Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
It’s another open mike, which is a good thing because my brain is frozen and it’ll be another week before the weather really starts warming up. I’m okay so far (and if you don’t know why I’m mentioning that, you haven’t been reading/watching news out of Minneapolis, or don’t realize that I live here). Next week, I’m ranting about “good writing.” Again. Meanwhile, talk, ask questions, update how your current WIP is, stay warm, stay safe.
“I’m okay so far…”
You stay safe too!! You’re much closer to the front lines than some of us.
So far, so good, for me at least. My revisions letter finally got here, so that’s going to be a bit distracting.
Got two stories awaiting the copy edit before publishing.
Also did some cover work. Madeleine And The Mists
Having accepted that I am simply going to have to do some naval battle scenes, I am actually making progress on “A Most Intriguing Voyage”. Lost a couple of days to some kind of a cold this week, but I feel a lot brighter today.
Hope the choreography isn’t too bad.
So far, so good. I’m keeping things as simple as possible, since the naval battles aren’t really the point of the book. I tried for far too long to avoid describing any of them, and it kinda worked since my protagonist might reasonably be tucked away in the orlop deck during action, but it meant I couldn’t show my privateer’s POV at all. I need that.
My New Year’s resolution the last two years was to finish the webcomic script I’ve been working on, which has not happened, so this year I resolved to write at least one page of the script per week. So far it’s been working – I’ve wrapped up a major subplot, and now I’m in the midst of a scene that’s been in my head for ages.
My story having abruptly become a lot more physical, I am reading about space stations and acceleration and gravity and military ranks and point-defense weapons…all well and good, but the more I read the more likely it seems that you cannot dock a rotating spacecraft to a rotating space station without unhappy consequences, and further that while rotating stations for gravity seems like a good idea, rotating ships for gravity may not be. Which implies accelerating to halfway, flipping round, and decelerating the other half–assuming you’d like to have gravity, and the medical evidence is that you really would.
And that means it’s kind of lucky I didn’t publish #1 before starting #2, or I’d have been stuck with handwavy anti-gravity, which I no longer like–I didn’t do anything fancy with my spacecraft scenes in #1 so without AG they don’t make sense. I don’t like AG anymore because I think it would have all sorts of applications, including military ones, that are super hard to think about but weaken plausibility if ignored. #1 is not a military story and it maybe doesn’t matter, but #2 is another matter, and they should be harmonious.
If the problem is docking, you might get some ideas from aircraft carriers. And if I recall correctly, Arthur C Clark had a rotating spacecraft dock with the hub of a rotating wheel space station, because it wasn’t chasing the station’s perimeter, just matching the rotation rate so that it could thread the needle.
No idea about whether you should use rotation for gravity on a ship, but I imagine that it depends on whether it’s a long trip (like heading to Mars or another star) or a short one (like shuttling someone up to an orbiting space station).
Also depends on whether you have enough fuel to accelerate constantly.
I finished the first draft of my 21st novel last year, and it was an interesting experience. At my best, or at least most aspirational, I come up with clever plots, nuanced characterizations, and witty, or at least sparkling, dialog. And (we all have our weaknesses) decent descriptions.
#21? I came up with a plot that overwhelmed everything else. Functional characterizations, reasonable dialog, and minimal descriptions.
So, more revising than usual. But at least it’s been interesting. I always have to challenge myself, or I lose interest. (Why just crank out more of the same? I don’t condemn any who do, but my creativity fades away from the prospect.) This challenge is new and different, which is a good thing.
(Plot over all other elements isn’t, in my opinion, a deal-breaker, by the way. A lot of thrillers are pretty much all plot, after all.)
Deliberately playing around with different aspects of writing is a good way to grow, whether the “deliberately” part is a conscious decision to experiment with nonlinear structure or with a plural viewpoint, or whether it’s realizing that one’s backbrain has handed one something very different from one’s usual type or process, and committing to make it work anyway.
Good for you for finishing it.
Thank you!!
I will stop wondering whether I was being an idiot while writing it. 🙂
I added some 200 words to a WIP that’s been moldering for decades.
At this rate, I should finish it by the next millennial. Maybe.
If we could get some of the chilly weather y’all have over there I’d be elated–this winter has been shockingly warm compared to years past. I miss snow. 🙁
I’m at a conference this weekend. Interesting conversations, lovely people, but so help me, if one more professional editor starts talking about “passive tense” and flags all uses of “was” as examples of it, I’m going to be sorely tempted to print out a certain old post from this blog and scatter it all around the hotel.
Feel free. You can use the one on the uses of passive voice, too. (Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools?)
I’ve got a common case of sagging middle in my current Novel WIP, and have been constructively procrastinating by writing and attempting to write short stories.
Right now, the protagonist of my novel is off on a tour of some local plantations, (which are loosely based on Caribbean plantations of 3 centuries ago). Maybe he’ll pick up some clues for the treasure hunt that’s the mainspring of the plot.
Hrumph! I suspect that the side quest is turning out to be more interesting than the main plot.
Maybe there’s an unaddressed problem with the main plot which is draining its energy–I find that is often the case when mine seems listless.
As a scientist as well as a writer, I wish I could get better at going from “hm, something about this makes me uncomfortable” to “this is WRONG and here’s why.” I get there eventually but it can take way too long. Blew a whole summer trying to find a code bug once, and early in the fall walked into my boss’ office and said, “There’s a fundamental flaw in your math.” He gave me a piece of chalk and said “Prove it” and two painful hours later we knew exactly what was wrong. But I had all the pieces at the start of the summer, if only I could have surfaced them.