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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1300609" data-attributes="member: 5171">Heh.  The vampire/witness-protection one is currently sitting in the slush pile in the magazines, so I'd rather not post a public link to it (on the off-chance that somebody decides to buy it).  I'd be happy to e-mail to anybody, but I'll note that there is at least one other large plot element in there that I don't generally mention, and it could make the story odd for folks.The "E" one was actually just a poem.  Sorry if I misrepresented myself on that.  I did write a murder mystery where, if you looked at the first letter of each sentence, it spelled out the clue that the detective overlooked and who the real killer was.  Trying to come up with "E"-starting words for the beginning of each sentence was a pain in the ass.  And I wrote a conversation between five guys, Al, Ed, Id, Ox, and Ur, who could not use the letter A, E, I, O, and U respectively.  They were doing a modern interpretation of Plato's Symposium (trying to define love).  Ox just said "It's beautiful," and all the others called him a moron.(This was back in college in a class on writing with constraints.  The "E" stuff, that is.  The vampire thing got written back in October when I decided to write something funny.)As for the actual main topic at hand -- I didn't realize that we were focusing exclusively on the Science-oriented Science Fiction -- SF as opposed to Fantasy.  One aspect of that is that a lot of good, inventive ideas have been done to death.  How many new energy fields can today's TV Space-Ships get caught in?  How many times can they run out of air?  How many times can they get blasted?  Firefly looked poised to deliver some fun new twists by combining genres, and I for one loved that -- but evidently, the rest of the world did not agree with me (or us, rather).  Lexx tried to combine space opera and sex opera, and produced garbage, from the few times I watched it.But really, the field needs to de-ghetto-ize itself.  Buffy pulled in some of my literary friends when I made them sit down and watch an episode and showed them that yes, there were real writers working on the show.  Babylon 5 did the same thing -- I converted multiple people just by showing them the last twenty minutes of "Whatever Happened to Mister Garibaldi" (Londo visiting G'Kar in his cell and showing him a way to free himself and his people, Lorien finally bringing Sheridan to the breaking point).  If they made a space show that involved an interplanetary peacekeeping squad solving crimes in a small but combat-worthy ship and made it one part blowing-stuff-up-in-space, one part CSI, and one part Homicide, it might survive long enough for people to begin to take it seriously.Or, hell, you know what I'd like to see?  Another Alien Nation-type show.  Take an interesting alien, flesh it all out beforehand, and then spend a season or two letting the human explorers contact the weird aliens and begin to figure them out, with all the backsteps and problems and miscommunications that stuff would really carry.  Add in political tension to bring in the West Wing fans, and a known enemy to provide a ticking clock.  Humanity needs to make these new aliens its friends, or at least needs to know that it can turn its back on them while it goes off to fight the Sk'paa.  Yeah, in space.  But not in the thing-to-blast of the week format.  Another of those will pop up at some point anyway.  Give me a plot.  I'm 27, for crying out loud.</blockquote>

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