Tag: Long Summer

Part One

I completed Part One of ‘Long Summer’ today and reflected on that. It is the first draft.

Part One. Three hundred pages. Seventy-seven thousand words.

I began it July 9th, 2016. A down computer interrupted my work on it. I was without the computer for several weeks while it was sent back to HP for repairs and returned to me. Then it took a few weeks to find the groove again. I basically lost the end of July and most of August.

Still, in thinking about this novel as it evolves and expands, I believe this novel could have three parts. More parts are conceivable as I learn more about these other worlds and civilizations, and the multiple, complicated plots develop. I don’t want to release or publish any of it until the entire novel is completed. As large as Part One is, I’ll probably release each novel as a part, but again, I don’t want to do so until they’re all done.

This could be a very long haul.

2

The Novel Bible

I started thinking about my novels’ bibles while reading Whitney Carter’s WorldBuilding Post today. Some good suggestions were in there and I’ve found and incorporated most of them on my own.

The one thing about naming and history conventions for me is to keep track of them. Not just what they’re named, but sometimes, why they’re so named. I keep a separate document for that, and usually have it opened and update it as I’m writing, or at the session’s end. The bible for ‘Long Summer’, sequel to ‘Returnee’, is over 7,000 words. That’s not really big; James Michener used to have binders of information.

More interesting to me is that I’ve learned that I do more research to develop and build the world than I do to write the story. While I will write from forty-five to ninety minutes on an average day (and end up with word counts from one thousand to three thousand words in a session), I spend several hours researching and developing the worlds, characters, settings and situations. This is true not just in science fiction, which is my preferred genre, but in mystery, which I also write.

For example, if someone was born in America in 1975 and the novel takes place in 2015, they’re forty years old. That’s easy. But what music did they listen to while growing up in America? Did they watch television, and what did they watch when they did? What significant historic events happened in their lifetime, and it were they affected? Technology is part of this, something that I remember from a comment my mother made. While she’d traveled across the United States during her lifetime, I flew on a commercial jet when I was eighteen, and she didn’t do so for almost twenty years after my first flight. As we work and live, it’s easy to forget that ubiquitous devices like computers and cell phones are relatively new to human existence. Our civilization and societies are rich with laws, technology and permanent solutions that no longer apply. It’s important for the novel’s honesty and integrity to bear these matters in mind to develop coherent characters and stories.

I like substantial verisimilitude to novels that I read, and I include it in the novels that I write. Some people would say that I put too much in but I love tangent explanations. It’s largely because I think people are complicated. Little is black and white to many. They may state that it’s black and white, and they may act like it’s black and white, but most are offering a sketch insight to their true beliefs. Some of this is driven by people being politically or emotionally sensitive (or the opposite, attempting to be deliberately rude and crude), acting out, or displacement. More often, people struggle to untangle the skeins of history, thinking and emotions. There is also a large contingency of lazy people, and people who are just too tired, worn out, or impatient to figure out what they think, so they take the easiest courses of thoughts and actions.

All of this is recorded, in shorthand, in the novel’s bible. In ‘Long Summer’, as in ‘Returnee’, it’s easy when addressing future Human development. Corporations dominate, so corporate structure and thinking dominate. These are calcified, turgid organizations driven by reducing overhead and increasing profit, crying out, “We are a team,” or, “We are a family,” when they need to encourage hard work and cooperation, shrugging and noting, “We are a business,” when they cut jobs. They’re governed by wealthy people living in bubbles. However, factions who oppose corporations do exist. They cite multiple issues with corporations for their existence as individuals and groups. They’re more challenging to develop.

Even more challenging are the other intelligent races that emerge in ‘Long Summer’. Six races, including another branch of Humanity (seven, if you include Humans that have spread out from Earth), dominate the known and settled galaxies. One of these races is a long gone race. Traces of them are found everywhere but there isn’t any evidence of where they went or why. Such vacuums aren’t acceptable; naturally, theories abound about what happened to them.

All of this is recorded in the novel’s bible. Brief entries are made about the order in which these races encountered one another and their relationships with one another. Two of these races (besides Humans) dominate but the others are written into the script in various manners. All of this is organized and recorded. My bible itself is an organic record, growing and changing shape. It began, as they always do, with a few bullet lists. I always go with what I need for the moment to move forward. As more information and understanding was demanded, I developed a more complex structure to impose order so I can easily find information (what colors was his/her eyes/skin/hair again?) without exploding with frustration.

