Alright, haven't posted in awhile; need to get back to more regular postings (and less depressing postings!)

"Rio Sinter" is a sci-fi story I started a couple of years ago. The characters and story arc were almost instantly fleshed out when the idea came to me, and it's something I've really wanted to write. I just think it is a worthy, original, realistic, hard science type of story. I've been really excited about it since the beginning. Getting it down on paper has been problematic.

The hard part to writing most stories is choosing where to begin. If you start too soon you bore the reader while you get to the point, and if you start too late you end up mired in back story, boring the reader. With Rio Sinter, I was starting too early, and trying to make it exciting to compensate. It was still a bit dull.

Last night, somehow, I had an epiphany. I watched the movie "Orlando" (based on the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name), and was blown away with the simplicity of how the story (a very odd, essentially sci-fi story) was told. It was economical storytelling at it's best.

I felt released from the previous beginning of my story. I was clinging to it because I liked it, thinking I needed it to establish setting and character relationships. I restarted the story, from where I should have started it all along. Instead of filling in back story, I'm layering imagery and scenes, and building up a sense of where the characters have been, which lets me focus more concretely on where the characters are going. Personally, I think it is greatly improved, though perhaps it still won't withstand the harsh scrutiny of my writing group.