I write science fiction and fantasy. This is all made up. That’s the fun part for me about all this. Granted, there are elements of the familiar, but that gets pretty dull to those of us who like a little of the fantastic in our fiction.
Specifically, I wanted to talk about WHEN ANGELS CRY, the upcoming novella that will be available in two weeks as an ebook for only $0.99.
In this, I had to imagine the main character, Padina, as an alien used to being able to fly everywhere on her world suddenly finding herself having to walk everywhere on Earth. Not only that, but she had to learn to speak English. That presented a different problem, but not too different from what we can find here on Earth already. As someone who took German in college, I had some experience learning a foreign language, but I learned it in an environment where I already spoke the native language–English, of course.
It’s hard to imagine being in a situation like that, but I’ve kind of been in a strange land without anyone to help me. In college, I went to Florida, a long ways from North Dakota, to get away from winter and the depression I had after my first two years of college. I had to adjust to a new culture, but one vaguely familiar to me. Believe me, ND and FL cultures are as far removed from each other as England and France. We’re all human, but there are differences, especially going from the country to the city.
I used those experiences to my fullest and expanded on them into what I thought might be. I wrote what I knew but I also took it farther. I took it to the point of an extraterrestrial alien arriving on Earth to hide. Granted there are similarities, which is how Padina and her kind (what we consider angels) can hide among humans without anyone knowing just by sight. But she also was going from a far more advanced civilization to, um, ours, though about twenty years ago.
I don’t always write what I know, as in other-world speculative fiction, but I take what I know about how things work–climate, geology, sociology, etc.–and apply it, sometimes twisting it to something unique but always logical, at least in my mind. If I’m not sure, I research.
I don’t like writers who write what they don’t know. I can spot a non-horsey person writing about horses or farm animals the moment they start describing them. I don’t want other people who read my stories to say I don’t know something. I may not know everything about what I’m writing, but there is a basis in real-life to give it credibility.
