Learning to write

After agonising for ages about how to begin the story, I've finally written the first (short) episode and posted it to the new blog.

This is going to be a very "episodic" affair. My plan is to try and post a new episode every Friday, or if I'm feeling particularly creative more often. But there should definitely be a new post every Friday because that's what it says I'll do in my writing diary.

So in structure it's probably going to end up a bit like Tales of the City, following the stories of different people as and when I develop them. But I also want it to be science fiction, so I get the chance to experiment with different ways of infodumping. And I want to see if I can weave the alien setting into the story wherever possible - one of my favourite reads of the past couple of years was The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency which managed to show me Botswana through the stories of the main characters rather than in spite of them. I've spent over 30 years developing my constructed world: unless I can find an effective way to immerse the reader into the world then that's probably 30 years of work down the metaphorical drain.

I've also decided to label the episodes according to the characters appearing in that episode. The idea of "multi-linear" storytelling attracts the less stable side of my mind, but this is the only concession I'm going to give that demon in me, at least until I've learned how to do plots in the traditional way.