Every year or so I get a wild hair thinking I want to do a writer's workshop. I tend to write a lot, most of it over on
UCIP, which may not be the best place for an aspiring writer to play, but it sure does let me flex the collaborative fiction muscles. Just about all of what I do at UCIP is character development. Gobs and gobs of character development. Most of it ends up being romantic clap-trap, psychological and philosophical musings.
All of the writing though, when I really get in the grove, like I have been in the past few weeks, gets me in the mood to share my secrets with the masses. To be honest, the people that I do write with are really good. I always want to work on tense, POV, that sort of thing that can be difficult in collaborative fiction, especially for younger writers.
So many people at UCIP get hung up on character, and having their characters be perfect that it sometimes frustrates me. I'd like to take these kids out of their second skin that they've developed over years and put them some place where they can work on writing, without the attachments of character.
At the base UCIP is about 'simming' which for quite a few of it's members means logging on to an IRC server and playing out roles real time. That really never has held my interest. People doing IRC simming are in it for the action and interaction. They're extraverts really, showing the world who they are, or who they'd like to be. I'm an introvert by nature (stop gasping, Blogging is a solitary experience, even if you read this (hi mom)) so my tastes run to complex characters with strong internal monologues. Sometimes the internal monologue is so strong that it becomes a character of it's own. That doesn't really transfer well to real-time IRC simming though. People start to wonder about you when you hold whole conversations with yourself.
The other type of simming though, Play by email simming, is more up my ally. It's basically writing, collaborative fiction. The idea is to establish character, then hold on as the leader of the sim steers the major action plot points of the story, all while the characters interact with the action and establish their own emotional plots. That's the goal. I've not seen it carried off very often. More often we cruise around on this big Starship with a vague goal, while 'As the Starship Turns' plays on in the background. I don't suppose this is a bad thing really, but sometimes, I just want people to have the tools to see things like action plot points, the possibilities that character faults bring, something to bring a spark of action to the group.
Not that I really know what those tools are. So I settle back and wish people could divorce themselves from their regularly scheduled program and have a little fun with writing, trying different tenses, different POV's, trying a different style of writing from what they're used to. Maybe I just miss sitting in english class.
I also picked up a copy of Hawking's 'The Universe in a Nutshell'. While it's nice to see Hawking explain strings and branes it comes off as a little light compared to Greene's 'The Fabric of the Cosmos'. Hawking's book reads more like a high school text book, where Greene seems more collegiate. A good reference, pretty pictures, but with less meat than I'd like.
Sunspot 652 departs over the solar limb in the next few days. Good bye to M and a few X-Class solar flares. Guess I've got to find a different 
Note to self: NEVER EVER de-fragment a Raid Group on an 