My recent absence
Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been posting very much recently. Yes, I'm a bad blogger. Mea culpa and all that.
There is a reason, though. My fiction-writing muse seems to have returned, and knowing from experience that she could depart just as quickly as she arrived, I'm taking advantage of the inspiration and concentrating on my fiction for now.
Some of you may also have noticed an increasing obsession with Japanese pop culture (I'm trying to reign this in and not bore you guys to death with it too much). Again, there is a reason for this - the male lead in the piece I'm working on is Japanese. Which brings me to a favour I wanted to ask - is anyone who reads this blog at all familiar with Japanese culture? Has anyone ever lived in Japan? If so, I might want to enlist you as a beta reader at some point.
Also, since I note that we have a few sci-fi fans here, I have a hypothetical situation that I could use some input on. The story that I'm working on has somewhat of a speculative fiction slant to it. Specifically, it has a couple of lead characters who have exceptionally long lifespans and may in fact not be entirely human. I'm not talking about vampirism - frankly I think that whole vampire theme has been done to death recently, and I'm not remotely interested in going there. However, this does leave me with a bit of a problem, in that I have characters with unusually long lifespans and no easy, pat explanation for why that should be the case. So, the question is, if you as a reader were to run across that in a book would you feel the need for a pseudo-scientific explanation involving DNA,gene mutations etc? Or would you be able to accept the idea that the people themselves might not know the reason for their long lifespans? Would it really bug you if no clear explanation was given, beyond "there are a few of us who are this way, and nobody really knows why"? Or would no explanation be preferable to a crappy pseudo-scientific "explanantion" that doesn't really make any scientific sense anyway?
I'm at a point where I could probably cut out that element of the story or create some kind of work-around, but I don't really want to. I tend to think that my first instincts as far as how to structure a story are usually the right ones. It would be interesting to hear other people's input, though. So, any comments?