In writ­ing May (and in gen­eral, as the major­ity of 2010 was a dis­as­ter) I’ve obvi­ously began think­ing more and more about sto­ries, plots and ulti­mately scrib­bling down a new book, novella or a few short sto­ries. The old ideas swirl, but they’re indica­tive of not being very cre­ative and ulti­mately I feel like I need to start let­ting some new ideas grow and take over some of my imag­i­na­tion. I’m a big fan of sci­ence fic­tion, but I’ve been sur­rounded by a lot of fan­tasy lately and something’s telling me I need to dab­ble in that genre.

When I began really focus­ing on writ­ing a few years ago, I actu­ally began writ­ing a fan­tasy story ten­ta­tively called The Emer­ald Queen. Not very orig­i­nal, but that’s that for you. Then I moved onto sci­ence fic­tion, and even­tu­ally began ‘Ran Red. Since then and in-between, I’ve tossed together some con­tem­po­rary shorts, some sto­ries vaguely fan­tasy, but the major­ity most def­i­nitely routed in sci­ence fiction. Well, maybe it’s time I tried to take what I like from fan­tasy and trans­fer it into my more — appar­ently — par­tic­u­lar the­atre of writing.

But what is it about fan­tasy that I like? Well, I think it’s the romance of it, the sim­ple plots that drive for­ward the char­ac­ters and cre­ate sto­ries, the colours, the vibrancy. When I think of the far future — empires and bat­tles and so on, well I imag­ine the usual big space-ships and races of aliens with crazy-big weapons and high-tech com­mand cen­tres. I’m get­ting a lit­tle tired of the mono­chro­matic stage these con­flicts are set upon, but I’m also a lit­tle over­done with the post-apocalyptic ‘mutant vs. sur­vivors’ or ‘mad max’ types of angles. From my expe­ri­ence, the per­cent­ages for these types of land­scapes are large, whilst the ‘back to basics’ tend to focus on smaller groups and events, it’s almost like if you want to get per­sonal with the future, you have to sub­tract the end­less abil­i­ties to do any­thing, which in-of –itself acts as a mir­ror and high­lights the point.

What if I merged the two though? Tried to build a far-flung future where tech­nol­ogy had not got­ten out of hand, and every mo-hawked nut­ter car­ried a plasma pis­tol. No force­fields, no bonkers-fast super­cars, no immense star cruis­ers the size of coun­tries. My mind is telling me I can do some­thing here, some­thing that takes the notes of a Tolkien, Lewis or Feist and inject them into some­thing after the now, as opposed to way before or far, far away. I know my descrip­tions are a lit­tle vague, but come on… it’s not like I’m going to put down every idea and detail. Besides which, I’m churn­ing this out as I process the ideas, so it’s all fresh, and quite pos­si­bly shit. Who knows, eh?

I think this is going to be my next project, and to be hon­est I’m con­tent with that — as in con­fi­dent that I can achieve it. The last thing I said I was going to do was May and although it took me longer than antic­i­pated and the final prod­uct changed a lit­tle, I did it. So this next thing will work out too!

Thanks for reading,

RG