Done! Done! Done! As of 11:08 p.m. November 27. Early! Woo Hoo!
A blog I read reminded me it is November and therefore National Novel Writing Month. I'm late starting but, as he says, hope springs eternal. I've got an initial goal of 3000/day to try to catch up and get something like a real novel by the end of the month. Ha!
This novel, another other writing, is now available from Fiction.
Back in the bad old days, when I felt trapped within my birth family and their religion, I had a long-running fantasy about being taken away from it all, not by Calgon or some other bubble bath, but by a hot guy in a spaceship. There might have been some telepathy involved.
Dumb, I know, and a completely predictable artifact of some attachment problems. I'm much better now, and have since read someone else's version of same, actually several. Dara Joy did a few (with some hilariously funny on-Earth intros, but unfortunately, also involving a lot of stuff with cats that just doesn't do it for me). And C.J. Barry did a particularly silly version in _Unearthed_, which got me thinking about other ways to rework that fantasy, ways which were probably influenced heavily by having repeatedly read _Restoree_ in my formative years. Also, now that I think about it, _Have Spacesuit Will Travel_.
The basic idea has a couple of problems. First, pretty evil to just kidnap someone from their planet of origin! Not a good basis for any kind of trusting relationship between peers. Second, what's the motivation for grabbing the heroine? Joy and Barry postulate special, innate characteristics in their heroines: either the one-and-only-soulmate and/or special innate skill (singing). I decided to dodge both of those problems by making it a two-step process to get Leia off-earth: first, her kidnapping is by bad guys, and second, it's basically random. They don't care who they get, they just want a specimen for a zoo.
Leia is then rescued by the good guys, including Our Hot Hero. Slight problem: why don't they just send her back home? Lots of possibilities here, and I'm going to use several of them.
I don't have a plot, just trying to work through the implications of this poor pawn named Leia, REALLY freaking lost, with some amazing opportunities and a serious language problem in which she has to not only learn the words, the grammar, etc. She also has to learn an entirely new way of thinking about medicine, technology, mathematics, history, economics, blah, blah, blah. All of the frameworks are different -- not just different names for the same thing. Lots of on-Earth analogues, so it's a reasonable story to tell.
Oh, and a hot guy, reciprocating her interest. Which one would assume would help, right?
Copyright 2007 Rebecca Allen Updated: February 23, 2009