Day 11 - Speculative Fiction Notes

OK today James Bradley author of Clade and others hosted a course on Speculative Fiction at Writing NSW today.  Excellent course.  Below are notes and exercises we went rhoguh on the day - please note I used Day 1 - Babelism as the base for this course.

Story a day - Speculative futures course.

Types: Utopia, Dystopia, post-apocalypse, slow apocalypse. (Listed a heap of books here in my notebook.)

Following are some exercises that will form/aide in the build out of the preceding story, or help inform others.

Day 10 - The car exhaled

  He turned the key, pulled on the hand brake, the engine stopped. Silence. Howard sat looking out the windscreen. The bushland shrouded in a fog; a cloud so thick it was impenetrable as it reflected the morning sun.
     Opening the car door the crisp cold of a winters morning hit him full force, overpowering the warmth that had built up on the drive from home.

Day 9 - Murray-Darling

‘Fuck that mate, I am not going down there. Over.’

Jack stood atop the pumping station. Pump seven had been screaming when he came across it.  He’d had stopped all the pumps, once he had seen what was causing the issue with pump seven.

Day 8 - Chapter 4 - Rogue

Dwarvelf Continued - previous Chapters

Chapter 1 - Shattered

Chapter 2 – What Now?

Chapter 3 – Durog’s farm

-----

Hector sprinted across the field. Had he stayed at the window too long? His tattered black cloak billowing behind him, he dove behind a boulder on the edge of the Forest, not far from the path that he had seen the Dwarves come down.

Gasping, lungs burning, heart thumping so loudly he was sure the Dwarf standing on the verandah would hear him.  Laying as still as he could, everything he wore, his soft leather boots, black woollen breeches and shirt moulding to his body; blending into the ground extending the shape of the boulder he lay behind.

As his breathing eased and heart rate reduced his sense of hearing slowly recovered. It was quiet; the moon had passed its zenith while he had been listening at the window. He knew though this was not the only reason that it was so quiet. It was the dwarves arrival and his flight across the valley floor that had caused all of the creatures of the night to stop and pause; waiting to see what would happen next.

Day 7 - Introductions

A friend and colleague today asked me, where do I get my ideas from. Then promptly got crook and raced off to the doctors. So I thought I would give them something to read by pointing out the backstories on the characters from the banner.