Eccentric Flower:199901/dirdidrani
From Eccentric Flower
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nineteen january (later) dirdidrani I vowed that by the end of the night on Monday I was going to get A.D. Roehm off the planet. But the Sethin had other ideas. Let the record show that I am not Tolkien, and I never want to be. I am interested in telling stories, not creating universes. But I also don't like working in other people's universes (which is why I don't write fanfic, and please don't go there, because an series of columns last year on this in mouth organ generated more messages and email than we have ever received before or since. I'm not knocking you if you do; I just don't. Okay?) So it seems like I have to create a universe or two of my own now and then, or write nothing but stories set in present-day Earth. The thing is, when you make up a new universe, if you're aiming for any sort of quality at all, you have to be internally consistent with your creation. Not plausible - consistent. And, if it's SF, you have to make it so the fundamental facts check out. Lord help me. Never mathematically minded, I have spent a fair amount of time today crunching numbers to answer this question: If I say that the planet Seth is twice the area of Earth, or that Seth is twice the volume of the Earth, which of those two statements makes Seth out to be bigger? Never mind questions of whether a planet 2x Earth is even probable, whether it could exist - I don't know, I don't know who to ask, and I can only do so much. The answer, by the by, is that doubling a planet's volume causes less of an increase in the diameter of the planet than doubling its surface area. All of this so I know which word to use in a single sentence. Meanwhile, no actual writing gets done. You might say, "write now, and check the facts later," but that way lies madness. As it is, I have such a loose grip on my own consistency that I have to stop and reread Our Whole Story So Far periodically, start to finish, to make sure my later "facts" don't contradict my earlier ones. Language. I have tried to think as little about Sethin as possible. Aedie (as the Sethin have christened him by this point) is writing his diary in English, and he only rarely has to cite a Sethin word. Unfortunately some of the Sethin words which are most important to the plot are ones which have no English equivalent; I have to make sure that similar concepts follow logically from similar phonetic roots, that the language looks like it grew naturally, instead of springing fully-formed from my brow. So, even with maximum avoidance, I now have more than a page's worth of notes about the Sethin language, including a mini-glossary. My notes overall are up to 2200 words. The story itself is only 18,200 words so far! It's ridiculous. Don't write SF. Don't write something that's even marginally SF, like I'm doing. Take my word for it. Even handwaving requires too much work ... for something which is made-up in the first place. Far better to write like Lewis Carroll and not have to keep your fantasies orderly. The title of the postcard, by the by, is Sethin for "teaching untruths." Which is what I feel like I'm doing.
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