My dining-room table has suffered a block-oclypse. It is mounded under vast heap of c-IEDs. The ‘c’ is short for ‘child’ and the E is for the explosive and muffled cursing. Yes, a kind friend has donated to my grandchildren 3 children’s worth of Lego now his kids have grown past it. At the present price of Lego, it’s a princely gift. It is also rather like a writer’s mind.

Yes, I am sure there are writers with vast bins of all the correct bits and colors to assemble, according to some perfectly systematically organized plan. Mine is far more like some brilliant anti-computer, perfectly designed to turn vast amounts of information about almost every subject into garbage. Or rather detached blocks attached randomly to blocks they should have nothing to do with.

In among the Lego tide are occasional figures – characters ranging from Starwars to pirates, and pretty well every stop between. Fascinating, strange, suggesting all sorts of constructs to my fertile mind. Many are missing heads, legs or hands, and definitely headgear. Some bits have been slowly coming to light as we try to sort it all out to divvy between the grandies (and their parents’ feet). Other bits I think have gone to join the great roomba. The grand-kids won’t care. And therein lies the difference for the writer. The readers will care.

I am still going through the submissions to MAD SCIENCE. There are some great stories. There are some great stories that I would like to say to the writer: ‘You don’t HAVE a page (or even a paragraph) to tell me about the rather dull background and introduce me to the character/s before launching me into a great story, well put together, with a good ending.’

There are others who saw the pirate character in the Lego pile and the propeller and the wheels and several bits of Millennium Falcon – ie, fascinating starts to a story, possibly interesting characters… and kept shoving more random bits on the too-small base.

One author succeeded in creating a story which – after I had been amused, but convinced it would trickle off into a chaotic mess, living up to none of the promise… surprised me, and pulled it all together. A delightful story — and I should have spotted I was being ‘primed’ with the foreshadowing, but did not pick up that they’d planned whole thing. It was NOT a random assemblage of interesting parts that did not actually work together.

I am afraid that, so far, they’re the only one — several others I can tell the author was pantsing it, sticking more and more bits on hoping one would give them an end. Bits that really added nothing to final story. Just bits jammed on because the base-piece was big enough to take them. And then reaching an ending where one part of the previous bits gave an end, and the rest… was just there.

There’s no right way to write. Pantsers and plotters are both successful at times. But please… if you’re going to pants and you finally arrive at the ending you had no idea what was going to be or how you’d get to, please, please… we live in word-processing era. Dead-end threads, red herrings that have no bearing on the final story can be cut. No, it isn’t how many Lego pieces you can cram onto it. You can also go back and insert bits of subtle foreshadowing. If you want a clue on how to do it, go and read THE RELUCTANT WIDOW (Georgette Heyer) and see how often (spoiler) she brings up the clock in the library. She didn’t have a word-processor. Inserting those mentions would have involved much tedious re-writing/typing. You can bet she plotted that ‘Chekhov’s gun’ from the very start.

On other news, I see STORM-DRAGON is still at no. 1 in Children’s Action and Adventure sf books. Thank you all who helped propel it there, and all the good people who wrote reviews.