Hello, possums! I'm posting this a wee bit early (look, it's gone midnight in New Zealand!) The site has gone down the last two Sundays in a row, so I thought I'd better get in while the going was good. Anyway, the prompt for this week is a word which can refer to a number of things, depending on the context. It is: Integrity. Go forth and write creatively!

Very good choice, GGO! Let's hope that my muse will cooperate -- I really want to come up with something!

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GGO: (Before I read your fic) "Write what you know" is hogwash. No science fiction and fantasy would ever be written if people stuck to that. However, "What you know" can be taken down to a deeper level of using your own experiences (especially emotional) to inform what you're writing even if it's something you haven't experienced yourself. Personally, I like to ask people who have experienced it for their take. (now after having read your fic) Nice to see some backstory on Strecker's continued fall from grace. I say continued because we don't get backstory on why he was fired.

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Keep in mind that the drunk experience varies pretty widely. I don't drink much these days and I've never been a fan of getting absolutely smashed, so I don't have much to offer.

GGO -- "write what you know" -- yes, if you're writing for Wikipedia! Otherwise, as you say, where would sci-fi and fantasy be? I like the backstory on Strecker -- there's a lot of potential there.Will you write a follow-up on how his meeting with Mala went? P.S. a "technical advisor" on being drunk who actually remembers what it feels like? Nope. Not gonna happen. The two don't go together. I remember the hangovers, but probably that's not what you mean I get hangovers easily, which is why I try to avoid drinking to the point of getting really drunk, although I do enjoy a tipple or three.

It's true that if we only wrote what we know, there would be no speculative fiction. Having said that, it's nice to be able to make speculative fiction as 'realistic' as possible. For instance, we know that when the satellite hits the side of the alien mothership in 'Independence Day' and blows up with an ORANGE fireball, that's not realistic. We know that sound doesn't travel in space, so the whole 'engine noise' sound effect in so many media productions is not realistic. We know that an object the size of the Death Star cannot exert enough gravitational force to make a crippled Star Destroyer list to port and then 'fall' nose first into the station. We know that if on board ailerons lost orbital electrons aboard the Phoenix (the ant episode of BotP) some very weird shit would happen, including all the atoms in a primary control surface suddenly acquiring a positive charge - and why would you have an instrument aboard a combat air/space/submarine craft that could measure that kind of stuff in the first place? We know that if we use common terrestrial vertebrate anatomy as a guide, the idea of a 'fat tail' being a sign that your Pernese dragon has just overeaten for one meal is probably... well... a bit weird, because it would suggest that the digestive tract makes some very interesting twists and backtracks past the vent, down into an extremity and back again, which is biologically unlikely given (a) evolution and/or 'intelligent design' (take your pick) and (b) the GM origin of the dragons. We know that even if you don't get blown up by an explosion and you look fine on the outside, you can die of 'blast lung' pretty darned quickly, but we tend to ignore that a lot. As Mark Twain said, the difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense, and that includes speculative fiction. It needs to make sense in-universe and the audience needs to be able to take their belief to a point where it can be seamlessly suspended because we've carried them there based on what we do know, then just gently eased them over the fiction event horizon into what we might know, what we don't know, and 'gee whiz!' As for fantasy, well, we still accept that things like gravity exist. Swords still have to behave like swords, bucklers still have to buckle and horses still have to trot around wearing tablecloths. Tolkein wrote what he knew: he was a linguist and a folklorist and you can see it all through his work. When things got a bit weird, like a mail shirt being really light and protecting the wearer against things a regular mail shirt shouldn't have protected against, he lampshaded it and explained it (mithril.) He also wrote his characters really well. Frodo wasn't your typical hero, Sam was recognisable as the faithful batman (no, not that Batman) and even Aragorn, the traditional hero-figure, had doubts, while Boromir did the wrong thing for the right reasons and the family of the Stewards of Gondor was well and truly messed up. So, yes, we do need to let go of what we know to write speculative fiction, but we also need to write what we know within the framework of fiction so that the stuff we don't know makes sense in the context of what we do know, otherwise the audience just goes, "Oh, no."

I do agree, GGO. I've just met too many (mostly novice) writers who buy into the "write what you know" phrase way too much, to their own detriment.

sorry I just can't help it (yes I'm in a very weird place) GrumpyGhostOwl in's the shortening of your name - GGO it just reminded me of this add - Aussies will understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk6pO7eLeiM Goggomobil (Not the Dart) (sorry if it's already been mentioned, I'm late to the party)

I know. I hear it too. Every. Damned. Time. And it's years since I picked up a copy of the Yellow Pages to do anything other than kill a Huntsman Spider. (The rules are that if they stay outside, that's fine. If I find them inside the house, they get three chances to climb on the end of the broom to be taken outside, and if they don't want to cooperate, it's the Yellow Pages. If they go into the Owleries, it's not my problem as the Owls reckon Huntsman Spiders are delicious.)

I'm a rolled up newspaper girl (bigger reach if a broom isn't handy) and I know the chooks like a good spider. I'm usually okay with spiders except for walking into webs at night, then I do the "omg dance off.... get it off me' If it makes you feel a little better I had that bloody add stuck in my head all night as well as "not happy Jan" today it was replace with the "Teddy bears picnic" and random Wiggles music the fun of insomnia and spending time with my great neice