Science fiction is HARD WORK!

I've been reading this stuff my whole life, but I've never had to write any. When we did Omaha, Kate and I didn't have to make anything up, we just gleaned stuff from our own lives and the life of the city we lived in. We were never short on material. We didn't have to do any world-building.

I'm pretty good with dialog, but I'm not used to the Herculean task of world-building like my SF writer friends, my gaming friends, my fantasy writer friends, or my superhero comic writing friends. And to make things worse, I haven't been paying that much attention to the CURRENT world I live in for it to be useful. So, study study study, search search search, learn learn learn. I have characters, I have a mise-en-scene, but i'm nowhere near having a story. Before I have that, I'm going to have to put the characters in the setting even though it's far from fully realized, and see what happens, and what comes charging in from offstage. And everything that happens brings me to a new juncture where i have to go back to the research and do more construction.

I haven't even been to the drawing table yet, but my studio is just shoveled-out enough so that I can get in there as soon as i have to.

OMAHA THE CAT DANCER REFUSES TO DIE continued

Well, here we go. After decades of isolation, i thought I was safely dead and buried for the second time, but someone has goaded me into activity at my advanced age.

While I am assisting in the production of a German revival of Omaha the Cat Dancer, I am now also hard at work on a new project and reviving my signature character.

Heaven help me, it is turning out to be science fiction story! I didn't mean for it to happen, but that's how things go. Now I'm up to my cat's ears in research, not just on the recent trend of Cli-fi, but several other story-related things such as the zigzag history of feminism, alternative economies, and other controversial topics that have a dizzying range of possibilities.

The new star, a probable descendant of Omaha, will be the head of an unusual conclave (some will say a cult) within a future city-state. More later. Egyptian mythology will be involved, in the same metaphoric way that the woman is a cat. More later when I have art.