Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
Once again, it’s open mike time! Who’s working on what, how’s it going, what else are you all up to…whatever you want.
April Open Mike
Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
Once again, it’s open mike time! Who’s working on what, how’s it going, what else are you all up to…whatever you want.
Revision continues to grind forward in my WIP. I’ve run into a subplot that I thought I had fixed, and now I need to fix it again.
I’m also being drawn off by a twisted fairy-tale side project: “Goldilocks and the Three Barons.”
Ooh! I *so* want to steal that concept!
I think the characters’ confrontation with their previous master and mentor might be the climax of the story. It has to be a hard struggle, and I’m fussing over how to make it hard enough.
I had a piece of logic in my first envisioning which seemed solid at the time, but it’s not:
–Characters are engaged in a sharp psychic struggle with their mentor: they are on the ground, mentor is in orbit.
–Jump alarm goes off on mentor’s ship, and they break contact, knowing that holding telepathic contact through Jump is fatal.
–One character says, wait, mentor knows that too, they wouldn’t dare Jump with us holding the contact. They were BLUFFING!
–Fight resumes, with a bit of surprise on the characters’ side.
The problem is, what if mentor thought, yay, I bluffed them into breaking contact, *now Jump before they try again.* Catastrophe.
I’m thinking their estranged relative on board the ship needs to give them just a bare flicker of contact, to let them know the ship is still in-system.
My impulse decision early in writing that you can’t hold contact through Jump turns out to be incredibly significant to the plot, and indeed the setting. I had no idea. Apparently that’s why the Swarm aren’t one giant interplanetary hive-mind.
I always love when I get those sorts of revelations about my writing. Until, that is, I realize how much work it will be to implement the thing properly during revisions. My backbrain is good… but it’s never graced me with the courtesy of being *that* good. 😉
How long does it take to go into Jump (assuming you weren’t already in the process), versus how long does it take to re-establish psychic contact? If it takes a few minutes to boot up to a full Jump, or if there’s a reason it could take a little longer than usual this time, your characters scrambling to re-establish their link in time to stop the mentor could add a nice ticking-clock element.
My characters have no idea! Kay, the protagonist, might know the answer for human tech, but the gigantic Jump-beast is far outside her expertise.
I, um, don’t know either. My first reaction is that the beastie can Jump twice, but it’ll be really tired and hungry afterwards and will balk at a third: if they double-Jumped to get here it may not be ready to go. In any case Mentor is setting them a test, is fairly sure they won’t use lethal force, and thus isn’t planning to Jump out even if it’s going to lose. (Though it will be quite surprised if it loses.)
But the characters don’t know that either. They know it’s a test, but they also know Mentor has their gene-sequences and could, in a pinch, make more, so testing to destruction is not out of the question.
One way Mentor could get the better of them is setting up a situation where it sacrifices one of its telepaths and they have to sacrifice one of theirs. Kay won’t do it, and I think Mentor knows that. The only flaw, from its point of view, is that it will seriously alienate Kay if it plays that particular card. It will sacrifice a telepath the way I would sacrifice my Queen in chess: with careful deliberation, but no remorse.
Kay is going to have to have an answer to “what if someone else does that?” though: if she wants to play at Swarm politics she has to expect this kind of thing. (Mentor is, as Swarm goes, unusually nice; still a sociopath in human terms though.) She needs to demonstrate that her human regard for her daughter/subordinates is not purely a weakness.
Wrestling with revisions.
Honestly, I’m mostly ripping out some foundational character choices I made a while back on this book and subbing in other one’s that hopefully change the dynamics between characters as little as possible. Which is always… fun. Honestly, I’m surprised at how well it’s going.
I’ve also been doing some plotting jam sessions on some side stories / shorts today since I got tired of just holding those in my head but not writing them. I tend to like to only write a book if I’m working on one, but my inspiration really doesn’t just hand me stuff for a book when I’m working on one, so it’s often better to note down the other stuff in my brain, even if I often fail to do so.
I’m mostly working on dealing with my mother’s estate, unfortunately. But I did make a respectable start on some prompt-fic at my last writers group meeting. Hoping to finish it tomorrow, then see what I’ve got.