> 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/