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here because i figured it'd eat the comment. >.>
what she said: I've wondered what prompted you to write, how you came to adopt imagery that avoids stereotypic/iconic sf & f tropes, and how you came to work out the interrelations and family structures you've built for your stories.
To which I can reply flippantly that I was always the story-teller/worldbuilder for the games, among my groups of friends growing up, and that I grew up reading authors like Anthony, Azimov, Niven & Pournelle, Heinlein, McCaffrey, Bradley and James Schmitz.
But that doesn't really explain it, I suppose. That set-up, by rights, should make me most comfortable among the archetypes developed by the forerunners of the genre, and I'm rather obviously not.
I can add that I grew up under a very large metaphorical Cultural Rock (my musical influences until I hit fifteen or so and started attending a local open mike show were comprised almost entirely of artists like Meg Davis and genres that the local Oldies station played, to give one example. I didn't hit public schooling until community college, so my exposure to pop culture was a bit . . . lacking. I'm only barely joking when I say that I first encountered Bugs Bunny when I was seventeen.) And that my parents didn't bother raising me in a religion of any real sort--and within that my mother's expectation of absolute equality with her male coworkers or acquaintences. Both parents always encouraged me to think--about what I was reading, about what I was seeing in the group dynamics around me, whatever.*
My opinions on the culture I'm living in, and the definite traces of Grecophilia and Christianity on that culture, are formed largely on my observation, instead of through interaction. I'm certainly not an unbiased observer, and I also certainly have my own blind spots, but I'd like to think they don't entirely line up.
In one sense, I've always been building my own frame of reference, and that affects my writing and worldbuilding significantly. It also tickles my fancy to reinterpret archetypes--I like not quite fitting expectations, personally or authorally.
:* It is possible that a direct line could be drawn from this tendency to think with my dissatisfaction with the vast majority of modern fiction, pretty much across the whole spectrum of genres. Also my own determination to figure out how a family group would change and evolve over the course of a very long time, or how mythology would shift in response to cultural stimuli--how cultures blur at the edges and become something new. The idea of a static culture makes me yank on my hair a bit--look at history. Things have shifted how much over the course of the last hundred years, let alone the last thousand?
what she said: I've wondered what prompted you to write, how you came to adopt imagery that avoids stereotypic/iconic sf & f tropes, and how you came to work out the interrelations and family structures you've built for your stories.
To which I can reply flippantly that I was always the story-teller/worldbuilder for the games, among my groups of friends growing up, and that I grew up reading authors like Anthony, Azimov, Niven & Pournelle, Heinlein, McCaffrey, Bradley and James Schmitz.
But that doesn't really explain it, I suppose. That set-up, by rights, should make me most comfortable among the archetypes developed by the forerunners of the genre, and I'm rather obviously not.
I can add that I grew up under a very large metaphorical Cultural Rock (my musical influences until I hit fifteen or so and started attending a local open mike show were comprised almost entirely of artists like Meg Davis and genres that the local Oldies station played, to give one example. I didn't hit public schooling until community college, so my exposure to pop culture was a bit . . . lacking. I'm only barely joking when I say that I first encountered Bugs Bunny when I was seventeen.) And that my parents didn't bother raising me in a religion of any real sort--and within that my mother's expectation of absolute equality with her male coworkers or acquaintences. Both parents always encouraged me to think--about what I was reading, about what I was seeing in the group dynamics around me, whatever.*
My opinions on the culture I'm living in, and the definite traces of Grecophilia and Christianity on that culture, are formed largely on my observation, instead of through interaction. I'm certainly not an unbiased observer, and I also certainly have my own blind spots, but I'd like to think they don't entirely line up.
In one sense, I've always been building my own frame of reference, and that affects my writing and worldbuilding significantly. It also tickles my fancy to reinterpret archetypes--I like not quite fitting expectations, personally or authorally.
:* It is possible that a direct line could be drawn from this tendency to think with my dissatisfaction with the vast majority of modern fiction, pretty much across the whole spectrum of genres. Also my own determination to figure out how a family group would change and evolve over the course of a very long time, or how mythology would shift in response to cultural stimuli--how cultures blur at the edges and become something new. The idea of a static culture makes me yank on my hair a bit--look at history. Things have shifted how much over the course of the last hundred years, let alone the last thousand?
