My novel's journey: Multi-genre week

This was me last week.  I'm still working on plot cards for Gapman, and writing when I don't have plot ideas coming.  I also did another sweep of The Old Man and the Void because my SF crit group, Tharsis Tuus, has revived after a long hibernation.  I'm trying to get ahead in all my June blogs so that I can take vacation, as well.  Fabianspace, DragonEye, and Rocket Science for the Rest of Us will continue to have posts.

Mostly, however, I've been in the read-aloud edits for Neeta Lyffe Zombie Exterminator 2: I Left My Brains in San Francisco.  This one has a strong romantic element because Neeta and Ted get together at last; unfortunately, they are both kind of dancing around the fact that they love each other, and Neeta is also suffering from insecurity from the trauma of chopping Bergie's head off in Zombie Death Extreme.  The result was, I inadvertently "committed chick lit."  The women understood where Neeta was coming from, but the men thought she was annoying or out of character.  I thought I'd fixed it in the last round of edits, but Rob let me know that I still had not gotten the chickness out the book.  Fortunately, he's the kind of guy who can say, "Here is where you're going wrong.  Try this..."  So guys, rest assured, you will not be reading chick lit, and you can thank Rob Fabian, Dough Davidson, Lee Mather, and Walt Staples for it.

In other news, it's my birthday, and I feel like giving you a present.  The first five people to go to my website, pick out a book and e-mail me using the comments section will get an electronic or print copy, their choice, depending on if I have them in my home stock.

My Novel's Journey: Old Man in the Void - On a New Track and Full Speed Ahead!

To think just a few weeks ago, I was wondering if I'd make it to 50,000 words on this novel.  As of this writing, I'm at 70,000 and charging ahead with 3,000 words a day average.  The funny thing is, the writing took off again when I came to the end of the outline.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway ends when the fisherman, Santiago, arrives back at his fishing village with nothing but his life, his boat and the carcass of the marlin he'd fought so hard for.  Nonetheless, he is revered for his efforts, wins back his apprentice, and goes on with life as before.  That's really how I intended The Old Man in the Void to end, too, except for one thing:  It's not as easy to escape a black hole with your life and your ship intact.

Dex, my "fisherman" woke up in the hospital after major genetic surgery to combat the spaghettification effect, and his ship--or, more precisely, his AI, Santiago--nowhere to be found.  Thanks to time dilation, he's also 500 years into the future.  Not exactly a good recipe for picking up where life left off.  But I planned it, I really did.  A young man fascinated by the past and the Disk was going to help him acclimate, find Santiago and marry him to a new ship, and they'd be on their way.

I couldn't do it.  It was too easy, too dull and didn't let Dex be the hero of his own story.  No, Dex had new challenges to face, and the first was finding Santiago.

Now Dex has found his beloved AI, but only by putting himself and his friends in grave danger.  Now Dex and Santiago are teaming up again to beat the odds and save the day (and this time, with greater success.)

I'm off the track and writing blind, but the funny--and thrilling--thing is, everything I wrote using my careful outline is naturally playing into the rest.  A couple of times, I've even been able to better understand (and revise) what I'd done based on new events I'm writing now.

I am so excited to finish this book. It's been a great challenge.

Note:  I actually wrote this blog on Friday, Feb 17.  On Feb 19, I finished the book.  77,000 words or so and a very different book than the one I intended to write.  Like I've joked with friends: I never really planned to rewrite Hemingway; I'd be horrible.  I wanted to write Hemingway-inspired Fabian, and that I can do.  I'll blog next week on things I learned with this experiment.  Until then, SQUEEEE!  I FINISHED!

My Novel's Journey: Old Man in the Void - The Alien Mind

One of the fun things about science fiction and fantasy is getting into a mindset totally different from your own.  It's challenging, too, because you have to still make the alien (or fantasy) species understandable to humans. 

I've been having a a lot of fun with the warrior species in The Old Man in the Void.  Only known as "The People,  they are not one species but two, caught in a war that led not only to the death of every living being, but also the destruction of both their star systems.  Nonetheless, their battles continue on in the automated warships they created.  One of those warships drags Dex and his ship, the Santiago, across the Event horizon.  Dex and Santiago must master the ship and use it to pull them back to reality before enemy drones, the damage to the ships, or the enemy drones destroy them as well.

