Lately I've begun work again on a story I've been fiddling with since highschool. During school was my most productive time for writing. Living at home with the fairly conservative parents I had, the type who ration the amount of TV we had, didn't allow consoles or internet (until I left home strangely) or allowed much social contact, provided me with lots of distraction free time in which to cogitate. I wrote two 210 page science fiction stories (which were utter shit however) and wrote possibly a third to half of the one that I'm still hacking away at today. I stopped, because reached a point where the characters had stopped driving the plot (or were driving it into dullsville), and then I began uni and all my writing was for academia rather than fun.

Doing the English course at JCU gave me different ideas regarding the kind of characters and plot I wanted. But I think its made me think too much about it. In my original, original idea the main characters were humans who stumbled into a alien war, now I'm attempting to make the primary characters from an alien race that attempts in someways to be divorced from the humanoid, human featured beings that usually populate sci fi.

Its bloody hard though. How would people really identify with something that is radically different to their physiology? Am I a good enough writer to describe something so different, or even imagine something decent up. So far I haven't been able to escape the bipedal, arms, legs and head form for my primary characters. Its easier making up weird creatures with secondaries, because you don't have to describe how they feel and move and experience so much.

Last night I started writing out an actual chapter rather than the endless profiling I usually do. My creative writing lecturer said we each have two writer's within; Writer A who just slaps ideas on the page as they come out, and Writer B, the editor, that gets hung up on "is that really the right word for this sentence?" and, " Before I can begin any meaningful dialogue between the characters I really should detail their religious history so I know where they're coming from. " Writer B is great and all, but I just want to get some words out and on a page before I start analysing the beejesus out of it .