Writing meme

[vilakins]

OK, I'll play.

Ask me anything about my stories and/or writing process: inspiration, process, what the hell was I thinking, etc. No limit on questions, just ask away.

Comments

[vilakins]

1. Only that most (but not all) of my stories feature Vila and all of them have hopeful or open endings if not downright happy ones. I like to end on a positive note because that's what I like to read.
   
   
2. Not B7 ones. There's my big PGP which is a bit daunting because of its sheer size, but if I think of it as a series of connected shorter stories, I think that will make it easier for me to tackle.
   
   Otherwise, there are the huge SF novels I've had in my head for years.
   • One is about a young woman I'm tempted now to make a descendant of Vila because his skills plug a few plot holes. It's the classic story teenagers think up--a plain, unloved, and overlooked orphan whose skills and special talents cause her to have an important place in history. This story has a lot of Star Wars and Gormenghast influence I'd have to weed out before I wrote it.
     
     
   • I have another I'm tempted to call Napoleon Clonaparteabout a boy who gradually realises that he's a clone made from Napoleon's DNA as part of a secret project to raise strategic geniuses for a galactic war. The boy is being brought up on an isolated planet by a cold-hearted military officer who makes him practise war-gaming to the point of obsession, and when Napoleon finds out the truth, he starts to question his unpleasant uncle's authority, the society he lives in (in which clones are used as slaves with no human rights) and thus comes to the attention of the other side. That's about as far as I've got with that one, but I rather like his friendship with one of the cleaning clones at his school.
     
     
   • The there's the multiple-timeline one in which history has split off at different cataclysmic points, so there is our world (but in the future, after a war), one in which the Roman Empire never fell, and one where Atlantis survived due to a choice of a different sort of technology (IOW magic). Merlin and Morgana are Atlantan time-travellers who use other realities as battlegrounds, Rhodri is a Welsh nerd who finds his DNA activates the high-tech weapon Excalibur, and there's also the Roman Emperor Loriana, originally trained as an engineer, who is kidnapped by Morgana and taken to our world to wrest Excalibur from Rhodri (because it was designed to be wielded by a Pendragon or their Emperor). Loriana, however, hides her identity and allies herself with Rhodri. This one has my own take on the timeline thing: once any two timelines are connected to each other, you can't go further back than that as history is fixed at that point. IOW, if Morgana visits our present world from the Atlantan, she can't then go back to WW2 as that's already happened from her POV, thus I get round the old time paradox. BTW I used Morgana's dragon in my B7 story The Stuff of Legends.

Eep, this is stopping me writing my Jarriere one...