Becka's Notes

Part Five is up!

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Same drill as always.


If you wish, leave a one or two word prompt or a single line of dialogue and I will try and use it. This prompt post will be open until midnight GMT Sunday/Monday.

Part Three is up!

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Same drill as always.


If you wish, leave a one or two word prompt or a single line of dialogue and I will try and use it. This prompt post will be open until midnight GMT Sunday/Monday.

Part One is now up.

I've decided not to use the bingo card for this story this month so same drill as last week.

If you wish, leave a one or two word prompt or a single line of dialogue and I will try and use it. This prompt post will be open until midnight GMT Sunday/Monday.

(Shamelessly cribbing this way of doing things from inventrix )

So I've decided I want to write another web serial (I must be mad) and I want your help:

Before we get started, some information and instructions:

• I want to do a Space Opera with giant spacefaring bioengineered creatures called 'fish' as vessels . (Though the protag has a more normal vessel either due to relative poverty or ethical problems with 'fish'). This is also the universe that has my sulphuric acid aliens in it - so you may want to check out that tag though some time after the first contact in the ficlets in the tag.  (Note while the sulphies bio-engineer their vessels the 'fish' are made by a different group of aliens) Why do I want to do this? Because...


• Examples of the genre: Skylark of Space, Lexx, Farscape etc.


• By "story premise", I do not mean a plot summary. I am not looking for plot twists or plot details, but rather pieces of a general idea of the starting point.


• Example of a story premise: "[Main Character] is approached in a bar full of aliens to ship a cargo to a distant lanet but on route she realises it may not be entirely legit." (This one is really general and rather cliche, but you get the idea.)
• Each week I will put up a prompt post where readers can suggest prompts. More on that in the first prompt post. I plan to put up the first prompt post on Wednesday 8th January. This post will remain active until then.
• If all goes well the first installment will go up on Wednesday 15th January along with the second prompt post.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, here's what we're going to do!

As a comment to this post, give ONE suggested point for the premise. An attack in hyperspace, a mysterious stranger, dubious cargo, a bar full of aliens, that sort of thing. In addition, include
ONE suggestion for a serial title (or a part of the title, or structure of the title)
and ONE character-background detail for the main character (number of siblings, religion, educational level, unfortunate incident involving a dog and a hair dryer, etc. etc. etc.).

Thanks in advance for your help.

I want to learn to write to prompts. I've never been very good at it but quite a few of my online friends have a good time doing it so I thought I'd give it a go. anke pointed me in the direction of origfic_bingo and this is the first prompt I've written to from the card I received. It's not very good. It's very first draft. I tell like anything. But hey I actually wrote something to a prompt, this is progress. I enjoyed writing it as well.

Title: First Contact
Genre: SF
Prompt: Diplomacy (I hope the word doesn't actually have to be mentioned).
Rating: G
Wordcount: 363 words

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When the strange ships first appeared in orbit it didn't so much cause panic as unease.

It might have helped if they'd done something other than sit there apparently doing nothing. Both aggression and overtures of peace were things that humans could understand. The lack of either just made people wonder what they were doing.

On the TV the talking heads spoke of invasions and how such a large fleet could only be there for the purpose of colonisation. A few even suggested that the aliens were really demons. One armchair pundit posted a video on Youtube suggesting they were trying to psyche humans into destroying themselves to save them the effort.
When the riots broke after the video went viral out one wag noted that if that was the case perhaps said pundit was being paid by them.

Then someone with too much power for their frayed nerves got twitchy. America claimed it must have been a Chinese satellite that fired the missile since they had no armed satellites, China claimed the opposite. The rest of the world agreed that whoever had given the order was stupid. The aliens clearly had the range of Earth's weapons and were sat just outside it.

Fortunately, the aliens didn't respond, they didn't even shoot the satellite down. The world gave a sigh of relief but continued to watch the sky distrustfully.

Months passed, the ships remained there, and still nothing happened publicly but it became obvious that something was happening behind the scenes. Scientists from NASA, ESA, Roskosmos, CNSA and various other space agencies met with world leaders in a summit at the UN.

"The aliens have been trying to talk to us since they first entered orbit," a nervous looking scientist explained to the press once the discussions were complete. "But they've been doing it carefully, making sure only those they wanted to heard them and we couldn't understand them anyway. It's taken this long to learn to speak to each other enough to understand what they want."

What she said next wasn't just close to the top of the list of things people didn't expect to hear, it was so unexpected that no one had even suggested it.

"It seems they really are colonists but they aren't interested in Earth. They want Venus but consider it ours, so they are offering to pay for it."


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