{"id":53,"date":"2015-04-17T13:14:07","date_gmt":"2015-04-17T13:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=53"},"modified":"2015-04-17T13:14:07","modified_gmt":"2015-04-17T13:14:07","slug":"my-writing-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=53","title":{"rendered":"My Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the dangers of reading sci-fi while writing sci-fi is the \u201ccontamination\u201d of original ideas.\u00a0 When I first started writing, I sheltered myself from all contact with sci-fi books and movies.\u00a0 I even gave away dozens of my classic paperbacks to a member of the younger generation to avoid being tempted to reread them.\u00a0 My self-imposed exile has eroded over time, but recently I read two books that make me wonder if I should run off and hide again.\u00a0 The first was Philip K. Dick\u2019s <em>Exegesis<\/em>.\u00a0 I wanted to know more about the man, and his writing techniques.\u00a0 What I discovered were many similarities in ideas; hopefully not in his mental difficulties.\u00a0 He was interested in what I was interested in, the nature of reality.\u00a0 The second book is <em>The Fall of Hyperion<\/em>, by Dan Simmons, a space opera series jam packed with cool ideas.\u00a0 So many ideas, in fact, that only because I take notes on what I read did the similar ones jump out and bite me.\u00a0 Otherwise, I would simply have lost myself in the story.\u00a0 I won\u2019t share with you exactly which things that he mentions that are fundamental to my new novel, <em>Perturbations In The Reality<\/em> Field, but will share a quote from Simmons\u2019 blog: \u201cHow do you break it to someone that ideas are a dime a dozen? That every writer has more ideas than he or she will be able to write about in a long lifetime? And, finally, that their idea (almost certainly) has not only been explored in fiction about 10,000 times\u201d\u00a0 His description of Zen Gnostics however, no churches, no priests, no holy books, no concept of sin, seems to fit in quite well with my Family of Man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the dangers of reading sci-fi while writing sci-fi is the \u201ccontamination\u201d of original ideas.\u00a0 When I first started writing, I sheltered myself from all contact with sci-fi books and movies.\u00a0 I even gave away dozens of my classic paperbacks to a member of the younger generation to avoid being tempted to reread them.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}