I am once again getting the itch to attempt a short story. I mean to not ignore it this time.
The question I'm left with is what I should write. I could write a story set in pretty much any of my settings here or it could be just about any kind of science fiction. I think I could write just about anything I could get really into. I could probably even write it to the level of 'not total. Garbage'.
I'm looking for suggestions of any and every kind. They can be as vague or precise as you like. The settings I wouldd be willing to use are Pride's Wake, Trigalactic, or Natu/Necropact. Also, any kind of general sci-fi or near future Earth kind of thing.
Time spent worrying about what to write is time not spent writing.
Stream of consciousness! :D
Really, just get some words down on whatever sounds cool to you at the moment and don't worry if it's disorganized crap. You can revise something, but you can't revise nothing. Something has to have provoked this itch to write, so go with it!
Thanks for the response.
The urge was sort of triggered, most strongly, by just reading a lot lately. I've read a bunch of Lovecraft, comics of various styles, and then I got the new issues of Asimov's and the otherr magazine from the same publisher that I don't remember the name of.
I want to write but I don't want to end up ripping off what I'm reading.
I might try just going but I don't know if that will lead anywhere positive.
My advice - advice I rarely seem to end up following myself - is to avoid writing a lot of action stuff, at least not at the very beginning of a piece. Too easy, and boring unless we're invested in the characters.
Random idea: instead of one super-intelligent computer system developing and taking over the world for its nefarious cybernetic purposes, two arise near simultaneously, perhaps the results of two competing AI research centers. The two AIs are radically opposed ideologically in some way, and a partly physical, partly digital conflict results, with human beings as pawns. Might develop into a cold war, might be more violent. Maybe one AI consists of a bunch of linked uploaded human consciousnesses and the other is wholly synthetic; or maybe one is highly emotive and creative, the other more utilitarian and logical. The whole thing would have a kind of (post?)cyberpunk quality. Skirmishes over processing systems, battles over electronic territory, saboteurs in meatspace looking to blow up the physical machines running everything, AIs with cults of personality (or genuine religious cults), cloned or robotic avatars as mouthpieces for the god-like AIs themselves... all sorts of fun stuff.
Quote from: Nerevarine D!
I want to write but I don't want to end up ripping off what I'm reading.
My advice is to rip off what you're reading. Find a concept that should have been different somehow and "fix" it. Then mash up the sci fi premise with the real lives of the protagonist (if it's action or mystery or horror whatever, it can be fun to de-genre-fiction it by getting into coming of age, slice of life, drama, or comedy territory). Finally see if you can tailor the scifi concept to the real world somehow and you'll have something a little different. Tell a story about a guy having an affair in a cyberpunk world (he and his wife are using false bodies to cheat on each other, only to find out they're cheating with each other), about a kid growing up in a post apocalypse setting(but a weirdly happy one, like you get now and again in the Flight anthologies), or about a broke college student dealing with the aftermath of Godzilla (college is freaking gone).
There's a lot of room for little tweaks to make a big difference when half the work is done for you.