On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 03:17:27PM -0600, Richard Lawson wrote:
I started to write it in a modern-day setting, some random college student
being yoinked from Earth, but it ended up sounding way too much like a
self-insert, which I didn't want at all.
I wonder if that's a side effect of the type of character you chose,
though, rather than your setting. You may want to try some other kind
of character -- preferably someone that you wouldn't expect to be the
hero of this kind of story. Would it be the same story if your main
character were a hippie? A street bum? A young child, perhaps even an
infant? (after all, the powers that be consider human life to be
excessively short -- might want to get them as early as possible) What
about a Yamato Nadeshiko-ish young woman? How about someone older than
you might expect?
Try as I might, none of those appeal to me. And the setting is important;
wherever the human comes from, be it Earth or some equivalent, he'll keep
coming back to it at key moments in the plot. So I need that world to be
fully developed.
Is there anything in this 'home front' subplot that might suggest a
setting?