Ah, but this has been a tougher month than anticipated, writing-wise. It’s been a good month otherwise, but I have been distracted, and procrastinating, and avoiding, and…
For some reason, I’ve found it hard to get started with this scene. I’ve crash-landed my characters on an alien world, and then… well, what now? Inspiration seemed to be lacking, so I did what any writer would do: anything else but write the scene. I played with Twitter (the bane of productivity!), I wrote 5000 words of advice for my daughter (which she’ll probably never read), I worked, I took a sailing vacation with said daughter…
And, of course, as always happens, when I finally sat down to write it, after a couple hours of staring out the window, once I started to write the words flowed easily. This is pretty common for me, and I hear it’s common for many others, too. I just need to get off my butt and spend more time in front of a screen.
Wait, that’s self-contradictory, isn’t it? If I’m spending more time in front of a screen, it’s probably while sitting on my butt. Hmm, a conundrum.
I’m distracting myself again, without getting to the point. The point, dear reader, is that the much-deferred and delayed scene is finally here. And what’s the first thing that a crew who find themselves marooned on an alien planet, teeming with vegetable life, need to do? Why, they need to run a toxicology report, of course. They need to find out if they can eat said vegetable life without dying horribly.
Good thing Laxmi’s along on this expedition, as she’s a top-notch exobiologist as well as ship’s doctor, and she knows just what to do. And, so will you, once you ride along on her shoulder:
header image credit: user:CHUCKage/flickr.com under cc by-nc 2.0
Matt Fraser 