|
Post by metalikhan on Aug 17, 2009 21:30:52 GMT -5
Excellent!
The world needs more LOLing and ROFLs! ;D
|
|
|
Post by torainfor on Aug 17, 2009 23:22:27 GMT -5
I'm saying Americans have much higher standards, ) Different standards, maybe. Point taken and absolutely agreed with!
|
|
|
Post by waldenwriter on Aug 18, 2009 16:59:08 GMT -5
I haven't had anybody say I'm weird for wanting to write, maybe because I've been saying I want to be a writer since I was a kid. Plus, I think people probably had other things to consider me weird for, like singing while swinging on the swings (something my best friend considered me weird for before she met me).
Like some other people have said, I never managed to finish writing anything early on. And I still have problems finishing things to this day. The only novel that I finished which I still have a manuscript for is an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery called The Chess Master which a friend of mine just tore apart with comments when I sent her the manuscript. I did write a couple short Christian-themed novels long ago, but I don't like them that much in retrospect. My friend Dawn and I also came up with a story during our hikes with the church hiking club that was about two girls who were kidnapped and then escaped. I wrote a novel based on this story, set in 1986. I've lost the manuscript for it, and now that I think about it, it was just ok.
My first SF novel was a sci-fi novel called Us Against the World (after a song by the Swedish band Play). It involved four young Christians fighting against a New Age-influenced radical Parliament group called Sphere that had taken over London. I got stuck with it and abandoned it, eventually feeding it to my mom's paper shredder. Looking back, it was a little too edgy perhaps for Christian fiction, since it featured government corruption, civil disobedience, and a character who was a rape victim. I think having two close friends who got pregnant out of wedlock (though through consensual sex, not rape) influenced me on that last one.
Now I'm pretty much writing SF stuff exclusively, with my current novel being sci-fi, though the sci-fi elements are pretty minor, and the novel also has some fantasy elements, like the curse that the main character is under and a demonic antagonist. I do worry though that it won't be very good since I haven't read any sci-fi except for the Christian PowerMark comic series, the book Spirit Warrior by a local writer named Peter Zindler, and C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. My main experience of sci-fi has been through movies like the Star Wars series and through sci-fi anime.
I am a bit more confident about writing fantasy, since I have read Narnia, Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and the Inheritance Cycle, as well as the Disney Fairies books, almost all of Gail Carson Levine's fantasy works, the books xxxHolic: AnotherHOLIC Landolt Ring Aerosol and Oracle Quest (the first book in Lisa Wright-deGroodt's Quest series), and many fairy tales, myths, and legends. I've also played a few fantasy RPG video games, seen some fantasy films, and watched some fantasy anime. My main worry here is being too derivative, especially of Tolkien, since I am a big Tolkien geek. Especially if one has elves in a fantasy story nowadays, you just can't not be influenced by Tolkien.
In other words, I'm weird myself about my own writing. I think this stems from getting double whammy on perfectionism - I'm the firstborn and (in my opinion, diagnosis is still pending) autistic. I also worry a lot and have intense interest in how others think about me. So it's hard.
|
|
|
Post by Cully the Swamp Walker on Aug 25, 2009 12:49:06 GMT -5
People definitely think I'm weird . . . and I love it! I don't know why, but I've always felt as though I was in on a secret, or part of a special club they knew nothing about and unfortunately for them couldn't join.
|
|