Due to everything that has happened, finding my voice again for this blog has been a struggle – mostly due to the lack of Internet access I’ve had for awhile.
To tie into that idea, I’ll talk a bit about how I spent several months unable to write much of anything. A writing block of sorts, one that left me feeling humiliated since writing was something I’d done since I was old enough to pick up a pencil.
My way of finding my voice again was to just work on world-building exercises. I’ve been rewriting a list by Patricia C. Wrede to create a more science fiction friendly world-building list of questions for myself, and then answering those. I’ve also wrote out interviews of my characters, and although both felt rather silly since most of the information I was typing I already knew and had written somewhere else, it also helped me to explore something new as well. I noticed more of the details about my worlds and my characters. These new details then inspire new stories, new poems, and even new musical compositions.
I’ve also created space ship designs in my vector art drawing program – Inkscape. I am not as proficient in three dimensional modeling of objects as I’d like to be, but in time, I do hope to be able to create at the very least the frameworks of some of my technology designs for my Elivera world. Creating these frames of ships also led me to writing a short scene of the ships in a space battle. These short scenes probably will never make it into any of my current projects, but it does help reboot my writing, which had been stagnating of late.
Another way of finding my voice is to use my university studies as inspiration. Since I was taking a course in general relativity, I explored black holes and the quantum theories on how black holes evaporate over time. This inspired questions about the properties of spacetime and how these can be extracted and explored by a high tech civilization. Following this train of thought led me to explore new types of technology for my Elivera world, and in turn, I ended up writing a few short scenes that captured people using the technology.
Anything really can serve as a source of inspiration for writing, but it takes a bit of training to take what seems to be an unrelated topic and turn it into a source for a poem, short story, or even a novel.
Reshaping Reality 