h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This month my writing group (http://www.swindonfreewriters.co.uk/) is writing outside our comfort zone. For me, this means writing a light-hearted romance. I have also set the additional challenges of grounding it in reality, and writing a female character in the first person.

What I'm finding interesting in this short story is how things develop as they go along. I knew immediately I wanted Doctor Who to feature in the story somehow, and the initial idea was a hetero couple watching a classic serial. Then it became a hetero couple meeting in a shop that sold lots of Doctor Who stuff. Then two guys. Finally, it's ended up with two women meeting over the long-awaited release of Power of the Daleks on DVD (for those who don't know Power of the Daleks is the first Doctor Who serial featuring Patrick Troughton, it's also entirely missing. If it were found and released it would be hugely significant for Whovians everywhere, so it seemed like the ideal set up for the story).

I'm doing surprisingly well at it (though I have had to remove some deep social commentary to retain the 'light-hearted' bit and not fall into my usual 'humans are rubbish' stuff), and in an inadvertant twist the tone of the story would be entirely ruined by smut so nobody can accuse me of being a man writing about lesbians just so I can be smutty about it.

Sounds like you'd pass the Bechdel Test. http://bechdeltest.com/

Ummmmmm, interesting. Why did you choose a romance? Is your entire group doing romance? There must have been another genre outside your comfort zone. Hell, writing romance would be way outside my comfort zone.

We all got individual challenges. I was initially given simply "write something optimistic" because a central theme in all my work so far is that humans are rubbish and we're all doomed, but then I took it up a notch and decided to go for light-hearted romance, and then took it up another notch by writing a female character in first person.

Against expectations I actually succeeded. I finished it on the home commute. It helps that I used something familiar as a central theme.

Now back to Lovecraftian horror.

Well done!