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!]]

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.)

Writing BtSF

Tags

Before the Sun Fades, Music, NaNoWriMo, Writing process

Now that it’s out (which I’m still not entirely sure I believe, even though I’ve seen a photo of the hard copy!), I’m kinda thinking back over the process of writing Before the Sun Fades, and how it all went. Or didn’t go, for a lot of the time.

Spaceship Design

Tags

Art, Background, Books, Fused, Reasoning, Sci-Fi, Writing process

Returning to the subject of The Fused, my Ship hasn’t yet been fully drawn, but I thought I’d spare a moment or five to talk about Ship design. (It actually has a name, somewhere. Nobody remembers it, though, except probably the Ship itself.)

When I started out writing The Fused, I had a small collection of images lifted directly from a dream I had. The Ship itself wasn’t so much something that was fully envisaged, as simply the location where all the events took place: in effect, Lindsi’s world. As a result, over the course of writing the story, it’s been through a few morphs before settling into this final shape. (I’m still nailing down a couple of the proportions, but basically, the shape is solid.)

In the first vague conception, the Ship was much more stereotypical: vaguely ovoid, with the four Habitat Domes embedded along the sides, the pointier end pointed forwards and engines set into the rear. Main Corridor 1 was, under this conception, almost literally the backbone of the Ship. Then I started to think about it, and this presented a few problems.

• Either some of the Domes had no view of space (and I’ve already specified that they all do), or the Ship needed gravity of different orientations in different locations.
• Differently oriented gravity would make for some very confusing junctions.
• The preferential “up” for the core of the Ship was unrelated to anything else, whether the gravity fields changed with location or not. It would be an entirely arbitrary choice.

Deciding that the Ship’s designers hadn’t wanted to faff about with multi-directional gravity, I then needed all the Domes to, essentially, be on a plane, or they wouldn’t all get to see the stars. The Ship went through a very brief period of being imagined as sort of stingray-shaped. However, that again gave it an entirely arbitrary choice of “up”, and simply didn’t seem like the most simple or resource-light solution given that it was built in space, and thus in freefall.

At around that point, I also realised that this Ship needed fuel. It’s a generations-long mission with no guarantee that its destination will be viable (it does have a destination, although again, people aboard don’t really know that), and while I did give it fusion power, even fusion isn’t free. You get through a lot of hydrogen that way… and everything on the Ship had to depend on the main fusion reactor, plus its auxiliaries. Everything. Up to and including any atomic synthesis systems they might have for creating the heavier elements that their fusion reactor won’t give them. With the best will in the world, the Ship will not be a closed system. They lose energy (radiatively, in the visible and the infrared), and they lose matter both when they use the attitude thrusters or the powerful main drive (used for accelerating and decelerating to/from interstellar travel speeds, which are still a lot less than the speed of light), and when they simply throw away waste they can’t recycle any more. Simply in order to balance the mass-energy equation (and therefore avoid carrying an entire journey’s worth of fuel), the Ship needed some kind of matter intake.

Space is big, and it’s pretty empty. But it isn’t entirely empty. There’s debris and things floating around out there, remnants of all kinds of past events… but more than anything else, there’s an extremely tenuous interstellar gas and dust: mostly hydrogen, but with other elements mixed in. The easiest thing by far to do would be to simply slurp up the interstellar medium and feed it to the reactor. And to do that, you need a ramscoop. A big one. (Essentially, a large funnel.)

So suddenly, all envisionings of the Ship needed to include a ramscoop. Which, mounted on the front of either of the two designs, began yet again to look a bit silly… and to be a decided waste of construction materials. The back of the scoop was just so much wasted space.

And at that point, it occurred to me that all I needed to do was make the ramscoop bigger. The Ship didn’t need to be going “forwards” by its own internal gravity, there’s no preferred orientation in space except that your main thrust has to point in the direction opposite the one you want to move. If I made the ramscoop big enough, it could actually be almost the entire body of the Ship, with the Habitat Domes all safely on the back of it — where they’d have an excellent view of the stars, be protected from forward radiation by layers upon layers of spaceship, and need no gravitational alteration at all. The main reactor (and auxiliary reactors) and main engine just needed a mounting, and since the Ship now has to fly “down”, in the direction the mouth of the ramscoop points, the logical answer seemed to be to stick a spire in the middle of it, essentially a big stick with the engine and reactor at the top. This kept the engine some distance away from the Domes in case anything went wrong, and had the double bonus of looking pretty and incorporating the concept of a spire, which appeared in my dream as inside the Habitat Dome and was originally shelved as it simply wouldn’t fit very well.

