xxxix - Day 10 - What are some really weird situations your characters have been in?

And we are back with our regularly scheduled programme.  It hasn't been a terribly productive week, well, at least not for writing.  Final preparations for a kitchen renovation ate up the early part of last week, and then repairing my laptop and re-installing all the software made short work of what was left.  I think I'm mostly done, so hopefully the cart stays upright from now on.

This week we have another hard question. The way the question is written immediately brought to mind the sort of gimmicky and contrived stories teenagers write. I shy away from creating deliberately weird situations. Weirdness should serve the purpose of the story, rather than being the basis for the story. If not constructed carefully, it ceases to be about character development or progression, veering instead into a series of unconnected, implausible accidents.

I have to admit my gauge for this kind of thing isn't the same as most people I've known. Being a fan of science fiction doesn't help, either. Would meeting a race of sentient glass that communicates musically (by manipulating the frequency, harmonic content, and amplitude of a series of tones) be considered weird in the context of a science fiction story? By definition the genre pushes beyond human experience and so a baseline weird exists every time you set out to write that kind of story.

In another of my stories, the protagonist refines a theory proposed by his parents and travels back in time. Unfortunately on his first "successful" attempt, he manages to rewrite his family history, which leads to him jumping through time, having to ensure successive generations of his ancestors are introduced to each other. Kind of a tongue-in-cheek Quantum Leap meets Back to the Future thing.