Re-Search II

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

Sometimes, it feels like all you have to do in Sci-Fi is make something plausible and easy to reach for the average person on the street, bus, or hospital trolley.

It almost feels as if research to this end is lazy learning – there are many people who strive all day, every day of the year to reach proof of some amazing theory, develop a new process, identify the very building blocks of the Universe.

But it’s not. I still learn – sometimes mind-boggling things. I have to “Stand on the shoulders of giants” not because plausible hokum is low-hanging fruit, but because the sheer concepts of interstellar travel are so absurdly high. I think sometimes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has it about right, in that the human race is a giant supercomputer doing all the legwork and sharing all the know-how. A lot of people work in the crunch department and people like me work in the fluff studio.

I mean sure, I could make a mcguffin (technical term) and have some kind of infinity stone or magic carpet or something, but I like knowing how things work. That’s how I like my Sci-Fi because it makes it all easier to swallow. I believe “Authors” refer to this as Verisimilitude although to be fair, I see that word everywhere now and it’s as much as a writey-word (technical term) as the so-called dreaded Purple Prose, but I digress.

So what I’m trying to say, Dear Reader, is that everyday is a learning day and no learning is lazy or wasted. “Information is Victory”, someone once said.

Although getting this book finished feels like it will be a miracle. (Which is another topic entirely). It also means I have a lot of acknowledgements to make!

Editorially Speaking

“A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.” 

Israelmore Ayivor

A good friend, who has helped a lot with my writing and kept me going over a few bumps, asked me to take a look at some of his work, so I’ve been splitting my time between that and my own projects.

For the record, it was a very good story and since he’s probably reading this, he’d better submit his work or I won’t be happy!

To be fair though, it was a humbling thing. When a story is being written it’s yours, you want to keep it safe and hide it, protect it from critics and the harsh words that can wreck it, because once you’ve finished it, it’s perfect and you know it backwards. The feeling you get finishing a project – no matter how many words it is – is a great one.

Being able to help with something like that, dear Reader, is a similar feeling. Good luck with your submission RJ.

Re-Search

“Research is creating new knowledge.”

Neil Armstrong

The great thing about Science Fiction is the ability to do what you want with limited research – depending on how ‘hard’ you want that SF to be. A lot of the need for this stems from innovative ways first popularised by Star Trek, Specifically The Next Generation, where some techno babble would issue forth and the people in the audience would be wowed.

Research for me meant going to a library, getting hold of books, that kind of thing, because I’m old enough to be pre-world wide web. Now, I can just hit up the search engine and it’s there.

It helps to have an analytical background though, because just as there are lots of dead-ends, in a library, there’s a lot of bad quality on the internet – but I digress.

When I was re-drafting Rebellion of Mars, another of my flights of Sci-Fi, I decided I wanted to root it firmly in fact. This leads to a Science-Faction corruption of the genre which sometimes goes a bit too far for me, mainly because my Degree is in Law, not Quantum Physics.

The reason I wanted to do this was simple – world building relies on consistency and rules. You must have an envelope to work inside – it can be as big as you want it, but it has to be there. That way you don’t have dumb characters getting out of the pit by some Deus Ex Machina fiat.

So my research led me to a lot of places. I had to know about exoskeletons, gravity lensing, exotic materials, Lagrange points, astronomical distances, invent a whole new method of firing a person ten billion miles in an hour, that kind of thing (yes, it’s probably wrong but it sounds plausible and that dear Reader, is the trick).

That research is now in cast-iron moulds for my use whenever I go into the next draft of Rebellion of Mars and her sequel, Crisis at Jupiter. The one problem I now find myself with is that for Children of the Glyph, I didn’t study Mars enough, focusing on the Macro as opposed to Micro. Fool!

This is causing several plot problems with scale, because Mars is quite a big lump of rock (same land mass as Earth) and some craters are about 1000km in diameter. I challenge you to read up about Olympus Mons and not have your mind blown.

So it’s back to the drawing board a little bit, dear reader and I think what I need to do is make the envelope a little smaller…

Fangs for the Memories

I usually have one project I’m focusing on, but often have many other projects in the back of my mind for several years.

David Allee

My current work is a Sci-Fi action horror thing, that is consuming my almost every waking moment trying to get it right. I keep altering stuff, playing with it, but I am moving forward.

Dear reader – let me do some time travel with you and go back. To 2014.

I wrote a novel that year and two poems about the same subject matter, (unpublished of course) but there was a small problem. A hard-drive error and a computer crash slaughtered them. I cannot honestly tell you if I have them anywhere. They were action-horror too, except they involved vampires.

One story was called Ashes to Ashes (no, nothing to do with Bowie) and followed an elite group of Vampire hunters and the Organisation trying to wipe them out. Dust to Dust followed on from this and dealt with lots of the fallout, but was never finished. (Sequelitis see?) Both were inspired by poems of the same name (my work).

In 2015 I found the poems. I then combined these into a novel called The Covenant which kind of amalgamated the lot into a more cohesive whole. Well now I’m revisiting it. This isn’t bodice ripping stuff though – yes it has neck nibbling, but it’s inspired by three main things – the excellent Channel 4 (British TV) series Ultraviolet, (where I was introduced to the fab Idris Elba) John Carpenter’s Vampires and a dash of Vampire: The Masquerade, by White Wolf.

