Building Worlds

Tags

Books, Galactic Federation, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Thoughts, Writing process

I don’t think my writing process has really changed all that much, but the longer I keep doing this, the more of what was once subconscious becomes accessible to my conscious mind. The old “I have a feeling this is going somewhere” or “This isn’t going to work out” feelings about things I was writing — which were usually pretty accurate; it’s not that I was any more wrong than usual — have become steadily more nuanced until I’ve started to be able to unpack them into why.

Take Dayna, for example. She’s now rapidly pulling ahead in the NaNo stakes, because realising that I needed to do First Contact, well, first spurred me on to finally think about and start to untangle all the various aspects of the First Contact story, and that, like designing the blueprints for a building, is letting me see at least some of what this construction could look like — and what it could look like is good.

[[Spoilers, spoilers.]]

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The Wrong Story

Tags

Books, Galactic Federation, Sci-Fi, Writing process

I was debating making alterations to Dayna’s story, or at least to which part of it I used as a NaNo candidate, and I decided to talk some of it over with a friend. Talking (or typing, since it was an online conversation) forces me to put my thoughts and feelings into words, which helps me define what I’m really thinking. In this case it crystallised the whole general sense I had that something just wasn’t complete, didn’t go deep enough: that I was thinking of telling the wrong story.

The tale I was planning to tell is complete enough in and of itself, but it starts in the wrong place and is either irrelevant or repetitive in relation to the grand arc of the Federation’s overall plot. It’s a story best told later, as a tie-in that explores some previously offscreen events in greater depth. Writing the first Federation stories to be released to the world means I need to be writing on the Grand Arc.

[[Spoilers Ahoy!]]

Some of the Options

Tags

Books, Fantasy, NaNoWriMo, Question for you!, Sci-Fi

My current options for November are:

1. Arres. According to my records, his story first appeared in April 2011, in a dream I had. It was subsequently built on a little while listening to music in my parents’ car (Uriah Heep: Circle of Hands), and was the brief subject of a collaboration in an attempt to figure out how the heck he gets from his home village to, well, anywhere interesting, really. The biggest roadblock with Arres is that his motivations start out relatively small (find his father, find out why he left him this crazy scabbard tattoo thing) and have to be dragged somehow to something larger.
2. Dayna, and how she ended up in the future. Dayna has been around since… hmm, actually, since the original Hero Machine, a character creator I once found on the Interwebs. I created her there and she promptly grew a story, personality, and so on, and I don’t think I even have records for when she began, beyond that a couple of my image files for her were last modified in May 2003. She’s a Martian-born space cop in the late 2100s, the era of humanity’s First Contact in my Galactic Federation timeline. When a horrible plague breaks out on Mars, she’s eventually infected. The Galactic Federation offer their aid, but one of their hospital ships goes astray and is lost in deep space for several hundred years… until it’s found by a particularly hostile and remorseless species, who wake the stasis-preserved passengers for bioweapons research.
3. Cleris, and what it really means to have wild, imagination-limited magic in the world. I may be happy with Mysteries Unite as a piece of writing, but I was never quite happy with myself for writing it. It did its job — it won me a writing competition in 2007 (for which I never did get my prize: the prize was 2kg of chocolate and the exec ate it before the meeting in which I would have got it!) — and it was an interesting way to write, and it worked very well. But as the short story stands, it’s antithetical to everything I am and everything I stand for. It says this world, this wonderful, incredible world, isn’t beautiful. It says the fathomless mystery and majesty of the universe is worthless. And so I determined to fix it, somehow. In the end, I realised, it would take a book. A book for which the original Mysteries Unite was just a prologue. A book that would end in a truly heart-wrenching choice…
4. Tsien, and how she and Siris won the war. At the other end of humanity’s part in the Federation’s timeline (it goes back to long before our First Contact!), the galaxy has been plunged into cataclysmic war. Tsien and her siblings are the culmination of three hundred years (Earth time) of research by the brightest minds in the Federation. If they can’t win the war, civilisation as we know it will die.
5. Kirai, and the half of his story that doesn’t exist yet, a tale actually born out of a Waterstones competition to fit a short story on a large postcard in 2008. He’s the one who’s since got the furthest without participating in any writing challenges, and much of his tale already exists, at least up to the point where there’s a rather unfortunately fateful family encounter. The second half, however, doesn’t, and could really use my going on with it – I got to the point where all the truly huge conflicts were set up and poised to snowball, and then got distracted.

