Writing...

I've not been very good at keeping this up to date lately.  In fact, I believe since I last wrote about my own writing, I've finished two novels.  I say this because I don't quite remember when I last said anything on the topic.  At any rate, I've now written twenty novels (some of them rather bad, some of them perhaps quite reasonable, none published).  Which I reckon's a reasonable achievement given I'm only nineteen :)

The Game Layer was the second most recent that I finished.  It was inspired by an article on the BBC about an app called Scvngr, and a few words in a long-distance conversation with another writer over facebook.  He said something about me being able to mark books on goodreads with whether I owned them or had just read them, so that I don't end up buying multiple copies.  To which I replied that I didn't have a smart phone (I believe my phone is probably the antithesis of a smart phone, as it doesn't even have a colour screen, and as it works without any problems...).  Scvngr, I should perhaps add, is an app which lets you get offers by doing real world challenges.  Using the new (or maybe just one I've never before used) button above, I shall now add a link to the very article which inspired this novel, isn't that exciting!  Probably not, but I'll do it anyway...  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12735762 .  There, see.  A link.  So, that got me thinking about a future in which those with smart phones are able to get progressively richer and those without become progressively excluded as they cannot access the offers and challenges that people with them have.  Then, just to make life more interesting, I altered the smart phone aspect to be in people's heads.  After all, some people are so dependent on smart phones and the internet that they might as well have them surgically attached.  From there, I just chucked in a crime/plot to dominate the world, and a bit of history leading up to the point at which the novel took place, and added a few characters.  Basically, the games were being used to make people murder.  And my main character had to figure out who was behind it.

Thorn at Kettree (not quite sure whether I'll stick with that title or not) is another sci-fi crime.  Or at least, it was meant to be, but Thorn decided that overthrowing a dictatorship would be much more fun than solving the crime I'd decided I was going to use for this story.  I plan on writing a sequel with the crime he was meant to solve put back in.  Anyway, it's in a totally different 'world'.  Humanity has spread to the universe, so there're lots of human settlements on a variety of roids and planets.  Thorn gets sent to Kettree to act as a representative of a new UN-type body for the universe that focusses more on crime than anything else, along with Lady Veronica.  He's somewhat appalled by the fact that despite the war which was meant to make the universe safe for democracy, Kettree's governor is effectively a dictator.  And that's the basics of that story :)

Maybe one day I'll get them published.  That'd be quite cool :)  Then people can come look at this post and go 'hey, this is where the idea for that novel came from' and nobody will have to make random guesses like we sometimes do in English Lit.  And I bet we always ascribe far more intricate and noble motives to writers than they actually had.  I reckon Shakespeare's Tempest is full of magic purely because he wanted to write a big spectacular, I don't know that looking for meaning is always that useful.  The meaning's probably there accidentally anyway.