So that’s how the Ship got to the shape it is today. It’s essentially an almost flat cone with a spire at the point, at the top of which is a lump containing the engines and suchlike. The front, or “bottom” given that the artificial gravity points in the direction of flight, is fairly featureless: other than the observation stations on the rim, it’s pretty much impossible to look ahead with the naked eye. A variety of protrusions around the edge house forward-looking sensor arrays, and it’s likely that the Ship also has drones in formation with it, further away so their instruments can get an unimpeded view — without much in the way of friction, anything the Ship deploys needs no thrust to continue moving along with the same speed and course as its parent. The back of the scoop is full of interesting features, most prominently the four domes, like giant bubbles. In the exact centre, the spire on which the engine and reactor are mounted sticks up, another set of whiskery protrusions here monitoring the Ship itself.

And that, as they say, is that. Now to finish drawing the thing, and roughly to scale at that…

Unusual Dilemmas

Tags

Question for you!, Reasoning, Thoughts, Writing process

Such things are pretty much a stock in trade of writing, of course, but now I’ve got an authorial one, and I’m not quite sure yet what to do with it. In a nutshell, I have to decide terminology.

My characters have a single word for a certain concept that does not match our word for it: this is for reasons that will later have relevance. However, in order to load the word with the correct immediate baggage in English, I have to equate their word and our word somehow. If I just use our word, then when certain things are revealed, things embedded in their word won’t have come across to the audience. If I use only their word, I have to take special care to load it with all the right baggage in a lot of early description so that I can be sure people are carrying it around, and then everyone is likely to see some things coming a mile off. But, if I use the two words interchangeably (which would at first glance seem reasonably sensible), I set up the false impression that the two concepts can be distinct in their language – which for my characters is not the case.

It’s a knotty little problem, though not one I urgently need to solve due to that wonderful thing that is the tool of find/replace: I can locate every reference in either terminology with ease. So I’m not fussed about it immediately, but in the long term, that’s something I’m going to have to work out… and it’s interesting. At least, I think it’s interesting.

Right now, I incline to thinking the best way to go about it is to stick almost exclusively to their word and try and load the baggage as subtly as possible so nobody notices I’m not putting their boxes on the cart they think I am. But maybe I’m wrong. Can anyone out there think of any relevant examples? Good or bad — what to avoid is as useful a piece of information as hints on what to attempt!

Recycling the Brain

Tags

Reasoning, Thoughts, Writing process

The human brain, it seems, is wired up to believe in things. It likes certainty, and it likes to look for patterns and for intent where neither exists. It likes causality, detests randomness and chaos. It’s hard to use it to get an objective view of the universe, because it keeps getting in the way. Belief — in anything — is comfortable and comforting. It’s a state of mind where evidence is discarded and surety is reached.

It’s also, unsurprisingly, kind of a problem. Discarding evidence leads to making decisions that conflict with reality, sometimes irredeemably — and in these conflicts, reality will win 100% of the time. It can’t not: reality is what is. Belief is just what humans want to be true.

What’s all this got to do with writing? Well, potentially quite a lot! Whether it’s exploring what a world that really is shaped by belief would be like or investigating the rise and fall of unrealistic expectations, it can be found in a thousand and one different ways in stories… and in the head of the author. Which is where this post comes in.

You see, the belief circuitry is a massive disadvantage when it comes to navigating the complexities of everyday technological life. Ascribing agency to your computer means you don’t fix a driver conflict and the little pest keeps crashing “because it just hates you”. Assuming that something is because you think it is, you can assume understandably enough that everyone else thinks the same way, at which point truth (or the best approximation of it we have) and fact become only as “valid” as your own subjective and quite possibly utterly divorced from reality opinion. Which is rubbish. Take that up with the rock you believe is made of feathers that’s about to fall on your head, and get back to me.

