Six Sentence Sunday – The Shuttle 3

First six. Second six.

Dara is the pilot on a routine space shuttle trip, which has just become less than routine:

Something must have leaked just enough heat into the fuel tank for one piece of Fracture to detonate early, and that set off a chain reaction.

Dara sighed and started the emergency procedures. This was not going to be an ordinary milk run.

“There is no need to be concerned,” Dara said to the passengers and the cabin crew over the shuttle’s video screens. “Our engines are down, except for the small docking jets which will not be enough to get us to a stable orbit. However, we have six hours before our orbit will decay significantly, and Orbital Rescue and Recovery has been notified.”

Again, any feedback would be much appreciated, and thanks!

Six Sentence Sunday – The Shuttle 2

First six.

I just set the scene so far – Dara is a somewhat bored space pilot on a shuttle run up to Astris station…

Ever since they’d discovered hyperspace travel, there was more and more shuttle travel from the surface up to Astris, the main way-station for travellers that would be going even further. But Dara had never even been to the moon…

Suddenly the cockpit shook, and several status panels on her screen went bright red. She pushed a few commands to find out more details about the problem, and ended up staring at an exterior view of the main fuel tank.

There was metallic debris floating away, wreckage from a large crater that had blasted out from inside the ship, and also milky translucent faceted rocks – her remaining fuel supply. Fracture was the most efficient propellant ever invented, but it was also unstable.

Again, thank you very much for any comments and feedback!

Six Sentence Sunday – The Shuttle 1

Okay, I’m starting a new short story as of this week, a science fiction drama piece.

Dara checked all the displays as the sky outside the window faded from blue towards black. Everything within tolerance, including the important graph of altitude versus time; she was exactly on pace with the company schedule. “Eleven o’clock milk run, San Diego to Astris station. At least I’m a good milk run pilot.”

Dara pressed a few buttons on the control board to bring up a telescope view of her destination. Astris looked the same as ever, an irregular cylinder with stumpy projections spinning in deep space as it rotated.

Thanks for any feedback, guys!

G is for Genre Lounges

The Script Frenzy A-Z challenge so far…

I was originally planning to do G for Graphic Novels, which a lot of people write in Script Frenzy, but since I never have, and didn’t arrange anything beforehand with asking people questions, I thought I’d cover something that I do have firsthand knowledge about.

The Genre Lounges are a collection of Script Frenzy forums that cover just about any genre you might want to write a script in – Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Action-Adventure, Comedy, Mystery, Drama, Romance, and more. Many genre keywords are set up to share lounges, so as to encourage discussion between similar genre writers and get fresh perspectives.

And within your Genre Lounge, you can start a discussion on just about anything you like, asking for help or answers to genre-specific questions, or just procrastinating and having fun.

So, that’s about it for this week of the A-Z challenge. Hopefully, I’ll get six sentences of my script up for Six Sentence Sunday, and we’ll be back with the A-Z of it all on Monday!

Insecure Writer’s Support Group – February

Well, it’s the first Wednesday of the month, and time to check in with the Insecure Writer’s Support Group and share some of our troubles and/or encouragement with fellow insecure writers.

I’ve already unloaded a bit about how hard I’m finding it to start writing new short stories. Partly that’s because I’ve learned so much lately about what a good short story needs to do – to show us the most important thing that happens in a character’s life, show them struggling against a great obstacle and taking charge of their own fate, and growing as a person.

And as I try to think of story ideas, there are the nattering ghosts of doubt that keep whispering in my ear, “That’s a cliche idea, everybody’s done it already.” “Nobody’s cared about that sort of science fiction story since you were four years old.” “That twist doesn’t add anything to the setup.” “What will you ever do for an ending?”

I’ve also been feeling insecure about just how much time I can, or should, throw into my writing, and how long I can keep it up. But I’ve also come to realize that these issues will sort themselves out. I’ll have made progress on the short story front by the end of February.

Whatever it is that we insecure writers have challenging us, we can make it. I know.

I’m a tired, but productive critter this week

I’ve been reading a lot of pieces and sending in a lot of crits for the critters.org online workshop this week. I decided that I wanted to get a ‘most productive critter’ award, which requires earning a really high number of critique points in a single week for many different stories or chapters, as opposed to a single novel reading.

