"I'm just going to write because I can't help it."- Charlotte Brontë


Sunday, December 4, 2011

Sci Fi Santa and some cyclists

So I kicked off the Christmas season yesterday with Aardman's latest movie Arthur Christmas. It was a lot funnier than I thought it would be. I laughed til I cried and discovered The True Meaning of Xmas. It's certainly jam packed with sci fi jokes, and I'll have to watch it again to catch the scattershot of countless yuletide jokes fired off by the elves.

Today I watched the tired but elated cyclists finishing the last stretch of the Great Victoria Bike Ride, which ended in our town, and made promises to myself about participating in it next year, maybe, but definitely the year after. Definitely!

In between, inspired by this upcoming anthology, I've been working on a sci fi pony story. As the site quite rightly states:

“A pony is better than a unicorn because he doesn’t know how cute he is! Unicorns are all glitter and sass. Very pompous.” and “I think we have room for at least 500 more pony stories in the f&sf genre.”

The inspiration behind the anthology is Kij Johnson’s Nebula winning short story “Ponies”, a very disturbing piece of writing. Her involvement is also what makes me want to be a part of this most noble project to bring more pony stories to the sf & f reading public. I was thinking of pulling out the first draft of the evil miniature horse story I wrote a while back and changing him to a pony, but it didn't feel right. Miniature horses are not ponies. Besides, an actual SF pony story popped into my head on Tuesday, and I've been working on it each morning on the train on the way to the Arvo Job. Today I changed quite a few things and almost finished it. I know how it ends, so I'm pretty confident it'll be done and polished by the deadline even with all the stuff coming up over the next few weeks.

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