Visit to a Dead Science Fiction Project

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My SFR occurs in the Sectors, which is the name I gave my interstellar civilization. These three stories were early early attempts at writing in the Sectors, which was useful practice but I moved on. I did keep the name and concept of one location, Taychelle’s Planet, which I like to drop into current books. It was like Antarctica and they make good vodka there.

Of  course since I’m writing science fiction, I then took the entire topic a step further and gave my ‘rock’ some scary attributes, the ability to do real harm and a bit of carving to justify referring to an idol’s curse in the title.

My next challenge was how to put a pet front and center in the story, and to engage them in a meaningful fashion with the action. I decided Juli and Third Officer Steve Aureli had unfinished romantic business, and that Steve has an elderly aunt traveling aboard this particular cruise. Every time I thought about the character of Aunt Dian, I saw one of the Gabor sisters in my head, dressed in pink and a froufrou feather boa, clutching a tiny dog. (The Gabors were famous actresses in their day and Eva from the ‘Green Acres’ TV show is kind of who I was going for, although ZsaZsa did play Queen of Outer space once in a movie.)