It’s an odd confession to make as a pantser. Pantser is the term often applied to writers who don’t plan and outline their novels in advance. I prefer the expression ‘organic’ writing, in that you plant the seeds and let it grow. Others call it writing in the dark. That works, too, as your mind’s lights find and illuminate the way.

In a way, I think of this novel writing approach in the same way that journalism works. A story happens: scandal, an explosion, an attack, an arrest. We have the big picture. Details are needed. Motivation and other questions about what, how and why happen arise to be answered. Reporters rush to the scene. Interviews are conducted. Research is accomplished. Investigation are launched, and layers are peeled back.

That’s how I like it. I tried to be a planner. Frankly, I lacked the discipline. My ideas and characters excited me. Scenes and dialogue bloomed, and I was urged to rush right in. And I did.

Whatever works, is my motto. There is the perfect way, the classic way, the artistic way. Mine is an imperfect way, and I’m continually addressing it. Each of must survey and inventory ourselves as writers to learn our strengths and weaknesses and develop our preferences for how we write. And after we write, we learn to edit, revise, polish. Writing is a tangled endeavor.

Now, a quad shot mocha is at hand. Time to write like crazy, one more time. Tauren just encountered the Travail Avresti for the first time. This is an historic moment, the first time that Humans from Earth are facing another intelligent civilization.

I want to know what happens.

2

A Dark & Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

My psyche has been talking to me for the last few days. With some reluctance, I recognized what my psyche was telling me. Being a stubborn soul, I preferred ignoring my psyche for as long as I could. Yet, I’d come to a fork. I could continue to the right, along the path I’d been following. I already knew that was rocky. The going was treacherous and uneven. When it comes to writing, following a treacherous and uneven path is mentally and emotionally exhausting, especially if you know that following the other path would be a smoother journey. But —

Exceptions exist. But, the other path was the one my psyche was telling me to take. But the other path didn’t directly relate to the novel I was writing.

Yet it did; I needed to know what happened with Phileas and Brett. Generally, I knew Phileas is a highly respected scientist. Working for a major corporation, she led a team searching for the latest God Particle, a project known, with matter-of-fact drama, as the God Particle Search Project. Significant progress was slow, so another project, private and personal, the stuff of her childhood dreams, drew her.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Phileas first read those words when she was two, but once they were read, everything was changed. ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, by Madeline L’Engle, was the first book she read more than once, and in fact, went on to read a dozen more times. By the third time, she knew all the words and didn’t need to read the book, but settling into bed and opening up a screen above her face soothed her. Being in bed and secretly reading under the softly glowing faintly blue panel was cozy. It was a romantic escape for someone who was otherwise ruthlessly determined, logical, practical and mathematical. In fact, it was a dark and stormy night on Castle Prime, while visiting, when the weather control system in one of the domes malfunctioned, that crystallized the epiphanies that initiated her turn toward her personal project.

It was a dark and stormy night. 

For me to understand what happened with Brett and Phileas, I needed to know more about Phileas and then learn about what happened with her and Brett. I knew many basics. Brett had a son. He didn’t know he had a son. The son, Kimi, had been illegally conceived.

Kimi worked for Phileas on the GPS Project. Brett was a fourth-waver, inhabiting newly terraformed planets on the corporation’s behalf to prove it was safe. Kimi’s ‘fake’ father had manipulated the genetic maps related to Kimi and Brett. The systems had caught the errors but flawed results ended up reversing the maps so the systems thought Kimi was Brett and vice-versa. That’s the basis of the first novel, ‘Returnee’, available on KDP.

While writing ‘Returnee’, I established that the systems thought Brett was Kimi. What I didn’t establish but I knew was that as part of that, Phileas had inadvertently taken Brett when she thought she was abducting Kimi. She took Kimi, along with the rest of her team, because she’d traveled into the future. While in the future, she’d learned things, and now she was covering her trail, and attempting to keep others from following her path – because she knew, in science and technology, that major discoveries like hers rarely happen without like discoveries being made elsewhere.