Now, as you know, I was inspired to this story from Hemingway's The Old Man in the Sea, and so it's probably no brainer that the species are my literary nods to the marlin and the sharks.  So I wanted the People to have a different view of killing and death, something more analogous to the Law of Nature, but I wanted sentient, emotional beings, too.  So rather than fighting out or hate, suspicion, greed or any number of human reasons, the People view each other as a brotherhood in competition, conflict being a beautiful thing full of honor and bringing change. 

From that, I developed the mythology:  Hudon, god of war, woos Elomij, the goddess of beauty and change.  In doing so, he manipulates the world, twisting it from her own plan, but convincing her in the end that he's improved it with his bloody motives.  In the end, however, they will fight and she will leave him, but not because she repents of what they've done, but because she finds constant war boring.  She will form a new people, while Hudon finds a new consort--Lady Death.

Since all the People are long dead, we can only see this in the myths and the machinery left behind, so that's been a fun challenge, too.

Another reason for having an alien mind is to contrast it against the human one.  Just as we learn by being exposed to new things, so do our characters--and often, the point is so they can learn about themselves, whether they use that knowledge to make a change or not.

A robot passed him by, silent and uncaring, apparently programmed to ignore anything that didn't pose a direct threat.  Intent on its mission, the same mission it had been fulfilling for God-knew how long.  Had the People been the same way, moving from conflict to habit to instinct, until neither species stopped to actually notice the changes, the carnage, around it?  Had they traveled mindlessly into oblivion with the same inevitability of their spaghettified systems spiraling into the singularity?  Had there been no Dukochev zones in their entire history, when they had a moment of stability to stop and wonder why they were so intent on slitting their brother's throat?  Did they hate so much?

Or did they hate at all?  Hudon's words came back to him from when he'd told the God he'd hunted both the People and the Worthy Foe:  "Is there a difference?"  And the myths of the Elomij, if indeed, they related to their ancient roots in this system, never differentiated between races.  They chose to be brothers, yet they chose to place victory in the conflict over everything, even their own survival.

Is that what I did?  Am I in this mess because I was too stubborn to put my own life and Santiago’s safety ahead of victory over some artifact?

The map on his faceplate was signaling a junction ahead he needed to take.  Time enough later to examine his conscience.  Right now, he needed to survive--and that did mean victory over the drones on their way to destroy this ship and them with it.  Victory, or at least a draw that would allow them to escape.

My Novel's Journey: Old Man in the Void - Hitting the books

I've talked before about how writing The Old Man in the Void is stretching me as a writer.  I'm writing in a fairly new genre for me--hard science fiction (or maybe medium since I'm not going to do the math on the page for you.) The nice thing about it is that it's illuminating areas where I need to grow that I hadn't seen in my other books because the pace is different and the focus is elsewhere.

Lately, I've been writing fast-moving, fun stuff, heavy on emotions or humor and light on setting and extrapolation of fact or theory.  As a result, I can "get away" with things in those books that I can't in The Old Man in the Void.  For example, while I describe taking ATVs through a jungle road in Live and Let Fly, I can still depend on the reader to understand vehicles, driving, even jungle.  However, when I say "Santiago rode the swarl in the accretion disk," most readers will be left drooling unless I've made it clear what a swarl and an accretion disk are, and how one rides them.  Even more fun, swarls are made up, but not accretion disks (which is the donut-shaped disk of matter surrounding a black hole), so I have to make my imagination make sense in that world and be plausible in ours.

But that's not the only thing.  As I'm dealing with a tone and characters different from my usual stuff, I'm realizing that I've gotten limited in my writing.  I tend to fall back upon favorite phrases, ways of showing emotion, scene progression.  While those have served me well in my fantasy and comedic horror, they stand out and even stall me in the genre of hard/medium science fiction.  It's intimidating, and sometimes, I just want to chuck it and write Gapman or something fun.  But it's because it's intimidating that I know I need to rise to the challenge.

