Jason Stoddard has asked “What do you Hate Most about SF Short Fiction?”. I must say, I was dis­ap­pointed with the responses. There’s no con­sis­tency among the com­ments, just like there’s no con­sis­tency in the tastes of any large, diverse audi­ence. I haven’t got­ten to read the Something Awful responses yet, but I am look­ing for­ward to see­ing if they are more use­ful to me as a writer than “Put in more robots” and “too much char­ac­ter devel­op­ment” (a com­ment quickly fol­lowed by some­one com­plain­ing about too lit­tle char­ac­ter development).I kind of hoped a pat­tern would emerge, that we would diag­nose the prob­lem that every­one is so sure is there, because of the num­bers. We’re like doc­tors hud­dled around a comatose patient we believe to be dying because of the mon­i­tors, each shout­ing their own diag­no­sis. We’ll never come to any kind of con­clu­sion because it’s all a mat­ter of opin­ion. And you know what? I’m sick of opin­ion. Give me infor­ma­tion, sto­ries, humor, not opin­ions. Anything but those. Everyone has one, and every­one is always wrong.* As an aggre­gate. Being sick of opin­ion prob­a­bly means I am suf­fer­ing blog burnout. Anyway–

What I am begin­ning to hate most about short SF is its inces­sant need to talk about itself. If I put half as much energy into talk­ing about it and think­ing about it, I prob­a­bly would have got­ten a damn novel writ­ten by now.

I’m just going to shut up and write now.

_{*Exceptions made for Nick Mamatas and David Moles.}

Tagged as: fandom, My Writing, process, SF