The result was that the GUFIN virus was created and brought back from the future. And this is where the next novel, ‘Long Summer’, (the work in progress) comes into play. To know what happened with Brett, Phileas, the GUFIN virus, and the Travail, I had to know what happened when Phileas abducted Brett and wiped out his knowledge of what had happened.

And that’s what my psyche was ordering me to do: write that out so I fully understood it. Naturally, I had to write it out in story form, because I think in story-telling form when I’m writing fiction. So, thinking about Phileas and her background, and her literary hero, Meg Murry from ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, I was able to begin:

It was a dark and stormy night.

As I knew, the first line is actually homage to another novel — and Snoopy, of course, loves it — but once I wrote it, Phileas leaped to life.

Time to shut down and call fini to another day of writing like crazy. No words were written in the novel today, but so much progress was made.

0

Sex, Memory & Imagination

You’re living a long time. One hundred and five is now the average age of a human. That average is creeping up. We’re all living longer as medical technology monitors and addresses issues 24/7. People aren’t being born, and some children are being kept as children.

Thereby is an argument: if a child is kept physically, emotionally and intellectually at six years old because that’s the age their parent(s) prefer them, but they’ve been alive for forty years, how old are they? Most planets, corporations and governments hold that if they’re maintained at an age, they count at that age if it’s an age whereby they’re somebody’s wards or in a protected status. So, for example, some are adults (which varies mightily in the future) but look like they’re twelve, because they liked how they looked then, so they’re counted as their true age. But if they’re twelve and are treated as twelve years old even though they’re fifty, they’re treated as twelve.

Civilization is more complicated in the future.

One decision many face is what to embody. As memory is augmented to provide greater storage and enhance recall abilities because people are living longer, people typically embody their memories as an avatar that can be compiled as a physical presence. That way, instead of just engaging in internal dialogue with themselves, they can call out their memory and invite them to have a drink or share a meal while they discuss their recollections. Brett’s memory is a tanned blonde woman in a red dress (who doesn’t have a name) and Handley’s memory is a pirate named Grutte Piers, based on the real Piers Gerlofs Donia. These aren’t their first memories but they’re their current memories in ‘Long Summer’.

Something similar has evolved for sex. Many people have decided that fake sex with an avatar of their design is more enjoyable than having sex with another actual person. People have foibles. Foibles can be very irritating. The foibles can be mitigated to some degree but people are a bit unpredictable. Many people have learned that they don’t like their sex partners to be unpredictable.

To solve these issues, people often create one (0r more) sex avatars (sexatars?). Like the memory, it’s an embodiment that’s compiled to exist for a period. People can decide exactly who they resemble and how they’ll act. If they want, they can create animal avatars and have sex with animals as a human or compile or modify themselves to be animals and enjoy their sex. Whatever creepy depravities humanity enjoys can be indulged by creating sex avatars. A few people have married their sex avatars. Avatars are people, too, my friends, except they have different rights.

Sex and memory are the two main items people have embodied as avatars but a few people create others. Some have their intelligence or imagination embodied as an avatar that they can call out for visits. Brett has created an embodiment of his personal computer and communications systems, and calls it Carl. Others have gone the good and evil routes, creating twins of the opposite end of their moral spectrum (as they see it). A few enjoy themselves so much that their have avatars that are exactly like themselves created so they have themselves as company. Most find this doesn’t work well, that as people, they’re not the wonderful companions they thought they are.

All of the avatars are as that as anything humans create. Maintenance is needed or the avatars break down and cease functioning.

With all these facets acting in parallel, the population of humanity is slowly cresting, and the average age is creeping up. The oldest humans are upward of three hundred years old. Despite proliferation of new communication technologies and people living longer, people are living more and more in isolation, with only their memories, sex and other embodiments as avatar companions. Sometimes, they miss family or friends and have ideal avatars of them created, too. It makes for happier holiday meals. Meanwhile, Mom, Dad and Sis are alive on other worlds but never hear from Bro.

Yes, it’s an interesting and complex civilization, in the future. Another day of writing like crazy is in the books (ha, ha).

This post has been brought to you by coffee. Coffee: it’s good for thinking (and bowel movements).

4

Greetings from a Sexagenarian

Back when my mother was in her late seventies, she went dancing on Friday nights. She often mentioned how much she enjoyed it, and enthused about the old people and their dancing skills and energy.