So there you have it. There are more, lots more, but I think a shortlist of five is more than enough for me to choose from. (There is a sixth option, which is “whatever I dream in between now and then”, but that’s quite beside the point.)

Questions or suggestions? Sling them at me in the comments! I’m happy to expand on any and all of the above!

Writing Month Approaches

Tags

Books, NaNoWriMo, Writing process

On one level, that seems a little silly to say. After all, every month is a writing month now! On the other hand, the rather specific challenge of November is, at this point, a long-running tradition. It’s how the first draft of BtSF got finished. It’s the time in the year when something like 80% of any given book of mine was first written. And, of course, I’m going to keep doing it — which means something else is going to suddenly get a rocket boost.

The question is, what?

I have a lot of stories to write, a lot of tales to tell. I seem to add to the mountain ahead faster than I can climb it, which I don’t really mind considering it is a mountain of piled-up awesomeness. Or at least, it is to me. Opinions may vary. In any case, it’s now definitely time to be thinking about what I’m going to do over November. And that’s a harder decision.

I was going to write Arres’ story, one I’ve had kicking around for a long time and never done anything with. But that story has slammed straight into another one and the second one will overrule it without ever meaning to. Because of structure, because of shape, because of the characters — Arres is going to have to work very, very hard to become someone who can stay afloat at all. So, maybe I should go watch him work, throw rocks at him and see if he makes it, because Book 2 will be the handover point if he does, where he meets… well.

Or maybe I should just do what I’ve been meaning to for over a year and write the story of Dayna Kingsley of the Solar Police, but last time I meant to do that I got totally sidetracked by a very detailed dream and ended up writing AIN instead. That happens a lot, actually. Dreams that become books, I mean. For all I know it will happen again in the upcoming month, and I’ll find myself writing something completely different.

But it would be nice to get Arres to a point where he could hold his own in that other tale. After all, it was his world to begin with, born of yet another dream I had. That second story could go elsewhere, its heart comes from elsewhere, and though it fits very, very well in his world, rooting it properly will be complex.

And I really must stop forgetting that I absolutely have to second-draft the first part of Reclamation, as well as find a good spot for it to end… (There will be a sequel: Reclamation is getting awfully long and looks likely to need to be two books.)

So: writing! Let’s get busy!

(Stalk my November progress over here on NaNoWriMo.org, when the site’s yearly update goes live sometime in October. Right now it’s still showing last year’s novel.)

A Sort of Report

Tags

Admin, Books, News

The month-long ebook sale has ended, and I sold 37 e-copies of Before the Sun Fades in it! I don’t think that’s bad going at all!

In addition, there’s just one major thing left to go before I can finally return to writing properly! And boy, am I looking forward to it. Right now, Reclamation (in the Path of the Gods series) and AIN are the top two projects in my mind, but that may change. The first few chapters of Reclamation already hit second draft status a while ago, and will probably now benefit from more eyes; any volunteers to read and comment on part of a book sometime in the next couple of months will be greatly appreciated! Meanwhile, the other end of it had to go on hold some time ago while I wrote a large chunk of Ascension — the two books are dependent on one another — and now needs both completing and, in the process, working out where to transition into the third book.

As for AIN, it’s rather more choppy: many of the key turning point scenes exist, and the beginning and the end are there, but it’s all rough first draft and many areas are lightly sketched in or altogether missing. So that will take a whole lot of building.

So Little, Yet So Much

Tags

Admin, Fused

Augh.

I just filled in cross-chapter links between every single chapter of The Fused, and while it might not look like much, it took for ever. So I hope they’re useful!

