Writing Update: Ice - February 26, 2023 (Late again, sorry.)

I finished writing the Ice Bowl, I'll be posting it right after this.

In my experience, improving at any skill involves repeating a cycle many times over. At the beginning you don't even know what it is that you don't know. After some research and practice you figure out what you don't know but you can't replicate the techniques. Finally, after weeks or months of practicing you reach the point where you know what to do and you are able to do it. Only, now you realize that was only a tiny part of the skill you are trying to learn. Compared to the real experts you don't know anything, you don't even know what it is that you don't know. And so on for eternity. I felt like I went through three or four cycles with this story and I feel like I could go through it twice as many times as that. From the beginning I said that this story was begging to be a full novel. Despite a lot of effort to shorten it, it still ended up around 15,000 words. You may notice in the story certain plot points that aren't fully explored. I apologize if this is unsatisfying, I had to leave myself a few exciting things for when I get around to rewriting this as a novel. My feelings on this story are complicated. It challenged me in a lot of ways and because of that I feel exhausted, but also proud to not have backed down. I got to try out a lot of new things with this as I've never written Sci-Fi before. I didn't realize how difficult it would be to come up with names for characters but also objects and places. I also got to mess around with some worldbuilding, changing character's speech and phrases while trying to make sure it's not confusing. The area that I realized I need to work on while writing this is in my descriptions, it's very difficult to describe settings when you can't rely on characters existing in our world. This story is not perfect by any means. I would call it an approximation of a real Sci-Fi story. Like if you told AI to rewrite Blade Runner, it could conceivably create this. If every story I write challenges me in the same way that this one did, I could go pro in a year. So thank you, but also I would like to not think about this story for at least 6 months.

Thanks for your patience as I took a few weeks to complete this one. I wanted to do it right. Next week I'll post the outline and you can see why it was such a challenge. XOXO