Fiction

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Here is a description of the National Novel Writing Month stories I’ve done so far:

• 2011 Return of the Equinox: A man awakes to find he has been revived five centuries after his death in a world where Earth is dominated by a species of artificial humanoids.
• 2012 The Rise of Mother Blue: A small tech startup is creating 3D printers incorporating organic parts but the devices become self-aware and things go badly awry afterwards.
• 2013 Breakfast at the Turn of the Holocene: Mutated humans from the distant future watch a twenty-four hour recording of some people in a diner in order to learn something of what people were like.
• 2014 Beyond the Midnight Gulf: A middle-aged woman goes out to find her son who has gone off into space for reasons she doesn’t understand at first, then ends up crossing to a different galaxy.
• 2015 The Last Parsec: A recovering alcoholic is pursued by extremists angry that she is cooperating with an advanced alien species.
• 2016 The Path That Was Never Planned: Five stories from the near to distant future with slight thematic connections. There was a girl set upon undergoing alien neurosurgery, a violin maker on a space station, people fleeing a pandemic threatening to wipe out humanity, a ship goes to the space between galaxies and back again, a group of vaguely human types are having a cocktail party and the subject of art comes up.
• 2017 Io Fries: A girl who had become infected during an outbreak of a strange pathogen that caused many people to become shunned by society so she and her working-class father had to locate to a colony on a remote island. (I blogged about this story in this post)
• 2018 The Ivory Island: A young man searches for his identity in the course of investigating the nature of a coastal island being built by extraterrestrial nanomachines.

Some of my stories were more purely science fictional and some were a little less so, but they have all had some kind of speculative element in them. This one, for instance, used some alien creatures I had come up with in a previous story and considered what might happen if they sent self-replicating probes to Earth. In recent years the focus of the story has shifted away from the speculative hook and centered more on other elements I came up with. This time around, I spent most of the time considering the events of the story from the viewpoint of my main character who had been one of those children who had been separated from his family when crossing the US southern border. This let me consider what it was like for him growing up without the kind of roots most children have quite a bit more than the original alien plot. I haven’t gotten to the point of writing a non-genre story at all, preferring to live in the ill-defined realm of the interstitial novels I like to read, but maybe I will someday cross over completely away from science fiction and fantasy.

On the one side, it’s been an absolutely brutal time in which to generate creative ideas for reasons described well by author John Scalzi. And yet, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo every year since 2011. Basically, I think that doing any kind of creative writing is like developing proficiency in a sport – you have to exercise the basic skills, over and over, until they become automatic. The way I’ve always prepared for NaNoWrimo before was to put together a plot outline, a list of characters, some idea of pivotal scenes, and, sometimes, a timeline of the world I’m building. Coming into the beginning of November, I had none of these, so no blueprint for a story that would occupy most of my free time for the next thirty days.