Monday Update & Anxiety Over The Business & SF Big Questions

It is another Monday. So far mine is going well, with the caveat that I have a lot on my mind about the business and life in general. I want to talk about a lot of things and so why not have one of the great talkers, at least in movies, grace us with a quote on science fiction.

Update on Work

At the moment I am editing Epilogue and when it is done it will go into a beta read, which should be interesting. I hope to hear good things. Well, useful things. I trust the people who will be reading it. I continue to work on Vacuum of Battle and that has progressed in some unusual ways. Before I did not have a clear image of the bad folks, but I am getting a much clearer picture of that now. Spies, criminals, and disgruntled nobility - oh my! Finally, the work on the Kindle Vella stories continues and I should have a good solid beginning by the time Vella is opened up to the public.

Anxiety

The group I have fallen into had a great talk on Sunday night about agents. For once I had nothing to say as I have no experience with agents, have never had an agent, and right now I am not in the place where working with an agent would do me any good. It would be a distraction. But perhaps one day. I have a great deal of anxiety when dealing with gate keepers of any stripe, no matter how good they are at their jobs or who they are as people. It is a bit unfair of me to be honest and I need to understand that there can be good experiences out there to be had. Like everything, there is a lot of work involved.

But some experiences in the last few years with having my work judged anonymously has made me reconsider any kind of professional judgment about my writing. Working with editors, sure, that makes sense to me. But no more blindly throwing things out for people to laugh and have a good time over how terrible what I wrote, was. To laugh at my work is going to require a measure of reciprocity on yours.

The Big SF Questions

At its best, SF asks a big question or perhaps, several big questions. I was talking with a friend who insists they do not write SF, and I suppose its true. But with some adjustments their work would make for excellent SF. And that difference is the big question as a central focus. Who am I? Who are we? It is not all lasers and sex bots. It is asking fundamental human questions and not necessarily finding those answers. It is the search and the asking as central aspects of the story that make something SF. The better the question, the more there is to uncover, the more one moves towards science fiction.

Until next time, chummers

~SMH