One story I never finished (and should) is about the first man to travel to Alpha Centauri. There he finds a world which is hotter than Earth, but not so hot that water cannot remain liquid, and it's covered with water. The only time he can go outside his ship without an environment suit is at midnight, when it's a mere 50°C outside, or about 120°F. But that's when the sea comes alive with light from the creatures that live in it; and some of those creatures turn out to be sentient.
Bioluminescence is one of those things I find incredibly fascinating.
--speaking of which, summer begins in eight hours and I haven't seen one firefly yet. It's been too cold.
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This has been one of my fears for a very long time. Once people get to know me they stop liking me and merely tolerate me. Figured I wasn't the only one.
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I should be in bed. Cripes, at 11:30 I was thinking, "Maybe I'll make an early night of it," but while I was on my phone it died, so I tried to listen to music and read on my tablet but it ran out of juice. Instead of taking the hint, I started trying to find ways to describe something in the useless dreck story that I worked on the other night, so I found myself doing image searches for a reference that would help me nail it down. And that was fruitless, so I ended up looking at Imgur and found those two things I just linked.
"Useless dreck"--in about 1987 or so I found myself drifting away from writing SF and started writing...I'm not sure what it is. Plain fiction, though, mostly about romantic relationships. I tried reading some of it after I read that novel I wrote in 1986, and I just couldn't.
But a lot of it was important chiefly for what it helped me learn to do, which is to write narratives about people--and, furthermore, to make them believable characters. It helped me learn how to add dimension to them.
The story I was working on the other night is basically about a teenaged guy who gets his face literally broken when he's caught kissing his next-door neighbor, a girl who is a couple of years younger than he is. He's 15, she's 13, and her dad pounds his face against a car dashboard a couple of times.
The last one I wrote, before this one, was about a shy teenaged guy who is invited to a party by a girl, only after he guts it up and actually goes to the thing, when he gets there she acts incredulous that he came, "I was just joking," etc, and the fallout of this debacle. It has a happy end, though. Came to about 15 pages as I recall--none of these are very long, which is why I'm writing them rather than trying to suppress them.
Still--it's a plus for me to write stories in which nonsensically bad things happen (such as a guy getting his face broken because his girlfriend's dad had a bad day and too much to drink after it) because I have a tendency to make things too logical, to have an explanation for everything. Okay, in the story about the guy invited to the party, we never find out whether the girl was leading him on, or if the invitation had been honest only she changed her mind mid-stream, or what. No one really knows why she did it; all we have is what she says about it and how she acts after the debacle. And I don't even know, myself; it's an ambiguity that I maintained on purpose, precisely because it wasn't important that we know why she did it. But doing something like that is hard for me. I want to know.
Anyway, AV is what needs attention. This particular story has maybe five or ten pages left in it; and once I've put it to bed, I'll turn my full attention to getting AV completed. After all, getting it done was one of my New Year's resolutions.
But for right now, I'm just going to bed.