It has been a fortnight since I blogged! Oh, dear. I am going to skip the endless apologizing I always do, and go back to blogging (hopefully) as if it never happened…
Reading This Week: No fiction. Lots of miscellaneous research.
Writing This Week: My dystopian novel, Daik 11, is on rapid boil! Two weeks ago I mused during my ramblings that abortion had been on my mind, and I’d always wanted to write a pro-life themed story – not one that directly dealt with abortion, necessarily, but one that at least dealt with the topic of the value of human life, no matter how flawed or “useless” or unhappy that life might seem. Then God dropped an idea in my lap. I realized that the series I plan for Daik 11 had the potential for a book like this. In fact, it was ripe potential. It was right there, staring me in the face! The other day I read this post by John Otte, which encouraged me not to feel guilty about leaving my trilogy for awhile. So I headed over into Daik 11 territory, and have been merrily planning and writing ever since. Hurray for progress!
Deep and Important Thoughts Pondered This Week: Obama and his contraceptive mandate, liberal media, and feminism. Don’t even get me started! This thing is on my mind constantly, because it annoys me to no end!
Tasty Food Eaten This Week: chocolate cheesecake for Valentine’s Day!
Quote This Week:
I am tired of hearing birth control coverage/availability referred to as a “women’s health issue”. It’s NOT. Birth control is NOT “preventative health care”. It is for preventing *pregnancy*, which is NOT a disease. Being with child is (almost always) a safe, healthy, and NORMAL state for a woman.
A baby in your womb is not a disease. Preventing one (or killing one, via abortion or abortive “contraceptives”) is NOT “health care”.
— Me, on Facebook recently
Oops. I got started anyway. Sorry. I would blog about it, because I have more than enough ranting material, but I don’t want to make my writing blog also a political blog. I am not a big politics person, normally, but when social things like this come up, I get really invested (obviously).
Oh, who am I kidding? I probably won’t be able to resist writing the occasional political rant. Plus, these kinds of topics involve speculation about the future of the world (very important to science-fiction writers), the meaning of life, and feminism vs. femininity (important to any writer who writes female characters).
Links That Stirred My Mental Pot This Week:
Al Mohler: “What Compromise? This Policy Leaves Religious Freedom in Peril and Planned Parenthood Smiling”. As I was saying.
Nathan Bransford: “Game of Thrones and the Art of Being Unsentimental About Your Characters”. This week I really needed to hear this, although what I took away was slightly different from the eventual topic of the article. (I need to heed the suggestions about uglifying characters too, though.) In order for my pro-life book idea to work, some truly terrible things have to happen to one of my main characters, and I needed the validation of this article to give me the guts to let them happen.
Rants are good. 🙂 And I agree, by the way.
I’d love to hear what you’ve changed/added to Daik 11! How did you tie abortion-like ideas to it? (If you’d rather not say, at least not now, I won’t mind at all. 🙂 )
It can be very hard to do bad things to characters. I’ve struggled with that before. I always end up doing them, but… It’s worse when the characters really nice about it, if that makes sense. 🙂
I didn’t change anything in “Daik 11” itself, but I added another book to the series. The background of the entire series is the idea that – sometime in the far distant future – the government raises all children; even from before birth, they are grown in artificial wombs (taken from their mothers halfway through the pregnancy). So the government has all control over whether each child lives or dies. You can see the potential for anti-abortion messages there! I’d rather not go into details of things that happen in the later books, though. 🙂
Is it the same characters? Or is that too much detail? 🙂
Yes, but some of the characters are more heavily involved than others. 🙂
I hope it’s published! It sounds like something that I would really enjoy reading! 🙂