@Priyajsridhar

4. Cat Rambo describes intense emotions that can power a story as “the big feels.” One of the problems is that it’s hard to write about big feels when you are still in the middle of feeling them. At there any big feels you’d like to put into a story? #Writephant

I hate bringing politics into a discussion, but I wrote a dystopian Mars colonization story in March based on and satirizing our current times projected 100 years into the future. I felt compelled to write this by the big feelings we were going through in the time. My outrage made it easier. The colonization company, EM Mars, had the initials of a famous billionaire because it was his legacy. It made this schadenfreude moment possible excerpted below. The Starship design is similar to the contemporary design. May Ri is our female engineer MC. Reina, later the first president of Mars, supposedly changed the flight software to strand the bad guy misogynists somewhere undeveloped on Mars, preventing them from taking over the Deimos space station.

The ship flared [brightly overhead in the Martian dawn.]

May Ri juggled the stopwatch, lost it over the edge [of the monorail trestle to puff in a red dust dune], and grabbed her binocs. "Did they bypass the timer—?"

"No," said Reina's voice over the frenzy of others, on a private comm.

May Ri realized the magnitude of the flare. Not separation. No benign peeling off of three tiny boosters. It brightened, quickly blinding. One flare, five, then twenty. A string of pearls in the heavens, snapped off a mythical deity's neck, strewn angrily across the sky. A swarm of fireballs, another flare, two, then red comets that looked that way due to the increasing friction of re-entry.

"Oops," said Reina. "Should've run more sims [on my software modifications]."

#writer #author #writingCommunity #writersOfMastodon #mars #sciencefiction #sf #RSstory #RSMarsNeededWomen