Traveling cities in spaaacceeee.....

This is what I'm working on today. Describing what my traveling space cities look like. It's so exciting to write things like this. I am going to link to my old friend's (she's not old, it's just that we knew each other a long time ago, that wasn't THAT long ago) when we both wrote stories for an online video game and loved it. She is a romantic at heart, I liked war and plagues. Our stories complemented each other nicely.... She is writing again, and I love it. She is mostly writing on her blog, which I am enjoying. Here is her blog.

The thing is, she is writing for the pleasure of writing right now, and that always is the best sort of writing. Writing is fun. If it's not fun, stop and go do something else. Far more writers work full time jobs and raise families while writing, than stop and write full time as a living. So it has to be enjoyable.

Which brings me away from my romantic friend from not-so-long-ago-really and traveling cities in spaaaceee...

Drama Girl has nothing to do with traveling space cities, but I may use
this picture as an inspiration to some of my characters. Also, people like
pictures in blogs. People like pictures more than words. This kinda makes me
sad, but alas, blogs must have pictures, not just words, so here.

But I have to tell you about my other writer friend, on the West Coast, who also wrote stories with us. She likes apocalypses. I'm going to try to find a link for her. It's kinda her thing for now, and she enjoys writing YA. She actually makes some money off her writing, which is fun to watch and chat about, and, in my case, drill her every now and again when I'm looking for information. She enjoys making book covers, throwing out her ideas, and creating spunky heroines. Spunky is a word my mother would have used, but it fits her characters. Unlike me, she will stay up for hours to finish a chapter. I write in allotted time frames I carve out prior to 9:30 p.m. because I can't physically stay awake after 10 p.m. and barely can think past 9:45 p.m. She's contemplating a new, non-apocalyptic story that I'm half excited about. I'm sure if she chooses to do it, there may be an apocalypse involved. Some loves are hard to let go of. This is her author page. You'll notice on her bio she spends a lot of time discussing how to correctly pronounce her name. It's the natural born teacher in her. Also, her name, easily spelled, is difficult to pronounce correctly for some people.... Sometimes, I think it just makes her a little sad, and lose a little hope in humanity that such an easy name can be so difficult for some to say properly.

Which is why my traveling cities in spaaaaaaaccceeee exist. Because some loves are hard to let go of, not because of any difficulty in pronouncing my friend's name properly.

I'm not writing a comedy, I just can't help drawing out... in...sppaaaaaccceeeee....

I'd like to write a funny book one day. But this isn't that book.

My mother also wrote.  She wrote for the love of the story and lost herself in her created worlds. She wrote fairy tales that haven't ever been written before that all featured young, plucky, spunky heroines. Maybe not plucky. If she had taken some of these stories and wrote them now, they would be published. YA fairy tales with spunky heroines are in now. She liked ghost stories, beach settings and haunted homes and coves. She was a night owl. And an astrologer.

Today I'm giving form and function and character and description to my traveling space cities. I see them in my mind's eye, and now need to translate them. It's exciting. It's part of the world building I love to do. It's the same excitement and fascination and joy visible in my mother when she was creating her haunted islands or mermaid coves or deserted beaches. The same as when my friends write the stories and characters that come to their minds.

I can see them, the traveling cities, inhabited with thousands of people and thousands of stories. Their lives and pasts and shared history are essential to the world I am building for them, but I will only tell the tale of my protagonist and those closest to her. Imagine that! As writers, we can create entire worlds in our minds, establish civilizations and races and breathe life into them, just so we can tell the tale of one character in the whole span of that created universe, one character with ancestors and talents and traits and friends.

I have another friend, she's on the East Coast, and she writes, as well. I've lost track of her writing, but I know she was morphing into fantasy from another, er, genre. She has been published under a pseudonym, and I am going to go find her and ask if she's still writing, and if not, assault her with shocked emoticons. I don't have a blog link for her because she became too busy for one. She worked with us, too, but not writing stories. She had to write press releases and release notes and 'calm down the world's not ending' forum posts. So, yes, she wrote fiction, too.

She's not writing about traveling cities in spaaaaacceeee, that's all me.
Can't help it.

And then there is my OTHER friend, who is remembered by my daughter for the ferrets she had as pets who has written this wonderfully full fantasy tale that I read and re-read and now, now I must assault her with emoticons, and see if it's ready to be sent out. She was part of creating the world we all wrote stories in. A lot of detail went into that world, and it's creatures were linked by the environment they became a part of.

Emoticons are the newest way to convey feelings and thoughts.

I do not think it is an accident that so many of my friends are writers, as yet unknown to the world, sitting in their apartments/homes/offices/coffeeshops/whatever writing, writing, writing... just because... One day, some of us will be known. Some of us won't. My mother was never known, but it did not make her any less a writer. This sort of writing isn't something done solely for pay.

You notice I'm not saying where we all worked? It's not because I'm not proud of it. It was one of the best jobs I ever had, and some of the best friends I know I met through that job. No, I'm not saying it because it's not about that world or that place. It's about writing, and my writer friends, and their works, and why we are all writing.

Why are we writing?

When there are people dancing around your head with fascinating tales to tell of strange and exotic times and lands or even of our own land, and these people have fascinating histories and opinions and goals and purpose, how could you not put it down?

And how, being someone who can do this, could you not find others of the like mind, because, really the only people who can truly understand the mind of a writer are other writers.

Now, I leave my writer friends to their universes and trials and characters, and tend to my traveling cities..... in spaaaaaacceeeee.