But we’ve got all this belief circuitry, like it or not. It’s just more of a disadvantage than the advantage it once was, when we lived in a world that we really couldn’t control and didn’t yet have the tools to understand. So what do we do with it? Well, and finally getting back to the stories, I think a good thing to do is recycle it! Over the years, I’ve built up an incredibly extensive mythos surrounding the things I write: not only does each world have its own suite of physical laws and what-have-you, but beyond all of that there’s an ultimate linking factor, a simple yet complex underpinning with enough give to hold everything comfortably, and just enough structure to bind it all together. It is, if you like, my personal storytelling Theory of Everything. And I like theories of everything.

So that’s where (most of) my belief circuitry goes. It operates on a mental level quite deliberately separated from the everyday, from the real. Ask me anything and I’ll tell you it’s not true, because probabilities are that it’s got nothing to do with reality whatsoever; certainly it isn’t grounded in it. But on the level of my second-layer thoughts, the ones that aren’t allowed to influence important behaviour, I sometimes like to believe it might just be real. Heck, I talk to the voices in my head and I’m capable of running three complex personalities besides my own without experiencing noticeable slowdown, I think I can handle believing one more little story that I know ain’t so.

The trick, of course, is knowing it ain’t so. Fall down there, and you end up divorced from reality, detached from the world, living in a little cocoon because the big wide outside is just too scary. If you’re lucky, you picked a common story, and you’ll have plenty of friends. Unlucky, and you picked a story that has everyone accusing you of wearing a tinfoil hat. Because when you don’t know it ain’t so, you start acting like it’s true, which is no way to behave about anything that has nothing to do with reality. Like I said, if you disagree, take it up with the rock you believe is made of feathers that’s about to fall on your head, and get back to me.

Fundamentally, we don’t know for sure what is and what isn’t. The only way to find out is to ask the world questions time and time again. Come up with an idea it’s possible to disprove and test it, reliably, repeatably, over and over until you’ve run out of ways to disprove it, or until you have disproved it and need a better idea. That’s how it works, that’s the only way to really learn about anything at all, even your own self. Ask questions and never stop asking.

And the bit of the brain that likes to be solid and certain and utterly right no matter what? Well, the best use for it I’ve ever found is to build a wonderful, beautiful framework around everything else that’s unreal — and to keep that inner world a world apart. Make it your own world, make it a safe space, but never, ever, under any circumstances, mistake it for the real. That way lies what we sometimes, inconsistently, call madness.

Sing Along Stories

Tags

Books, Characters, Music, Writing process

Once I’ve got started on something, embarked on a voyage with the coast receding out of sight, I often like to pick a CD that I associate most with it, and put that on loop as I write. It’s a particularly useful motivator during NaNoWriMo, because it prompts my subconscious to stop getting distracted with other things by repeatedly distracting it with concepts from the very thing I’m writing! My subconscious all too frequently has the attention span of a one-year-old with multiple shiny objects being waved in front of their face. This is fine — my mind seems to come with multi-level multitasking built in — except when I’m doing full-focus tasks, like sticking to the 1,667 per day NaNo word count while simultaneously working for a PhD! These sorts of things are forefront tasks and I can’t put sufficient effort into them unless I have full focus… so here’s how I get it.

To date, I’ve been through NaNo three times, and here are the CDs I’ve used. Each of them in overall sense and feeling of the sound of the CD — not any single track and not even always the actual words — I find matches up reasonably well to the overall sense and feeling of the story, making it a good background prompt.

• Before The Sun Fades — Within Temptation: The Heart of Everything
• Alt-Shift — Doves: The Last Broadcast
• Reclamation — Sirenia: The Thirteenth Floor

In addition, certain characters acquire songs, some of them more than others, which seem to me to express aspects of their personality or life: character music, picked up from around my collection and noticed as particularly relevant to one person or another. There are a few more of those, and some characters have more than one as various events affect them throughout their lives. As a random sample, we have:

• Tsien: Disturbed: Indestructible (Indestructible)
• Seolas: Disturbed: Haunted (Indestructible)
• Rei: Green Day: She’s a Rebel (American Idiot)

I don’t think we’ve met Rei yet, here on Distant Realms. She comes from the Galactic Federation, but long in Tsien’s past: she was a contemporary of Siris’ back when he was still Human. Perhaps I’ll post something about her soon!

