Science Fiction is a big umbrella. There are a lot of subgenres and books that don't neatly fit into the subgenres. In Russian it's called "Fantastic Literature." For me it is fantastic for at least a couple definitions of that word. I've loved it ever since I graduated from The Happy Hollisters

Really, I loved SF even before then, since my dad had me watching Star Trek with him when I was about four. He would have loved Firefly, combining his two favorite genres, SF & Western.

So, you might be wondering what this all has to do with Space Hippies, assuming you've made it this far. Wattpad (a serial fiction site) has a contest called the Open Novella Contest, in which one writes a 20,000-40,000 novella, writing from a prompt chosen from a long, long list. I settled on #22:

On occasion, an accusation of witchcraft has the power to set one on a wonderful, dangerous path.

Yeah, I know. Not the most SF sounding prompt. I wanted to write something in my existing universe. None of the SF prompts quite worked for me. You're allowed to use any prompt any way you'd like. And just like that, I found myself writing a story of a grandmother on a colony planet on a mission to rescue her daughter.

As Hanja, or Jaja as her grandkids call her, has hiked her way from her remote village to the capital, I've realized that with her herb lore and spirit-speaking and free-love philosophy, she's basically an old hippie chick. In a galaxy a long time from now and far, far away.

And that is the kind of SF I love to read and write. SF with all the tech and aliens, sure, but with the focus on how people survive and thrive among the tech and aliens.

Hanja and I need to finish her rescue mission (I'm probably going to need all 40K words for that!) by May 2nd. Which is this coming Sunday. Yikes!

Wish us luck in Round #3. We've got a daughter to save and a novella to finish this week.