User blog:JWSchmidt/Looking back at a decade

[[Video:Embryo Culture|thumb|300px|right|"The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie"]]Back in the 1970s I discovered science fiction...and color television. One night I had a dream about a science fiction novel I would someday write. Strangely, the cover of the "book" was like a color television, with a moving image that showed a beautiful planet in shades of blue, green and white, but it was not Earth. Back then, I had no idea how a book could have a video on its cover, but now that is the kind of thing we can do here at this wiki website.

Exodemic. Back in 2002 I started writing a science fiction story called Exodemic. That story was where I first seriously explored what I call the Exodemic Fictional Universe. The Exodemic Fictional Universe is really an attempt to provide an answer to the Fermi paradox. It seems strange that we humans find ourselves alone here on Earth, with no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life. People like Carl Sagan have suggested solutions to this apparent paradox, and the Exodemic Fictional Universe builds upon that kind of speculation. It is fun to assume that human-like alien species have been "out there" for hundreds of millions of years. If so, maybe they have already visited Earth.

Fly Paper. In 2005, when I discovered this wiki website, I had recently started watching The X-Files, which includes the idea that aliens first visited Earth long ago. I started writing a fan fiction story that moved X-Files characters into the Exodemic Fictional Universe. I think it is absurd to imagine that human-like space aliens would travel across interstellar distances to reach Earth and then ineptly spend thousands of years bumbling around trying, and failing, to take over the planet. In Fly Paper, I suggest that there could be aliens who calmly watch humanity, which seems more likely to me than some Hollywood invasion scenario. Of course, it does seem unlikely that anyone could ever just watch a world like Earth...the temptation to tamper in events would be large. So the question becomes, just what kind of alien intervention into the development of human civilization might the aliens become involved with? thumb|300px|right|[[VirileMail video teaser.]] VirileMail. 2008. The story of how VirileMail was created is a good success story for wiki collaborative fiction writing. Of course, once I got my fingers on it, I dragged the story into the Exodemic Fictional Universe, which I think worked out well. Also started in 2005, it took about three years to complete the story and there is now a "slim version" ready to be recorded as audio. Cellular Civilization. Cellular Civilization is another story that was started in 2005 but which waited a couple of years for a collaborator and for completion. I had a significant amount of fun with Dexamene Gregores character, but maybe she turned out a bit too blood thirsty? thumb|300px|right|Video Trailer for [[The search for Kalid.]] The search for Kalid. In a way, 2009 was "the year of Kalid". I've previously written about how "The Search for Kalid" was written. One of the major challenges for me was coming to grips with telepathy as a plot element. I'm glad I was able to tackle telepathy in an original story that could grow organically so as to encompass the "fake science" of T-particles. Several characters in The search for Kalid took on a life of their own, and I hope to get back to them in a sequel since there are a few remaining mysteries that came up and were not explored in the original story.

The 4 stories mentioned immediately above are examples of relatively long and relatively complete pieces of collaborative fiction that I had the pleasure to work on during the past decade. I'm not sure that "complete" has much meaning in wiki-format fiction and I hope to get back to all four of those stories in the future. I have a habit of emphasizing the plot over the details of characters, so all those stories could be improved by expanding on the inner lives of the characters.

I'm not a great fan of short fiction, however, I did manage to write Moon Hammer and Manmahtiti Bebobinmahtiti and collaborate on No.. There are also several stories waiting to be completed, including Moon Reyes, Nails and The Start of Eternity. The Start of Eternity is my current obsession and it is allowing me to come to terms with time travel. I might be able to get back to another time travel story, West Wing Wiki, after I complete The Start of Eternity. The Start of Eternity is over 100,000 words now and I am wondering if it will end up being longer than The search for Kalid. I hate giving myself deadlines for writing, but it seems likely that I should be able to complete The Start of Eternity next year. There are other incomplete collaborations such as I'm not you and Wiki fiction stew and I'm always open to new collaborations...I'm looking forward to a new decade of fun with fiction!

See also: Collaborative fiction writing using wiki technology.