The Price of Death When…

Tags

Philosophy, Thoughts

Doing the washing up, I put on Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth, music for the Silmarillion. Contemplating just how hard to kill Middle-Earth’s elves are led me in turn to a question I keep facing in each new setting: what their deaths mean. What do other characters in any given world perceive? A tragedy, or merely a transition, or almost nothing at all? The wrong reaction can be jarring, if you think about it too much, and can make you wonder if the central conceit of a book isn’t, in fact, slightly mischaracterised after all…

Here, then, are some categories of death, going from the least horrible to the most… more or less. You might have your own order for a couple of them.

Five-Dimensional Fantasy

Tags

Background, Books, Fantastic Multiverse

Or more dimensions, but I need at least five. (Various different real theories and hypotheses about the nature of the real universe also posit a varying number of extra dimensions. Which I accidentally typed dimensino, which should totally be some sort of ultra-weird fundamental particle that transcends the familiar boundaries of space-time. But I digress. Real theories tend to require a rather different number of extra dimensions than just one. They’re also a bit too complicated for a blog post I can write in the space of an evening. Maybe when I have more time: I’d like to understand a bit more about that area myself, and if I do the studying I might as well share it!)

As the header for this blog indicates, everything I write takes place within a kind of overarching structure. A multiverse, if you will. By definition, all things are contained within it: every possibility, however minuscule, is realised… somewhere. (Also every crossover, however ridiculous.) Space-time of course makes up the familiar four dimensions, and then I need at least one more coordinate.

You’re unlikely to ever see it. The existence or non-existence of the greater multiverse outside the bounds of whichever setting I’m writing in is usually about as relevant to it as the precise mass of a Sun-like star on the opposite side of the galaxy is to us. Not impossible to notice, under the exact correct conditions, but highly unlikely. Nonetheless, it exists, if only in my mind, and I might as well let a little of it out now and again.

Thus: welcome to the Void! This non-space, this place that is not a place, this non-time outside of time, is what you get between an infinite number of things that coexist. It is, and it is not. It isn’t, except that it is. It’s unreal, and yet…

In other words, it’s pretty much accidentally designed to either (a) make your brain bleed, or (b) make you decide I’m an idiot. The concise, inaccurate version is this: all realities operate according to the familiar four-dimensional laws of space and time. The Void is that strange “place” where none of that applies. It’s formless, save where form is applied and maintained by the power of the mind, a sort of global imagination, if you will. It has effects in reality, or perhaps it doesn’t, or both are true, from a certain point of view.

And in the Void, there are Powers. I generally divide them into ten, but you could break them up into one, or two, or twelve, or none, or infinity. From a certain point of view. Each Power might be seen as an ultimate quality, or an ideal, or a motive force. Each Power might be a person taken to an extreme. In each person you can find the influence of every Power, because those are the conflicting forces within every living being. Are they there? Aren’t they? From a certain point of view…

The Powers command Travellers, or maybe they don’t: people who by accident or design stumble from one universe to the next, changing things as they go. But of course this happens, because when anything that is possible must happen somewhere by definition, then at some point it will, and has, and shall have. Was it deliberate action? Or an accident? Or both… from a certain point of view?

Is this stuff canon? Well… by my own definition, not really! A couple of little bits are, here and there, and when the correct books are out I challenge you to spot them, but by and large, this framework upon which I hang my metaphorical hat and build all manner of bizarre houses has no clear appearance in that-which-is-published and is therefore, at best, semi-canon. Take it with a grain of salt as big as your head: my word is that of a very fallible god whose mind changes as frequently as the British weather. (That said, the overarching multiverse has stood the test of time admirably. Possibly because the Void is timeless… or not.)

P.S. Sorry about the lack of the Fused! There are currently only three paragraphs in the next chapter right now, so I really couldn’t post it…

Getting Back Aboard

Tags

Background, Books, Canon, Fused, Sci-Fi

It’s been a while since I was last aboard the Ship. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I figured I’d go over how it all goes together, and then I figured I might as well share it with you guys. Bits of it, anyway!

Meet the Characters: Tei

Tags

Ask away!, Before the Sun Fades, Characters, Fantasy, Tei

Considering the book’s been out for a month now, it’s past time for another “Meet the Characters” post! Today, let’s introduce Tei, a young survivor with an unexpected talent who accompanies Rakariel through Before the Sun Fades.

Click to reveal spoilers: