Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Don't like elections

Elections have their value, but like all things of value, they take some effort, and sometimes there are lots of side effects.  Elections tend to bring out the best and worst, and because they bring out the worst, we see things in friends (or acquaintances) that we'd rather not, biases, prejudices, stubborn or rudeness streaks, closed minds...we all have some, but sometimes the worst can be worse than we guessed, and if there isn't a lot of basis for the relationship to start with, it becomes clear that maybe there is no basis at all.  If there's more to the relationship, the bad thing can be gotten past like all all of our weaknesses--we'd have no relationships at all without that much--but the other relationships may end.  While it seems from the outside like there might not be anything to lose, we always have hope that even a barely-there friendship might eventually go somewhere valuable, and ending it takes that imaginary future away.

I'm not aware of that sort of thing inspiring a story scene I've written for NaNoWriMo, but it follows that theme.  My character has regained someone she lost but thinks that it still is that imaginary future, a dream of what might have been, and can't accept that the loss has been reversed. 

I never planned to write about insanity and paranoia, and I'm sure I don't know enough about it to make realistic psychological thrillers (they are, in any case, futuristic space science fiction, which isn't quite the right genre for it), but I seem to land there in a lot of my stories, at least on the fringes, and in this particular series, which turns out to have a rather nutty premise and nuttier universe (never intended as I write it, but Dilbert meets Pern's dragons at Plato's Cave is as close as I come to describing the resulting flavor), insanity seems rather more likely than sanity.   I can't imagine that it will be easy to sell as a publishable novel, but trying to write it is a great way to distract myself from the election ads.

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