CHAT: seriously OT CHAT: makin' it seem old (was: Re: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

From: "Nik Taylor" <fortytwo@...>
> Christian Thalmann wrote:
> > Yeah, it's the same with creationists...  they're wrong, but how are
> > you going to prove it to them?  ;-)
>
> No, they're right, God just has a sense of humor, and thinks it's funny
> to make the world *seem* to be several billion years old.  ;-)
Well, it doesn't even require a sense of humor :p

Like, I wrote a story once.  A factory worker breaks his leg in a machine
accident, and while waiting in line for his disability check meets the woman
of
his dreams.
So I describe the woman a bit, I say she's named Nicole after one of her more
eccentric grandfathers, she's wearing a blue dress and she's a little older
than
Jack, the guy with the broken leg.

It all seems pretty straightforward, but then you've got a dilemma of the
creation vs. the truth going on.   We've got two sets of truths!

    *There*, Nicole's named after a grandparent.
    *Here*, Nicole got my sister's middle name just cause I felt like it.

    *There*, Nicole's 37, three years older than Jack's 34.
    *Here*, they were only created about five minutes ago, when I started
      writing this story; Jack came first, not the other way around.

    *There*, Jack's factory was built by workers, over an old farmhouse built
       on an Indian burial ground, on a plain that used to be a lake before
       humans ever found it, that used to be a mountain way back when
dinosaurs
       went over and around it, and that was a plain before, back when those
       dinosaurs were just a twinkle in some monocellular organism's
       pseudopods.

    *Here*, of course, I just said Jack was a factory worker, and all that
       stuff fell into place because things don't happen out of nowhere.

of course if I wanted to do it right, I could have sat down and did some
serious worldbuilding/conculturing.. spend a day working on the world's
physics
in general, another on climate, a day on geography, and one on astronomy... a
couple days on creatures to inhabit the world.  (had a few different ideas for
life-forms... started with just one basic kind and seeing what kind of
"mutations" i can do to them, been going through a whole bunch of
brainstorming
and got a lot of good variants and sub-races going on.. hehe, look at that,
you
can line the first draft second drafts third drafts up and you can see the
specializing going on, and how this idea comes from that idea, and this from
that...

finally got a decent enough sentient life-form... now we can sit down, build a
model of our main character to give us a good idea what he looks like,  (how
does he act?  what are his needs?  maybe he's lonely...)  and start writing
from there.

and then we'll just throw in the whole putting-stuff-together process in as a
kind of prologue at the beginning, just so folks can see where it's all coming
from.

Or not.
(Has anyone read Pratchett's "The Last Continent" ?)

    *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/

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