So, in addition to continuing to write the book, I'm also taking extra time to study writing, not by reading writing books, but by reading the great authors in my genre.  I've got a notebook where I'm taking notes of phrases, getting ideas for educating readers on the world, and watching how they put in information. My best discovery to date:  David Drake and David Weber do a lot of what I'd been warned against as "info dumping," but they are such masters that you read right along and enjoy it.  I honestly think it has to do with genre, too--military/political sci fi, especially when you're deep into a series, benefits from those "dumps.  As a result, I'm no longer as afraid to stick a few extra paragraphs of important information in the dialogue.  In fact, this week, I went back and added a lot, and I think it's stronger for it.

While I might not apply all the methods I'm learning here to my other books, I'm definitely coming away from this experience a stronger writer, so the lessons in this are
1. Branch out--don't just stick to "your genre" or "your brand"
2. Read widely, especially authors that hit your weak areas.  Take notes.
3. Admit your weaknesses, then find tutors to get past them.

My Novel's Journey: Old Man in the Void

This week was filler week for me.  Since I had that month-long break before jumping into the manuscript again, I thought I should go back and reread, and since it was a yucky week, it seemed a good assignment.  I discovered a couple of consistency errors, like I was calling the alien ship "she," or "it," and I found a couple of spots where I decided to strengthen the descriptions, add some dream sequences, and such.

I have a lot of dream and memory sequences.  Dex is old, getting into his eighties, but even more, he's been working on the edges of a black hole for a long time, and time moves at different rates depending on how close you are to the singularity itself.  This had been fun to try to figure out as far as navigation, but even more interesting for how it affects the human body.  I postulated that this can affect both the body and the mind, separately or together.  His wife, Scarlet, died from the physical effects; her body aged at different rates.  Dex will suffer neurological symptoms, where memories become very real.  There is medication to help allay the effects, but even as they are battling the other ship and the black hole, he and his ship's AI are battling the ailments of his own mind.

It's kind of interesting to see it played out.  Sometimes, Dex is aware of his lapses; sometimes, they leave him confused; on a few occasions, he can fight the memory.  Santiago, the AI, knows the warning signs and will try to draw him back to the present, but it doesn't always work.  Here's an example:

He saw Scarlet sitting at the console, slouching back, her head tilted over her shoulder so she could look at him.  Her hair shone like moonlight and her eyes sparkled with love and admiration.  You and your mysteries.  You haven’t lost your need to find something new, her memory chuckled.

“Still haven’t,” he muttered to himself, as his hands roved the swell. 

He’d found the first relics, to be sure, even adapted its shield technology to protect Santiago, but he still hadn’t unlocked their secrets.  The small ships that escaped the disk were too damaged, and they lacked a Rosetta stone to unlock the language of either alien race.  They only guessed that there were two races or species at war based on the disparate sizes and shapes of the drones as well as the stylistic differences of the languages.

He grunted to himself.  Leave the language to the linguists.  Even the physics had progressed past his understanding.  That wasn’t who he was, anyway.  Scarlet had seen that early on, on the cliffs of Squatty Mountain “You’ll never be satisfied just thinking about someone else’s discoveries,” she’d told when he debated about applying to Keldar.  “You want to be out there, hunting down the data yourself.”

Pretty Scarlet with pretty wavy hair.  Where had she gone?  He wanted to talk to her about Keldar, ask her to go with him—

“Dex?” A ship’s voice pulled him from his memory and he blinked, confused by the colorful miasma around him.

“Dex, are you all right?”

“I…”  Dex.  That was his name.  And the ship?

“Dex.  You’re onboard Santiago.  Do you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you,” he snarled.  But his hands shook and his breath came fast and shallow.  He felt a tingle on his wrist and looked at the blue medical band.  The digital display noted the time and date and amount of medication it had just dosed him with.

 It's been a challenge to me to write a man twice my age yet probably my equal or more in strength and physical ability...but that's another blog.  (Oh, and because I get asked this a lot, but seldom have an answer.  For once, I know who I'd like to play Dex in a movie.  Harrison Ford, hands down!  Ironically, it's his voice more than his looks that I'm identifying in Dex.)