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!

The Eleventh Hour of Nano…

So, it’s the evening of November 29th. A little more than one day left for Nano-ers here in North America.

First off, I’d love to share this Wordle made from the 62,168 words that I’ve written so far. Wordles are word clouds that you can make out of a large sample of text – the more frequently a particular word is used in the sample, the larger the word is inside the graphic. I’m hoping to hit 65k at the Waffle-palooza write-in tomorrow evening!

And I’m happy to say that I’m still really having fun with this storyline, even though it wasn’t necessarily where I thought that Star Patrol would go. At this point, I’m unlikely to get out of Act 2 of ‘The Imperion Encounter’ during November, but that’s fine – it’s the second book in the series after all. And all kinds of really cool things are coming together.

We’ve got the human foil, Star Patrol Captain McBride, (named after a Nano ML that I met in San Francisco,) who dislikes the friendly aliens and distrusts humans who are friends with them or study their ways. And McBride was essential to actually getting my main characters where they needed to be – I had to throw him a very small idiot ball, but that’s okay for a foil character.

And then there’s the new romantic rival, Ensign Mason, (named for Fort Mason,) who’s another Star Patrol Academy graduate studying the aliens, and he likes Melissa. Brett and Melissa have been out on one date and they kissed, but she still hasn’t made a big dramatic choice or anything.

A lot of my characters are developing fairly well. Carla Jones is obviously the smart girl and is struggling a bit to do more than just be the source of helpful exposition whenever there’s something that needs to be explained. And Melissa Dempsey is opening up about her secretive past a little, and letting me flesh it out. All really fun stuff.

If you’re still short of 50k, then good writing to you. You can do it!

Day 14 Nanowrimo update

So, I’ve been working on my new book for just about two weeks now – and I have to say, it’s going pretty great. Having a lot of fun, discovering more about the Star Patrol universe than I thought I would considering all the years that I’ve lived with Brett Walker and Melissa Dempsey in the back of my head – but there are some things that you just don’t discover until you’re walking the walk.

My current word count is 36,534 at the moment. I’m hoping to get a few hundred more done this evening before I go to bed.

Some of the cool stuff about my book so far:

• The mysterious character of Exec, the second-in-command of the ship, opened up and I found out more about her at the most unexpected times – though maybe I should have expected them. For instance, the Captain gives her a little pep talk on an open comm line about how he thinks that she’s the right woman for this mission – and since he’s her superior, he can speak to her in a familiar fashion, as the ensigns and even lieutenants under her can’t.
• Even though I hardly plotted out any of the high fantasy sequence, it came out pretty well in true Nano fashion – not quite ‘whenever anything gets too boring have somebody burst through the window with a sword in his hand’ but close.
• The stuff after the end of my original outline, though, which is the stuff I’ve been working on since Saturday, though, is possibly the most fun – after we’ve had first contact with the aliens and are trying to figure out the getting-to-know-you stage of human-Breian relations.
• One of the coolest bits of this is that I know all of this weird stuff about Breian history and the Archon’s discipline of knowledge that my human characters don’t, yet – but I’ve also absorbed this intuitive sense of how to play out the secrets that I wouldn’t have had a clue about back in 1998. There’ll be time.
• And I really like the little bits and snatches of Jody Quinton and Gary Peterson’s budding romance… so much so, in fact, that I’m almost wishing that they could be the main characters, instead of Brett and Melissa and all of their angst. Oh well…

How’s your nano going? Have you ever taken an opportunity to go back and work with an idea from many years ago and see how much you’ve learned as a writer since then?

Six Sentence Sunday, Nano edition continues!

Hello.

This six is from later in the same scene as last week, after Brett’s spent a while observing the alien natives while Jody tries to communicate with them.

One of the natives suddenly spoke up with a rather long and enthusiastic speech, but he was facing one of his fellows, not Jody, and both of them broke out into renewed activity while the third stood near the cart and watched the new people. Jody let out a sigh that seemed to deflate her inside, leaving a very tired and very sick young woman standing before them.

“What’s wrong, Jody?” Colin asked, in a way that might have been encouraging if the question wasn’t so pitifully obvious.

“There’s not engaging with us in terms of real communication,” Melissa put in. She wasn’t a languages expert like Jody, but from her communications studies she must have picked up some of the theory. “The key to translating an unknown language isn’t just getting vocabulary – it’s getting context.”

Six Sentence Sunday – Nanowrimo opening

Hello everybody. Word count for Nanowrimo at this point, (Saturday night,) is 13,482, but right now I’m going to rewind back to the very first ones from last Tuesday morning, November the 1st. To be clear, since I’m rebelling, this is a continuation from the Star Patrol blogisodes and not really the opening scene of the book.

They emerged from the shuttle airlock, and Brett looked over at Jody to see how she was doing in the high-oxygen atmosphere of the planet. It actually seemed to perk her up a little bit, though that might just be Jody trying to reassure everybody that she was all right and could get the job done.

Then he noticed the aliens.

They had evidently arrived in some sort of cart drawn by a single three-legged animal, but the cart wasn’t moving anymore and had possibly been ‘parked’ by extending rods down to the ground so that it would remain stable. There were three aliens, and as far as Brett could tell they each had three legs and three arms, with four tentacle-fingers on each hand. He filed this away for whatever insight it might help him build into their way of thinking.

And thanks very much to the admins out at Six Sentence Sunday.

Nanowrimo Day 1 – It begins…

Word count: 1432

Writing sessions: 3 (as of 5pm)

Doing fairly well. Got some words written before I left for work, and on the bus both way. Managed to forget my office key-card, and as I’m usually the first to flex-time in, ended up walking around the neighborhood listening to Storywonk podcasts, eating my apple and drinking my strawberry milk, until 9am. If only there had been a nice comfy place to write open that early.

I’m starting to wonder if I’ll run out of outlined plot before 50k. However, with Star Patrol that shouldn’t be much of a problem, as I’m also well familiar with the second adventure of these intrepid space adventurers – the Imperion Confrontation. So if I need to, I can just jump right into that storyline!

Write-in tonight at Williams coffee on the pier. Whoo-hoo!

So how’s your nano going?

Even the Ruby servers are meditating…

…to prepare for Nanowrimo, of course! I just got this message when I went to http://www.nanowrimo.org/

I’ve never seen that error message before. Must be a Ruby on Rails thing.

So, what am I meditating on, with two days and odd hours before November 1st? Well, I’ve been planning on how I’m going to take the Alphasmart Dana with me everywhere, and swap out files in progress using the memory card for when I want to write on the laptop. I’m pondering banning myself from watching television until I’ve reached my quota of 2500 words a day – I’ve got to hit 50k by the 20th of November, so I can ring the bell at the Night of Writing Dangerously!

I’ve been thinking of what I know about my characters, realizing that Melissa Dempsey isn’t entirely a sweet ingenue, that she’s got a mean streak, and putting that together with everything else I ever worked out about the Star Patrol universe.

And I’m also loving the notion of ‘Writer’s Improv’, thank you Storywonk, which reminds me of Worldbreaker, which was an improv-like worldbuilding game, where everybody added one more detail in turn until the details started to get so specific that they were more like plot than background.

Can’t wait for Nano. How about you?

1 year of Kelworth Files

Well, looks like I was so busy with rewrites and starting off the ‘Harry Potter’ review series that I missed a milestone – this blog turned one year old on June 10th. Happy Belated Anniversary to me!

So, to commemorate the occasion, I’ll link back to three of my favorite memories for each month, June 2010 to May 2011.

June

The very beginnings of my blogging journey.

1. My very first (and most popular) Beat Sheet – Serenity!
2. My trip home from Toronto CSTS 2010 and the G20 riots.
3. The prologue debate.

July

1. Who could forget JulNoWriMo?
2. The Polaris convention!
3. Sharing a rejection letter.

August

1. Travelling up to Hunstville.
2. Fan Expo!
3. CritMo on Stringing Words.

September

1. I got awards!
2. Another beat sheet – The Simpsons Movie!
3. How to take criticism.