The Terminal Cases

My writing life needed a bit more organization-- or at least a sense of going through my notes, updating things and figuring out my focuses. Today on my "All Projects" file (where I list a quick blurb of projects and their current status), I took a handful of things that were under "Miscellaneous" and created a new section: "Terminal Cases"

The Terminal Cases are projects that aren't technically "dead", and thus go into the Graveyard... but it's more likely than not that I won't go back to them and finish them. But I did do some work on them, and there are some good ideas in there that it's worth not totally writing them off... yet.

• The Lowered Bar: The idea behind this was to follow four mediocre students as they muddled through a mid-grade college, eventually to get degrees but not really getting educations. I never really came up with a full outline, just various scenes. It never really came together into a unified whole.
• Long Night of the Pieman: This one was based on my experiences pizza delivery, boiled down to a driver's adventure in one night. Here I had a full outline, and wrote a fair amount. But as my days as a driver got further and further behind me, the less relevant the piece felt to me.
• The Xanadu Job: This one was a sci-fi Ocean's Eleven, quite literally. The team was even eleven people, with roughly the same jobs in the movie, and the underlying plan was similar, with some sci-fi twists.
• Arthur Wood's Metatextual Life: My concept here was Arthur was a young man, just moved to a new city, starting up a life there. But at the same time, Arthur is the main character of a TV show, with a rabid on-line fandom. So I had ideas for how these different facets affected each other. Like, from Arthur's point of view, he had a friend that he saw all the time, but doesn't see anymore; but from where it's a TV show, the actor playing that friend left and is now on another show. Stuff like that. I had an sketch of how Arthur's life would go over five years (in the form of a five-season episode guide), but there was something structural about the whole concept that eluded me. I never quite sussed it out. So here in Terminal Cases it'll sit.
• Convergence of Angels on the I-35: This one is well over a decade old in the Terminal Cases pile, really. I had written many chapters longhand, long ago, and then typed it up on the computer. Due to various mishaps and errors in judgment, any electronic version is lost. I still have the longhand, but I have yet to type it up and do anything with it. And I may not, because it is very much a "young man's" book-- I'm no longer 23 years old, spending long nights in diners. But I do love the title.
• Nightingale: This was my "flawed superheroine" project, about a wife & mother who survives when her family is killed, and gets her vengeance on. I had imagined it as a short TV series, or later as a web series.
• Dr. Hiro Hirose vs. Professor Badass: This originated from that Internet Meme of Prof. Badass, which you've probably seen. I imagined him as the head of a whole evil team (which you can see the write-up here). Then I came up with matching heroes to oppose him, lead by Dr. Hiro Hirose. (Written up here.) The whole thing started as an exercise in googling interesting hero-like pictures, really. But when I tried to actually write, at least so far, I realized I had characters, but no story. Yet. Maybe it'll percolate back up later on. Heck, a year ago I considered "Triple Cross" to be in the Terminal Cases, but it sprang back up in my brain, and now I have a complete set of rough-draft scripts. So, you never know.

Now available on Amazon...

Hint Fiction Anthology, featuring yours truly, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The Amazon page doesn't show the cover yet, but I hear that it will in the near future.

More on Interstellar Worldbuilding

I have talked about worldbuilding on an interstellar scale before, but I only spoke there about my influences. I have another, "thing I don't like" about a lot of space opera settings that I'm familiar with. Namely, the tendencies for them to have been built in a somewhat haphazard fashion.

Now in the case of, say, the Star Trek universe, part of that was the nature of writing for television, especially in the 60s (as well as the 80s)-- writers tended to make something up on the fly because it seemed like an interesting idea (or in the old show's case, because it fit the sets and costumes they already had on hand), and they weren't really thinking about building a larger universe. Fair enough. But it does bug me, and I know that I can't write that way. Even if it has nothing to do with the story at hand, I need to know what's over that next hill.

Part of it has to do with geopolitics, which becomes a very complicated thing when you are looking at a 3-D map (or rather, a 2-D representation of 3-D space).

In my Space Opera setting, humans haven't ventured further than 25 light-years from Earth. They've met nine other starfaring species, and are aware of four other species that have yet to advance to spaceflight. But what have I worked out? So far, a 100-ly sphere from Earth, which is home for 60 different alien species, of which 25 of them are spaceborne. Now, admittedly, a lot of those species I don't have more than a paragraph of information... but I know they are there.

Also, my 100-ly radius sphere is a map of-- to the best of my ability to create-- the actual stars within 100 light years. On top of that, I've done my best to craft reasonable and realistic possibilities for the planets found around those stars.

One tool I use, besides an enormous Excel spreadsheet, is a program called ChView, which is a fascinating-- if slightly frustrating-- program. For a piece of free-on-the-internet software, it's really good at visualizing interstellar maps. But it isn't quite everything I'd want it to be. That's all right, the person who wrote the program wasn't doing it for me, and I think it's great. Check it out.

Anyway, will all this work come through in the actual writing? I'm not sure. I do know this-- at my first attempt to write in this setting, I tried having a mysterious artifact from a old, powerful civilization be a plot point. But I didn't know anything about said civilization, where they were, and why the artifact was left behind. I was going on the fly. Didn't work.

Now I know the neighborhood, and that makes writing about exploring it so much more fun.

The Twelve Part Outline, Part III

The third part of the twelve part outline, following Establishment and Incitement, is Challenge. I define this section as "minor antagonists are put into play". The protagonists aren't going to face the Big Bad, not yet. They may not even know there IS a big bad. But whatever path the protagonist is on, thanks to the Incitement, leads them to some trouble. More or less, what I've done is introduce the protagonist, and prod him to action, and now we see what problems they have because of that.

Now, this can take a lot of forms. In Thorn of Dentonhill, it's mostly physical-- Veranix pursuing the drug dealers cracking down on them. In Holver Alley Crew, it's more cerebral-- planning the first robbery they are going to do together. For Maradaine Constabulary, it's a bit of both-- Katrine and Minox trying to question people who have no intention of cooperating with the constabulary inspectors.

For some examples you might be more familiar with, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, this is Indy going to Tibet to get the amulet from Marion. Or in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and Elsa in Venice, searching for the Knight's tomb.

In the grand scheme of things, this is still the small potatoes, though to the protagonists, and even the minor antagonists, it may not seem like it. It can be life or death for them. They just don't know how bad things can get. Yet.

Some inspirational pic-links

Sometimes I just like to surf online artwork to inspire ideas. I'm not saying these WILL inspire ideas I'll use... but I definitely like them.

Starships approaching planet.

Space Opera battle-- three ships in free-for-all

Steampunk Fascist Bunnies Launching World Domination

Infested with Brain Buzzes

My brain is always buzzing with ideas. Else I wouldn’t be a writer, and there wouldn’t be much point to this whole thing, would there?

But sometimes, even when I need to be focusing my creative energy on something specific (in the case of here and now, working on Maradaine Constabulary), the Brain Buzzes go crazy and it’s nigh impossible to work on what I should. Until I spend a little bit of time cultivating the New Idea, it’s not going to leave me alone.

Usually cultivation involves a bit of worldbuilding, character creation or outlining. I do some notes, and that’s usually enough to quiet my brain, set those ideas in the back of my head to ferment into something more cohesive, and get back to work.

This week, though, there’s been a LOT of Brain Buzzing.

• A new idea I’ll just call The Heroine Project for now. It’s little more than a vague idea.
• Reworking the history of Banshee-verse to expand the exploration of our solar system. I blame watching Defying Gravity for this one.
• Finishing the scripts for Triple Cross.

So I’ll be working on those things, hopefully that will quiet the buzzing.

Wrting Environments

The environment I write in is a crucial factor to how effective any given writing session can be. For one, I do better when in a public place, like a bookstore or cafe. Having a (habitually refilled) coffee or tea also helps a lot.

But there's more to the environmental factors. I need music, preferably by headset, to quit the rest of the world and occupy the parts of my brain that don't help when I'm writing.

Also important is being able to achieve a state of relaxed creativity. It takes a bit of time to get into the groove. One of my biggest problems is I need a good two-three hours to really get good work done. The first hour is usually something of a wash. I'm still working on how to make that first hour as good as the second and third.

But most of all, I need to be able to think. January is a bad time for that, because of seasonal allergies in this town. Cedar fever kills my brain in a sinus fog. Allergy medicine leaves me a functional zombie-- I can do most things, save write. It's very frustrating.

Thus you note the dearth of posts I made in January. Fiction writing was similarly held back. I've made some progress on the second draft of Holver Alley Crew (namely transcribing notes from my paper copy to electronic form), and inched forward with Maradaine Constabulary. That one, I can tell when the rough draft is done, it's going to be a rough draft.