Image from the Urban Dragon Hunters blog, about looking for dragonfliesOne Sunday last month I brought my laptop to church. I feel a little weird carrying the tech into the church world, but I don't have anything to do while the kids are in Sunday school, and I wanted to get a little writing done.
I planted myself in the church office and got started. One of the older ladies who helps out in the office asked me what I was working on.
Since I'm using the Snowflake method, I actually had a ready capsule description of the story I was working on, called Dragon Hunter. But it's one of those things that sounds kind of hilarious when you say it out loud.
I wasn't able to be quite this succinct on the spur of the moment, but it goes something like this: "In a world where humans are ruled by dragons who forbid the use of guns, an agent of the dragons infiltrates a group of gun runners."
To her credit, she try to back away slowly or back down from her encouraging attitude. Let's face it, all of my stories are going to sound ridiculous when reduced to twenty words.
It still feels odd to talk about this sort of thing, even with movies like The Lord of the Rings hitting the mainstream. Maybe I just need to get over some residual outsider feelings about this stuff. This lady didn't make me feel weird: I made me feel weird.
But not too much. I'm still pretty psyched about my dragon story.
Neat picture.
ReplyDeleteI know where you are coming from as far as trying to tell other people about writing fantasy or science fiction stories. No matter how sharp the synopsis, it just doesn't mean much to someone who doesn't understand the genres or the shorthand for what some of the words mean.
It's nice when people are polite enough to ask about what I'm writing, but I haven't come up with a very comfortable way to reply, other than being rather evasive.
Of couse, for me, part of this discomfort comes from my own self-directed irritation at not having finished nearly enough stories.