, yes. So Sunday became a retrospective day off, and today - well, today I am working on the story. And I've just reached that point, about three paragraphs in, where I suddenly understand that - although I have had this story in my head, titled and everything, for literally years - I really know precious little about it and I'm kind of scared of pitching into the thing in this state of utter ignorance, I can't make it work and I can't make it well, all I can do in this condition is spoil it entirely. So ordinarily I would hurl myself away from the computer at this point and go for a walk, go shopping, get the hell away from it for a while until I have a bright idea or recover my nerve or just get desperate enough to come back and poke at it anyway; only I can't do that, because my plumber is fixing my toilet today. He's been and gone and is coming back; so I am rooted to the house, cannot flee the story, and so - well, yes. I am writing the story. Ruining it, most likely, because truly I know nothing; but 'twas ever thus. We blunder about in darkness, and gather stuff together, and whimper "Does it make a shape yet?" to some presumptive higher power who can actually see.

Remind me again, why we do this...?

Because I do not hope to turn again

It's just confidence, I do know that; but being able to name a thing does not in fact give you mastery over it, in this world. Alas.

Writing science fiction is scary. All writing comes down to bluff, sooner or later (the most commonly-reported authorial reaction, on selling any book after the first? "Omigod, I fooled them again!" or variations thereupon), but I am excruciatingly aware of how thin my veneers are in SF, because I don't have the bluffing-fu, the grammar, let alone the deep knowledge stuff. I don't even have the vocabulary; all I have is other people's vocabulary, from forty years of reading.

So because I'm hypersensitive, I go off on anxiety-tracks of my own creation, to the point where a vague wondering about mountains on low-gravity planets leads me not to write a story for a year or two, only because I thought I ought to find out about plate tectonics and continental drift and is it compulsory or can you actually have planets that don't have that...?

Took me this long to decide that the answer is: I don't need to know. Just don't mention mountains.

So I'm doing that, and I can get away with it in a short story - I think! - because I have craft enough to keep people looking at what the story's doing rather than how jerry-built the world is; but I'm still aware of it and all its brethren as holes that I can't actually plug, a sieve that my confidence drains through.

And yet, apparently, I do insist on writing SF. Sometimes. Twice, now. Once for fjm's 'Glorifying Terrorism' antho, and now again. It would be feeble to say it's not my fault, that the stories just come to me, all of that. Plenty more stuff comes to me than I actually have time to write. This is a choice, and entirely my own. I must be some kind of masochist after all (which is a change of position, because a couple of years ago I decided that I had not a masochistic bone in my body; that was when I was having a lot of serious physio on my spine, and I could take all the pain she could give me - which was plenty, thanks - but I didn't enjoy any of it, nope, not at all, uh-uh...).

Now I shall feed the cat, for it is his teatime; and then I shall get back to the story. What's a good word, for whatever apparatus you'd need to fly (in the individual jet-pack sense, but a bit more subtle, thanks) on a low-grav planet? You see, I told you - no vocab...