That always drew my laughter. “The old people? Mom, you’re old.”

Impatience snapped through her response. “I mean the really old people, you know, in their nineties.”

While I understood her point, it amused me that she didn’t think of herself as old. Now, at sixty, I understand better.

My wife was in a conversation with a man in his mid-eighties. She’s a few years younger than me and mentioned to him that she was middle-aged.

He seemed amused. “Middle-aged? Isn’t that well behind you?”

I was taken back when she told me. If she’s younger than me and she’s not middle-aged, than what am I? What constitutes middle-age?

Does it matter?

Not really, and yes, and no. Middle-aged, as already demonstrated, is a vague, inaccurate term. Definitions by psychologists and institutions vary, as it does by era and culture.

Part of it, which disturbed Mom, and bothers me, are the connotations associated by these terms, young, middle-aged, and elderly. Think ‘young’ and contemplate the images and ideas springing to mind. Substitute ‘elderly’ and ‘middle-aged’.

Yet, in most of the advanced world, these labels mean less and less. So I’m taking up the Latin route. I’m sixty, so call me a sexagenarian. I like it. Easy to spell, and it has sex embedded right in it. Mom, in her eighties, is an octogenarian.

I mean, what does middle-age conspire to mean? I’ve been accused of being immature, old beyond my years, and an old man before his time. I’ve also been deemed young at heart by some, immature, or young in spirit by others. My older friends – in their late sixties to upper eighties – call me their young friend.

It’s all context and impressions. Like everything else, a spectrum of behavior, expectations and impressions establishes others’ perceptions and judgement. Yet this can change by day. Give me a short night of sleep and I can appear as a cranky old man. Pour a little beer in me and I can be as immature as a two-year old. Mostly, I’m somewhere in between.

I don’t dress ‘old’ but nor I dress ‘young’. I adopt dress that is neat without calling attention to me. My hair is thinning and retreating as fast as antarctic ice (but with less alarm), and when the sun gets its rays on it, it goes silver and white. Do I care?

Hell, yes.

And hell, no.

See, I’m trapped on that spectrum. I logically understand aging and its impact. I also appreciate the freedom of aging, and its limitations. I know I can’t do anything about it, nor influence others’ impressions of my age and their labels, so why care? But then someone says, “Isn’t middle-age behind you?” and I’m newly irked.

In the future setting of my novels, ‘Returnee’ and ‘Long Summer’, you can bet it’s addressed, because we’re driven by advertising, perception and self-image, themes that sharpen in that future setting. You can bet that a civilization that has developed a technological work-around to dying has done the same with aging’s impact and their appearance.

It becomes an exercise for the characters and their thinking. Many embrace genetic sculpting to develop a look which they like and others appreciate. It’s just like hair, mustache and beard styles and colors, or even jewelry. Some take up the approach, how do I want to look today? What color should my skin, eyes, and hair be? Others emulate famous people, but more establish a look and keep it. A few chose to resemble cats, dogs, dragons, centaurs, and other creatures. It’s almost free and relatively easy.

The 4G in my future (the fourth generation of space colonists) have taken it to an extreme, part of their statement about who they are and their stand. Their leaders look prepubescent. That fad is spreading. They think it’s a meaningful statement of who they are and represent, but others who have lived longer and done more, mostly understand how little that appearance really means. There are some who are more easily swayed, or want to be included in the new youth movement. It’s fun to think about and one of the great joys of writing fiction.

In one of my vaguely conceptualized ideas, people who become zombies immediately look young and beautiful, which sways a large segment of weak thinking people, who want to look young and beautiful again. And as zombies, they have no cares about work, taxes, politics, wars, civil rights or the environment.

Which takes me from here to there and back again. Because, after all, weren’t we really talking about mindless zombie thinking about what it means to be old?

 

0

‘Speak, Memory’ and Me

‘Speak, Memory’  is a recounting of one person’s creation of a bot based on a friend to cope with their grief. The bot is based on her friend’s emails. It is a fascinating read into how one person turns to clever use of technology and information to bridge her loss.

The tale has meaning to me for my writing. Memory is an enormous aspect of the future in ‘Returnee’ and ‘Long Summer’. While death is conquered through complex machinations involving resurrection, regeneration or cloning (multiple paths exist), and diseases and illnesses are staved off by embedded nano-meds (which use compilers and teleporters to seamlessly import medicines and treat you without pause), memory is a larger problem. First, your pre-death memories must be stored and accurately restored to you when you’re returned to the living. People living longer need to remember more, especially as space exploration and colonization exponentially expands and technology keeps racing ahead. Memory thus becomes augmented with biological drives as well as networks. You’re constantly connected.

As part of this extrapolation of what might be, memories of specific people, such as grandparents, are further developed through big data/social media mining. This creates a far deeper and broader database of their personality. Further, the database is housed in an avatar and AI dedicated to being that person. So, for example, your grandfather can be summoned into your presence as an avatar and converse and interact as your companion, even though he passed away several hundred years ago, or still lives, but is on the galaxy’s far side.

Last, as people struggle to remember specifics, many have created a separate avatar that houses the augmented, expanded personal memory. For Brett, his memory is an attractive tan blonde. He does not name her but calls her ‘memory’. Madison Handley, however, once based her memory on Mal Reynolds from ‘Serenity’ and ‘Firefly’. After out-growing it, she changes her memory’s appearance and disposition several times. By the time of ‘Long Summer’, when she’s become a pirate, her memory has taken on the aspect of Grutte Pier, the Frisian pirate formally known as Piers Gerlofs Donia.

As a further component of memory and extended living, I had to determine what route memory will take. Are future people’s memory perfect? What does it mean to perfectly recall a moment? Recent studies show that our memory is very imperfect, and those imperfections help us cope with existence and survive. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves. As part of that, which version of memory is collected? The perfect, unbiased version, or our personal edition? In the end, both are collected but only law enforcement normally accesses the perfect memory to resolve conflicts and solve crimes.

The rest of us prefer our personal recollections.

2

The Writing High

I’ve been working hard on three separate chapters in ‘Long Summer’, the sequel to ‘Returnee’. These chapters were all about the pirates.

It’s been stressful and challenging. Research and heavy thinking were demanded. I was putting together how the pirates interlock with the larger story. It was like trying to weave with spider webs sometimes.

The first chapter was exposition and interactions aboard the Narwhal as the new crew learned about one another. We were introduced to the main pirate character, Handley, her memory, Grutte Pier, and her parrot, JR. Handley’s background of being shaped by a reboot of ‘Serenity’ was included, and the ongoing debate among this loose confederation about being called pirates versus being called freedom fighters.

My use of ‘we’ in ‘we were introduced’ was deliberate in that last paragraph, as I met her and came to know her through the organic writing process. We’ve become pretty close.

The second chapter was about the pirate ship’s hunt for targets and increasing acrimony and dissatisfaction among the crew with the captain. None of them know him, and he’s a swearing doom and gloom machine. It seems like he’s always pissing on them.

The final chapter was the most satisfying to write and edit as the pirate ship Narwhal encountered the Intrepid and Missouri. Editing, revising, proofing and polishing led to that most glorious of experiences, a writing high. I sit back, so damned pleased with how the scenes were unfolded, meshed and finished. It’s one of hundreds of tasks required toward a finished novel, but it was a big one, and it feels awesome. This is absolutely why I write.

Now, though, wistfulness shrouds me. Half of my coffee remains and I think, what’s next? I’ve only been writing ninety minutes. My rear end isn’t even numb yet but I’ve emerged from the creating fog. Slowly the high drains behind the demands to continue. The novel isn’t finished.

Weeks, maybe months, of writing, editing, et al, remain. For now, I’ll enjoy the high, or more correctly, given my nature, try to enjoy it.

My coffee is cold anyway.

Cheers

3

Apologies to Joss Whedon

Many science fiction works have affected and inspired me. Hundreds of books, of course, from fantasy like ‘The Hobbit’ and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, to ‘hard’ science fiction, like Asimov’s Foundation series, and books and series by authors such as Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Biggle, le Guin, Butler, and many more. The ‘Star Trek’ franchise is a large influence, but also ‘Battlestar Galactica’, movies like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ ‘Bladerunner’ (along with several other movies based on Philip K. Dick’s works), ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ and more recent offerings such as ‘District 9’. One series and movie I really enjoyed, however, was Joss Whedon’s adventures of Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds, and his crew on Serenity’.

Three things happen in my distant, planet terraforming, space-colonizing future. One is that people are still affected, inspired and shaped by these fictional works. Second, the series is often ‘rebooted’ multiple times. And third, when the reboot takes place, some fundamentals are changed.

Rebooting is a recent trend. We used to just call them a re-make. But as books and movies are rebooted, they’re often changed. Look at all the changes we’ve seen in the reboots and re-makes of Sherlock Holmes. They’re often updated (such as the ‘Holmes’ series, where Watson is a vet of the war in Afghanistan), or given new skills (see Robert Downey Jr’s performance of Guy Ritchie’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’), but their sex can be changed (like Lucy Liu playing Watson on ‘Elementary’), or their race (James West in ‘Wild, Wild West’), to provide new angles.

So, in my future setting, one of the characters was inspired by Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’. In their future, the movie was rebooted as a series, and then more movies followed. But Mal’s character was changed from a man to a woman. Mal was a man (in my version) who took on a female sex and appearance after his wife disappeared. See where all this is going? In a way, future Mal is a Josey Wales – Richard Kimball – Robin Hood aggregate. Mal is a female, with an all-female crew. Jayne, portrayed by Adam Baldwin, is re-named Mahrk, so the character, a female, would have a pseudo male name. My character fantasized about being Mal and traveling the universe in her own ship, and thus ended up working in space for a corporation.

Stealing from reality, many people actually believe Sherlock Holmes was a real person. Groups and societies are dedicated to this premise. Likewise, my hero, Handley, was once part of a group who believe Mal Reynolds was real, and part of a secret history that has since been covered up.

So, apologies to Joss Whedon for what I’m doing to your creation in the future, but thanks for giving it to us.

And now my coffee cup is empty, and I’m finished writing for today…for the moment.

4

The Pirates

I’m at a point in the novel, Long Summer (sequel to Returnee) where the pirates are about to enter.

Yes, this is science fiction. Yes, these are space pirates (cue dramatic music). Or cue a Monty Python moment.

I always like ‘fly in the ointment’ tales. That’s the pirates’ role in Long Summer. They’re naturally a plot trigger to cause the stories to bank sharply into another direction, bringing the three disparate story lines into contact with one another at last, thirty-five thousand words into the novel. Creating  the pirates enabled me to embark on my favorite fiction writing activity: making things up. In this case, I was given permission to make up the pirate ship and crew. Who are they, why are the pirates, where did they come from and how did they come to have this ship?

The ship is the CSC Narwhal. CSC is Castle Corp Security, a spin-off from the original Castle Corporation that dominates the Returnee series as one a major part of the setting. (The corporation is constantly restructuring, re-organizing, acquiring and divesting.) As Castle Corporation was originally an Anglo-American effort when they first formed on Earth (with roots in 3D printing, with specific focus on home security devices…from there to space), the company sometimes invokes its heritage when naming ships. This was strongly evidenced in the naming of the security ships (the preferred nomenclature over warship). I’d remembered Narwhal from my history lessons, so I looked up Narwhal and confirmed its role in England’s maritime history, confirming it was part of the Arctic Fleet. Two Brit submarines were then named the same, along with a US sub. So, sweet, that worked out.

(I had to refer back to my Returnee notes a little as I worked out that naming, confirming corporations and financial consortiums led the way into space. Governments had little to do with it.)

I then needed to further define my new vessel’s manning, which is complementary to its role. As a security vessel, Narwhal is small, with three squadrons of droid fighters. Why droid fighters? I started with manned weaponry and realized that robots dominate my future. It would be weird to have manned fighters. But humans maintain control….

Essentially, I evolved the Droid Commander. Droid Commanders remotely oversee the flying of four droid fighters simultaneously from pods on the Narwhal. Yes, we have the sophisticated technology to do that in my future. Likewise, Droid Techs remotely manage maintenance/software/hardware, keeping the fighters armed and flying, repairing them via nano-bots, droids and automation.

Each Narwhal squadron has three Droid Commanders, each flying four droid fighters. So each squadron is twelve fighters. Three squadrons, thirty-six fighters, nine each Droid Commanders and techs. A squadron commander coordinates their activities with the ship and mission briefs.

