Writing in the inbetween

My writing life has been a bit scrappy lately. I had an assignment to finish for the Massey screenwriting course I'm doing, and a story to complete for the ConText con competition. Plus everyday life rearing it's usual mucky head. But the assignment got done and just last night I pushed the send button for the short story contest entry. A straight scifi story, with the dark overtones that have been creeping in to all my short stories the last few years. I seemed to have developed a pattern of light historical NZ romances alternating with dark, even dismal, scifi & contemporary short stories. The SF novels fall somewhere in between. Hathe is a romance but is also pretty dark in places, and the latest one that is still in limbo is definitely darker. It deals with the farming of humans by an alien species. And yes, I know Ann MacCaffrey has done something similar in her Freedom series, as well as  the amazing  novel The Sparrow  by Mary Doria Russell.  But hopefully mine is different enough to still be original. I'm pretty sure neither of them first got the idea of their book by watching lambs watching the stockmen in a freezing works yard one day. So at least I can claim a degree of authenticity.