Because I do not hope to turn again

[desperance]

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...

Comments

Re: Wordz

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mph - trouble is, I have an Alien Species who are a lot like gas-bags themselves, like unto zeppelins indeed (at the moment we are calling them dirigibles), so I think I'd rather have contrast. And she needs to feel that she's flying in and of herself, rather than simply riding a machine...