Creative writing is back

My term time creative writing course started back up again, and that is always a good prompt for a blog post! It gives me something to write about anyway.

The first session of the term was an introduction session, and catching up with old friends. It's a small course, so we gather around one conference table. Coincidentally, it ended up that all the returning students were on one side of the table, and the new people were on the other, jokingly making it feel like an interview process.

We had a short discussion on what it was that we wanted to achieve this term, and there was a suggestion that some of us would quite like to do different genres, and longer pieces. When one is limited to a maximum page length of 1 or 2, for the practicality of everyone getting to read their stuff, it does tend to force the same styles.

When asking what genres people might like to do, romance was mentioned, as was murder mystery, as was sci-fi. I joked at these suggestions that we could do a sci-fi murder mystery...

At the end of the class, we were given our themes and titles to pick from, and I pretty instantly knew I'd be doing a challenge of "write about something blue". I didn't have any immediate inspiration for this, but on the short walk home it dawned on me that perhaps I should eat my own dog food and do a sci-fi murder mystery.

But how to work in something blue? My first inspiration was from a sci-fi book I'm reading at the moment, The Emperor's Gift byAaron Dembski-Bowen. I am an old Warhammer 40k fan, and the last 15 years has seen a lot of people that grew up on the early mythos grow into seriously good authors, so there is a lot of good sci-fi around it. Aaron is one of the best authors in the domain at the moment in my opinion. He seems to specialise in taking the historically more one-dimensional and unsubtle aspects of the setting and finding pathos and tragedy in them.

Either way, the setting is heavy gothic sci-fi, so a lot of the characters walk around in basilica spaceships wearing ornate and heavy robes. For example, the tech-priests of the setting wear heavy hooded robes that obscure much of their mechanical bodies.

I pretty quickly came on the idea of a murder being investigated that features a robe like this on the victim, and how that would come to be. Whatever the murder victim is, I found the narrative flowed pretty easy after this. There was a slight issue when I realized that a full colour robe would make the twist at the end very difficult, but this is still a work in progress.

I of course can see where I've ripped off other ideas. There's some of Blade Runner, some of the Expanse, the Jawas from Star Wars, and one line that is totally inspired by Brave New World.

The story is attached. Let me know what you think!

Something blue.pdf

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