Big Dris’ mob had the realism and the officiousness of the British establishment, with some interesting takes on common myth, Vampires was very action orientated but too gruesome and VTM had great lore.

Moral of the Story: Everything blends.

With my newfound writing powers (ha!), I assaulted the first chapter and made it better. I know I can improve it more, but I have to keep my eye on the here and now, as Yoda once said.

Sequelitis

“He who starts many things, finishes but few.”

Chinese Proverb.

I can understand why Emma Darwin calls writing an itch. I completed Warlord of Azhov and now I want to write another novella. The problem I have that I wrapped that up tightly and now I don’t know where to go with it. Nothing is suggesting itself.

This is odd for me because I get the urge to sequel something very quickly into a project. I know which characters are going to live and I get the idea for how the sequel is at least going to start.

It’s frustrating, because I know there is another story to tell and after that another. (Sigh). It’s a problem because different projects help to sidestep Writers Block, which I have to say I’m not suffering too badly at the moment – I’ve moved forward a bit with Children of the Glyph and got the first two chapters where I want them.

And now I’ve got a sequel planned for that too. Which begs the question – am I writing these stories, or are they writing me?

A Novella Idea

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

Leonardo Da Vinci

The Novella is a great thing, I discovered. I’ve been hammering away at Sci-fi books for a while now and am juggling three of them, when a random conversation with my friend Polly led to a burning impatience for me to write the story we had manged to build from the barest of bones and a with a brief homage to Frank L Baum and a certain coloured brick road.

I’m not always terribly patient. This is both a benefit and a burden – good because it means I get off my duff and at the drop of a hat I will get something done, but also sometimes because I’m impetuous and run into the fire without thinking – I like to call this phenomenon “Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Speed.”

For all it’s faults though, I think my Novella hit the right speed. Confession time, I wrote a Novella. Even more I published it on amazon and entered it for their Storyteller competition. It’s not huge at 75 printed pages, but I did write it in 6 days. I can’t remember them, the words just came, the Characters just…were. (Somehow a Mongoose appeared and I think he’s the best Character I have written to date).

The Novella has really helped with my focus and understanding of structure. It has also helped me to build outlines for my stories and to better engage with advice from what I call other “Learn to Write” Authors, like K M Weiland and Emma Darwin, both of whom were suggested to me by my editor, Hannah Grego.

You can find Warlord of Azhov on the Amazon store and actually see what my writing is like. If you do pick it up (it’s free on Kindle Unlimited!) a review would be very welcome, but is not essential – although the feedback would be exceptionally useful going forward.

Anyway, dear Reader, back to the long road of boulder pushing. I can feel the crack of the Da Vinci inspired whip already.

Coming Up Short

The long draft, the long writer’s journey as you piece everything together in a big jigsaw is great, but it’s an uphill struggle pushing a boulder., so I thought I’d take a bit of break from hammering my crazy sci-fi and try something else instead.

I entered a couple of competitions, one for a 50 Word Challenge a Poetry competition of 40 lines or less and a 1500 word challenge. They were a pretty good exercise of the old noggin, especially the almost Micro-fiction competition, the prize for which is a mug – awesome!

I also read that a Novella is good for a writer’s muscles – teaches the pace and structure elements of something bigger whilst being able to keep on target with plot, but more on that another time.

So to cut a long story short – changing pace is refreshing. I shall do it more often dear reader and maybe you can too.

The Second Draft

This is the second attempt at this blog post, dear reader and I’m still trying to get the hang of it and am trying to decide on Stream Of Consciousness vs Diary Writing

For now I think the latter is best.

I’m currently working on a science-fiction book called Children of The Glyph, which is a military sci-fi meets horror set across Earth, Mars and the Moon. I’m having a couple of direction problems with it when it comes to Second Draft.

I have Outlined it (despite being a terrible NOP – as James Scott Bell puts it) and the first draft stuck to the plot and the 3-Act formula, but now, come the second draft, the story is talking to me, telling me it doesn’t want to go in the planned direction anymore.

The thing is, the new ideas I’ve had seem to make sense, but it’s going to be a word slaughter – I know Steven King said to “Kill your Darlings” but it almost feels like the new direction is going to be the real first draft and there’s going to be more Verbal bodies on the stage than at the end of a Shakespeare play.

The thing is, I can see the new story, where before I only had an understanding of what had to happen. I suppose this is what a second draft is for, as Neil Gaiman said.

Back to the drawing board – but I’ll save the off-cuts – although that’s another post. What about you dear reader? Have you slashed and burned your “darlings” so much it felt like starting from scratch? Let me know.

Going Forwards

“The Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Chinese Proverb

I’ve been writing stories now for twenty years and never published them. Each one of those years has laid the foundation for something else, has helped me to plot journeys for people who don’t exist and now, this Blog is an admission I want to plot my own journey.

Mightier Is The Pen is going to be an electronic repository for my wrangling, tribulations, problems and any successes or wins I make as I learn to write and develop everything in each layer of the proverbial onion.

I’ve decided to be a writer and progress from that to an author and you dear reader, are invited.