Writing for joy

Although I'm very glad I did my Masters, and I'm looking forward to the future challenge of a Phd, nothing beats writing just for the pure joy of it.

In my current project I'm moving away from issue-based realism, letting go of the logic and just letting fly - mostly with luminous greeen vomit! (not mine, the characters...)

I'm finding the words are flowing more easily as I focus on action-based scenes. Even though some of the scenes are quite tense, and the main character is struggling with memory loss and trauma, approaching these themes from a speculative fiction approach is very different. I'm finding that it's giving my writing a freshness and immediacy with an added dose of zing (kinda like a triple shot of espresso).

The speculative fiction genre gives me more freedom to express a character's internal tensions. There's nothing like gross bodily functions to illuminate how you feel inside!

It seems that, when I get down to basics of what I really love to write, that I don't care as much for the constraints of realism as I thought. What perhaps I need to do is to use what I've learnt about the brain, about resilience, about trauma and memory and to mould and stretch that within the context of speculative fiction writing.

Who knows, I might create a whole new sub-genre hybrid in the process!