Experience

They say 'write what you know' and for the longest time I disagreed with that. As a person who writes fantasy and science fiction and occasionally crime novels (with the aforementioned fantasy and science fiction sprinkled in) it's always seemed strange to me that I shouldn't write what I don't know. I don't know how to create fire out of thin air using nothing but my mind and some unseen force, but I've written about it. I've never lead a military space ship and yet I have a fairly unsuccessful but well received short story on amazon kindle about just that thing.
In the past few years I've come to understand this phrase a little better. While there are elements of stories that may not be something that you know, there is always something that you can. Characters, conversations, relationships, whether you have space ships or pyromancers you still have simple humanity.
But thats not what I'm writing about today.
I've had an idea for a while and I've written pieces of it, but the more I write the more I wonder if I'm even able to. If I'm even suited to. The story I'm talking about is Game on, the murder mystery about a games designer. It's funny, because this is the closest to my life I've ever writen, and yet its probably the most difficult to write.
When I started work on it I decided to make the lead a woman, which instantly lent a significant amount of history and controversy to the book, which makes it so much harder to write. Theres a part of me that doesn't want to write it, but another part that REALLY wants to write it because I think it'll be good.
I'm not sure why I'm writing this, can you tell?
I guess it's just interesting that the closest I've come to writing what I know is also the furthest I've been from writing what I know.
I'm still struggling with writing in general at the moment, but I hope that one day this project gets the time it deserves. And when it does, I already know that I'll solve my worries about misrepresenting the women of the games industry by having the women in the industry that I know read it first.
Hopefully I wont offend them too much.