I'm about halfway through the edits. It's mostly little crap, and gritting my teeth and hitting "accept" over and over because man, Torquere loves them some commas. :/ I keep telling myself everyone has a house style and it's not a huge deal, and really it isn't. I'd have rejected about 95% of the suggestions if they'd been given to me by a beta in a fanfic environment, but this is a professional editor and they're going to be handing me money, so I can deal with it. At any rate, I'm saving up my squawking credit for the really important things, where I was trying to do something specific and she doesn't seem to have gotten it and her suggested changes would've messed things up more than I'm willing to shrug off. There really aren't very many of those, so over all it's going well.
When you say "make a world" do you mean SF or fantasy? However you do it, a colonial setting definitely gives you some interesting story possibilities. [nod]
I have a few possibilities I've been thinking about, but I just read Mark Morford's latest column and got another idea, so who knows what'll have risen to the top of the pile by the time I get going? I did a little research a while back for a pre-Islamic Middle Eastern fantasy story with a djinni, sort of. I want it to reflect as much authentic culture as I can, though, which means I need to research at least things like architecture and art and culture from that period, some landscapes including plants and animals and birds, that sort of thing. It probably won't change the story much -- that's based on a couple of con artists and some mages and the actual lore about djinni (the proper plural of which is "djann," which I didn't know before) -- but I want the feel and the setting to come across right and that'd take more research than I can manage between now and 1 November. I'll have to save that for later, unless I trip over some sort of pre-Islamic cultural Wiki or something. [grin]
Then there's something I came up with as a tongue-in-cheek example in a post I made on my writing blog -- a humorous demon who's desperate to figure out who killed Satan's favorite succubus before the Boss gets back from Tahiti. Someone in comments asked when I was going to write it, LOL! I have to admit, though, it could be a pretty good humorous mystery. :) I don't know that I could do justice to 50K words of both mystery and humor in one month, though. Of course with NaNo it's not supposed to be good....
Let's see, have you ever read the story "The Monkey's Paw?" It's about the downside of a cool magical item that most people think would be wonderful to own, except it always turns around and bites them. I was thinking of something like that, a thing which always grants the owner's every wish, no matter how briefly entertained in the dark solitude of one's own mind. So if the thought, "Oh, drop dead!" passed through your mind in a tenth of a second, the person would. You could make them be alive again, but people would notice. You could make them forget, but what if they noticed that? It'd be a horrific thing to own because it's always on, even when you're asleep and dreaming. And you can't just give it away or throw it away -- it'll come back to you unless you sell it, and you have to explain to the buyer exactly how it works. That could be really icky. I don't know if I could sustain it for 50K words, though. Maybe a novelette?
Redwood seeds have a tough protective coat and won't sprout until they've been through a fire. What if an intelligent alien species has the same sort of thing -- they carry fertilized eggs or whatever in their bodies and they have to be burned before the eggs can develop. And they have to be alive up to the point of being burned because if they just die then the eggs die too -- no easy way out with just cremating the body of someone who died naturally. How would a culture develop in response to this sort of physiological imperative? And what if someone developed a procedure to let eggs be removed alive and then burned in a controlled, artificial environment? Or even transplanted into an animal and then burned? Whoa, conflict!
Or maybe I'll come up with something completely different in the next week....
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When you say "make a world" do you mean SF or fantasy? However you do it, a colonial setting definitely gives you some interesting story possibilities. [nod]
I have a few possibilities I've been thinking about, but I just read Mark Morford's latest column and got another idea, so who knows what'll have risen to the top of the pile by the time I get going? I did a little research a while back for a pre-Islamic Middle Eastern fantasy story with a djinni, sort of. I want it to reflect as much authentic culture as I can, though, which means I need to research at least things like architecture and art and culture from that period, some landscapes including plants and animals and birds, that sort of thing. It probably won't change the story much -- that's based on a couple of con artists and some mages and the actual lore about djinni (the proper plural of which is "djann," which I didn't know before) -- but I want the feel and the setting to come across right and that'd take more research than I can manage between now and 1 November. I'll have to save that for later, unless I trip over some sort of pre-Islamic cultural Wiki or something. [grin]
Then there's something I came up with as a tongue-in-cheek example in a post I made on my writing blog -- a humorous demon who's desperate to figure out who killed Satan's favorite succubus before the Boss gets back from Tahiti. Someone in comments asked when I was going to write it, LOL! I have to admit, though, it could be a pretty good humorous mystery. :) I don't know that I could do justice to 50K words of both mystery and humor in one month, though. Of course with NaNo it's not supposed to be good....
Let's see, have you ever read the story "The Monkey's Paw?" It's about the downside of a cool magical item that most people think would be wonderful to own, except it always turns around and bites them. I was thinking of something like that, a thing which always grants the owner's every wish, no matter how briefly entertained in the dark solitude of one's own mind. So if the thought, "Oh, drop dead!" passed through your mind in a tenth of a second, the person would. You could make them be alive again, but people would notice. You could make them forget, but what if they noticed that? It'd be a horrific thing to own because it's always on, even when you're asleep and dreaming. And you can't just give it away or throw it away -- it'll come back to you unless you sell it, and you have to explain to the buyer exactly how it works. That could be really icky. I don't know if I could sustain it for 50K words, though. Maybe a novelette?
Redwood seeds have a tough protective coat and won't sprout until they've been through a fire. What if an intelligent alien species has the same sort of thing -- they carry fertilized eggs or whatever in their bodies and they have to be burned before the eggs can develop. And they have to be alive up to the point of being burned because if they just die then the eggs die too -- no easy way out with just cremating the body of someone who died naturally. How would a culture develop in response to this sort of physiological imperative? And what if someone developed a procedure to let eggs be removed alive and then burned in a controlled, artificial environment? Or even transplanted into an animal and then burned? Whoa, conflict!
Or maybe I'll come up with something completely different in the next week....
Angie