Narwhal is structured to run silent, fast, launching quick strikes and then bailing. Their defensive systems are lightweight and automated. They’re not going to bombard a planet or take on a battleship. They’re more likely to run escort and interdiction missions.

Once I had those things in place, what did I need for manning for the actual ship, the Narwhal? Well, again, it’s automated, and lightly manned. I ended up with three defensive coordinators. Commander, DO, pilots to fly it (in the event of worst case situations), navigator (overseeing the droids and systems), intel officer, techs to treat it.

Shuttles? Escape pods? Logistics? Medical? All done by droids, except I decided the three shuttles would have human pilots. Ten techs oversee droids that do the repairs.

So there it was, forty-seven humans crewing the Narwhal and its squadrons.

Since it’s going head to head with River Styx, the stasis pod ship, I went through the  same exercise for the Styx (which has only light defensive systems). Then I mentally plotted the sequence of events as I walked over here to write today. The twists arose on their own, pleasing and exciting me, further evolving my sketchy plot.

(Quite deliberately, because the pirates are out to disrupt corporate domination of space and human activities, Castle Corporation also owns the River Styx. The pirates love the irony of a ship they appropriated from the Castle Corporation, stretching the truth, as the Castle Corp had spun off the division that owns and operates Narwhal,  attacking another Castle Corp vessel.)

This summarizes my basic writing approach. I begin with a concept or a character. In this case, three ideas came together. That gives me a bare structure. As an analogy, if my novel is a car trip, I’m getting in and pointing the vehicle in the general direction of a horizon I see, with the vaguest idea of what’s over that horizon, and what’s between here and there. That works for each chapter, story line and character arc.

Reflecting on all of this today, I recognize how much my writing approach parallels my other methodologies. As a senior NCO in the USAF, I was always imposing and maintaining order and discipline, but also loved instilling vision in my people about how to improve ourselves and our operations. To do that, I’d simply seize a direction and go for it, correcting as I went. Likewise, in my last position as a data scientist with IBM, when given a challenge, I mentally played with it until something formed, and then I launched myself into it. And in my youth, when I was taking art classes, painting and drawing, sudden inspirations would seize and carry me.

The confrontation between River Styx and Narwhal awaits. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

3

The Hip Bone Is Connected to the Tachyon

I’m having fun with science fictional physics, conceiving way out ideas for ‘Long Summer’, the sequel to ‘Returnee’. Part of this is playing with the chip. What’s a chip, you say? This is actually a chi particle. 

The chi particle is the essence of life energy, the spark that brings inanimate matter to life. In my grand theories, there is a formula of balance that I’m still working out involving the need for the universe to maintain an equilibrium between the chi energy and all of the rest. Most importantly for the entire balance of understanding, the chi particle begins in the realms of dark matter.

Additional characteristics for my grand particle begins with the hypothetical and unproven particle, the tachyon. Like the tachyon, the chip travels faster than light, traveling even faster than the tachyon. Its imaginary mass attracts tachyons. Tachyons become knotted with the chips. As knotting happens, the tachyon draws energy from the chip, slowing both the tachyon and chip. But the chip’s mass is not a direct proportion of the tachyon’s mass, but compounds the tachyon’s mass, adding to the knotted chip’s mass. As the chip-tachyon knot slows toward the speed of light, the tachyon gains more energy, slows more and degrades, giving up its mass to the chip. The chip, acquiring actual mass, begins a transition from dark matter to matter and acquires gravitons. The chi knot seeks the proper stew of atoms and conditions to develop and begins evolving as a life form.

This all is pretty preliminary. It has no math underpinnings, and no doubt many people will tell me either, you’re drinking too much coffee, or you’re fucking nuts. They’ll also grimace, appalled by my display of ignorance, but it’s fun for me, and provides further structure for developing my plot and writing the novel. I mean, this is why we call it science fiction.

Sometime, when I’ve advanced my thinking about it more, I’ll post a snapshot of tachyon telepathy. Remember, as Brett learns (eventually), what happens in stasis, doesn’t always stay in stasis.

I’m twenty-six thousand words into ‘Long Summer’. The summer’s computer issues threw me out of my writing – conceiving – imaging rhythm, and it humbled me. I gleaned how much I take for granted the ability and opportunity to sit down and write.

Got my mocha. Time to write like crazy, one more time.

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