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I mentioned that I am in the Naperville Science Fiction Writer's Group. Well, it paid a dividend today.
My work in progress (WIP) is called Space Rescue and is a "stand-alone sequel" to The Mars Run. I don't want one to have had to read The Mars Run to understand what's going on, but characters and situations from that book are in the WIP.
Well, as a result of decisions made in The Mars Run, I was going to have 3 female leads, two of them point-of-view characters. This is a problem - men like my female characters but females don't find them entirely believable. I am a guy after all. What was worse, part of the motivation of the story was that one character (female) gets back in the saddle because of her friendship with another female lead.
So I sent a lengthy email to my co-writers with this problem. One of them asked back, "So your question is if you make X a guy, what are some reasonable reasons that Y would stir herself out of her depression to come help rescue a guy?"
Well, if you put it *that way* the answer is obvious. Sometimes talking helps. But it can't be with just anybody, because they don't have enough background to understand, let alone answer, the question.
My work in progress (WIP) is called Space Rescue and is a "stand-alone sequel" to The Mars Run. I don't want one to have had to read The Mars Run to understand what's going on, but characters and situations from that book are in the WIP.
Well, as a result of decisions made in The Mars Run, I was going to have 3 female leads, two of them point-of-view characters. This is a problem - men like my female characters but females don't find them entirely believable. I am a guy after all. What was worse, part of the motivation of the story was that one character (female) gets back in the saddle because of her friendship with another female lead.
So I sent a lengthy email to my co-writers with this problem. One of them asked back, "So your question is if you make X a guy, what are some reasonable reasons that Y would stir herself out of her depression to come help rescue a guy?"
Well, if you put it *that way* the answer is obvious. Sometimes talking helps. But it can't be with just anybody, because they don't have enough background to understand, let alone answer, the question.