I’ve sent in 12 critiques since Friday afternoon, for pieces ranging from 400 to 4000 words, and running the gamut from ghost story horror to medieval fantasy to crazy cutting-edge science fiction with people becoming string theory patterns and entering quantum foam.

It’s been kinda fun, and quite a stretch for my critical ‘muscles.’ I’ll hear back tomorrow afternoon on if I got the MPC or not.

Late-breaking update:

First drafts…

We’ve been talking quite a bit about first drafts versus revisions here at the workshop, especially because a lot of the process is critiquing and revising. One thing that I thought was interesting was the notion that a lot of the participants, and apparently a lot of sci-fi/fantasy writers, prefer revising to writing a first draft.

I can’t really understand this. I usually have a lot of fun writing the first draft, and less so when revising – because the revising is where the hard stuff starts. (Not a hard and fast rule.) And Chris M said something to me when critiquing my scene yesterday that maybe I should try to concentrate on writing the best word, and not writing too many words. That’s good advice, but I’m not sure that I’ll worry about it too much in my first drafts. There’s plenty of time to focus on that level of detail with revisions.

Some pictures from Kansas

Just sharing a few of the photos that I’ve managed to take since I’ve been here:

My dorm room

Dorm room desk

The Lost Ad Astra Notes: part 1

So, it’s been nearly a month since I went to the Ad Astra science fiction convention in Toronto, but I didn’t post that much about it because that was in the middle of the A-Z challenge, and the good letters like A for Ad Astra and C for Convention had already passed. And I didn’t pull my notes out as soon as May started. So here are my somewhat scattered thoughts.

My overall impression of Ad Astra was that it was ‘more Polaris than Polaris.’ Polaris 24 was my first hotel-based convention, and in some ways it was crazier than the conventions with bigger celebrity guests at fancier venues, like Wizard World or Fan Expo, because there were so many really cool panels going on, always something interesting happening, the action starting relatively early and ending really late, scrambling to find some time to grab a bit of food in between panels that I really wanted to get to. Those are all the ways that Ad Astra was moreso than Polaris.

And it was at least as much crazy fun.

So, my Mom picked me up at work this time to drive me into the city, on the condition that I at least try to buy any of a long list of Mercedes Lackey books for her. The drive went reasonably well, except that we got somewhat lost actually looking for the driveway into the hotel, though we spotted the building quickly enough. Then there was a bit of a wait for my room to be ready when I was checking in.

I registered, started going over my program and the schedule to see what panels I thought I’d be able to make, and a friend from the Firefly fan group, Colleen, spotted me sitting in the lobby and asked if I could keep watch over her suitcase for a few minutes, and I agreed. Then she got dragged outside by her grandkids and I had to hang around for a while until she got back.

My first panel was with Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon, who were a lot of fun; that one was about continuity in an ongoing series. Then a panel on how to find good beta readers, which had lots of interesting tips. I was making notes like crazy on whatever came easily to hand – the iphone for one panel, a palmpilot for the next, and so on. I’ll put together as many of the notes as I can and share them with you all.

Infinite Horizons

I is for…

Infinite Horizons was the name of a little website I put up years ago for some of my original science fiction writing. It started back when I was at York University, because I couldn’t think of much else to do with the website space I got as a computer science student.

It stayed with YorkU CS for a while, until my accounts got closed after I graduated, and then I used a couple of different free web hosts for the next two years. In the spring of 2001, when I moved into my own place and got cable internet, I put Infinite Horizons up on my ISP web space, but never gave out the link to it anywhere, so it’s just kind of an archive mirror on the dark web now.

The one complete project on Infinite Horizons was “Voyage: Triton”, which I finished before putting the site up, during my freshman year at York. All of the rest of the writing up there was related to the Star Patrol universe – a chapter and a half of a first novel, and a lot of other little snippets and unresolved drabbles. A lot of them were written in the summer of 1998, when I was taking an adult extension course in Creative Writing as an elective, where the curriculum was big on writing stream of consciousness, so when I was doing a class exercise I’d just start on one of the story ideas that I had running around in my head, and never really finish it. That was the same course that started my career in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction.