We had a rough start, not going to lie. I went through four different plots before I landed on the one that became this book. The notes above document that beginning stages of one of those plots. They were all variations of the same focus, so ultimately it like an evolution of an idea. I tried different methods to inspire creativity. As the above entry notes, I tried to follow in the footsteps of many other successful science fiction writers and to write/figure out my plot while high. I love reading while high, however, quickly discovered that marijuana is my enemy when it comes to writing. Personally, would not recommend.
That little substance experiment did lead to the best writing strategy of all time though. I discovered "porch thinking", and I'm never going back. I spent about two weeks worth of nights sitting on my porch, staring at nothing, and thinking about aliens, humans, and what bothered me about the relationship between sex and gender. In those two weeks, I not only invented my plot but started to build a world, a species, and wrote the prologue for my novel.
I should have taken notes to document my train of thought, but sometimes writing interrupts the stream. I spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in the dark while mumbling to myself, and it would've taken twice as long if I'd written while I did it. My neighbors have to think I'm a little odd, and I know my roommates do.
The biggest focus of my "porch thinking" session, oddly, wasn't deciding what gender/sex issues I wanted to tackle or how I would capture the history of gender in a fictional alien society. That was actually the easiest part (wild, I know). The biggest issue was figuring out how reproduction would work. If the species that I chose to write about (or "human" colony - a genderless generation ship was one of the four plots I churned through) was sexless, than how did they keep going? Where did new species members come from? What happened if someone died? What kept the population increasing/staying stable? I could not make it make sense, and the rules of my world were reliant on this.
Enter the "replication" process. Eleventh grade Abigail would hate me for saying this considering we seriously struggled on the cell replication section in high school biology, but god bless mitosis. Not only did this solve my population problem, it also provided a way to have the same "character" exist over thousands of years. I did NOT want to have immortal characters, but I did want the reader to connect with a main personality while we observe the development of a society over a couple millennium. Replication is the glue to this book, and as soon as I found it I started sticking everything together.
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