Some of my researches have really surprised me. If I'm reading a story about the end of the world, I want to know something about how the world ends, and how the characters survive it. Instead what I got was a story about a girl delivering books to another girl, going home and taking a suicide pill. It left me with a sharp intake of breath. it violated one of the basic rules of storytelling, which is that the main protagonist should survive their ordeal.
I've read stories of people with symbiotic aliens on their shoulders whose minds and sense of being don't seem to be affected by the presence of the creature at all. I've read stories that begin with a long discourse on an obscure (invented?) word, but never go on to explain what it means. That story read more like a dictionary entry than thrilling fiction. Or perhaps it was supposed to be a bogus history text about this... God? I really wasn't sure. The author hadn't made it clear. Then there was the promising story about nanobots cleaning up a radioactive city. The biotech ideas were good, but it turned out to be far too long, and degenerated into a technical manual for the recycling process. Somewhere, the story got lost in the midst of the tech.
All this has left me wondering whether this is why I've had trouble selling my stories. The stories I've read fall into two types. One set fall into the hard SF mould, and don't seem to worry too much about characters or their fictive journey. The other set seem to be the other extreme, stream of consciousness ramblings in search of a story.
My stories sit slap bang in the middle. I have some science and tech, but usually not enough to classify the story as hard SF. The story is about characters who use that tech, and about its consequences. And I might be old-fashioned, but I like my stories to have a spine, a recogniseable sequence of events, a beginning, middle and end.
Hmm. I wonder what reception I'll get when I send the latest batch of short stories out to magazines.
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