In Soviet Russia, Story Writes You

Tags

Thoughts, Writing process

I read a fair amount of stuff about writing, unsurprisingly. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of people talk about choosing what happens in a story, about whether event X sends a message, whether character Y needs to go or to be in more. And it’s good, it’s all good: people talking about writing is a shiny thing. But here’s the thing: I don’t get it. Sure, I sort of get it. I understand, intellectually. I’m smart and I can spot patterns with the best of them (or at least a reasonably high subset of them) — it’s easy enough, having finally trained myself to do it, to deliberately look at something and say, oh well this could be Q or S or even T. But it’s another thing to sit down and write it.

When I start on something, usually it has an image, or a character, or an abbreviated sequence of events: some kind of concept that represents a base point. The Fused, for example, started life as a dream. Ascension/Reclamation: a dream combined with an ancient short story. Kirai’s tale actually did begin with a very overstretched analogy, but that’s because I was writing for a competition with very little time to spare and didn’t have any base ideas. (That part has also needed a complete rewrite.) Before the Sun Fades: Rakariel, who’s a very old character indeed (though not, I think, as old as Wildcat!) combined with the concept of the hidden valley.

So that’s the start, the seed. Next I pick out my primary characters (Kirai and Ren, for example), and work out who they are, how they react, what they’ve done, where they think they’re going. How they think and how they see the world. At the same time, I’m building backdrop. The countries they live in and planet/s they live on, the event where they meet, the people they know, the natural laws of the world — not human laws, real laws, the way reality works. Laws of physics, adjusted to suit. (What can I say, I write fantasy/sci-fi.) Background biology. All that crazy stuff.

Now I have a rough map, and some people. And at that point… all I can do is wind up and let them go. The moment they establish personalities is the moment that my control is gone. I can write down anything I want, of course, but it feels utterly wrong, utterly dead, and the character in my head — I maintain their ‘simulations’, if you like, at all times pretty much subconsciously; it’s a natural process for me — starts shouting at me. So I let them go, and I see what they do. Sometimes they do what I expect… and sometimes they veer off into uncharted territory altogether, like Cadeil, an intended ten-line bit-parter who ended up joining a major plot-point quest to kill his own brother because he couldn’t keep a sufficiently blank face and is a bit too naive. (It’s a very long story.) I saw it coming with all the dread inevitability of an oncoming train about halfway through the conversation he was having, but short of grandly dropping in on the story in person and completely derailing everything by existing, there wasn’t much I could do about it beyond stare for a minute and then get back to writing down what was going on.

I can decide how much of Cadeil’s story I include or cut out. I can write about it or not, as I please — but I can’t change the fact that he did what he did, said things with the gist of what he said, or that any time that group of people encounters his brother, their meetings will now be a million times more complicated. Sure, I can run back and change possibilities. Maybe in an alternate universe he was out fetching wood when the patrol came through, or something, and missed them altogether. But if they meet at all, that’s what will become of him. I can’t change that. Whatever message someone might think it sends, that’s who Cay is even if he is kind of an idiot, something he’s certainly not thanking me for saying about him.

Almost as much fun is the series of discoveries. Sometimes these people, these characters I have constantly running in the background, will do something that to me, at the time, looks completely inexplicable — but later, much later, I’ll come across events in their past somewhere that suddenly make me go “Wait, so all this time that’s why you reacted like that?! And here I thought you were just being seriously weird…” Bearing in mind that I’m not always looking for these events, that in some cases I’d almost forgotten the actions that they later explained… it’s all very entertaining! And yet again, there’s not that much I can do about it.

So it’s all very interesting to read about how you have to cut X here or insert Y there or have Z say something else. But me, personally, I just can’t do that, and while I can intellectually understand the concept, I can’t figure it out emotionally, let alone get it down to my subconscious — nor am I at all sure that I want to. It may have its flaws, but doesn’t everything? And anyway, most importantly, I like it!