science fiction romance – Page 3 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Genesis Earth 5.0 is finished!

That’s right; the fifth draft of Genesis Earth is complete. It was a quick, easy edit, but there were quite a few problems with the last draft, mostly having to do with the physics and timing/distances.

Anyway, here are the stats:

ms pages: 335
words: 71,500
file size: 164 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 2 Nov 2010
end date: 20 Nov 2010

And the wordle:

I used to describe this novel as a “hard sf romance,” but after this last revision I can see that it’s not hard sf at all–though the science (or pseudo-science) plays an important role, the story really is driven by the characters.

Thanks to some of my recent first readers, I also realize now that Genesis Earth is solidly YA. Based on their recommendations, I lowered the age of the protagonists to sixteen and seventeen, and made some adjustments to the query letter.

I’m not sure what this means for agent hunting, since it seems that many YA agents do YA exclusively, and while this novel is definitely YA, my other ones are much more adult (at least in terms of content and character).

Anyway, the song that was playing when I finished this draft was The Mummer’s Dance by Loreena McKennit, one of the songs from the soundtrack that Charlie put together a couple years ago. I think it’s very appropriate, especially for the last scene with the Icarian natives before the epilogue:

Finally, I thought you guys might want to see the “map” of the Icarian star system that I drew out on the whiteboard on my bedroom wall. Man, you have no idea how much I’ve been geeking out to this in the past few days. It’s a map…of a star system!

New projects and other stuff

So I started the sequel to Mercenary Savior today; I figure I can take a couple months off to finish the rough draft, then leave it in the trunk until the first one sells.

The working title of this one is Into the Nebulous Deep, which captures the main premise quite nicely (though let me know if it doesn’t jive with you). It takes place five years after the events of Mercenary Savior. James is a lieutenant in the Colony’s civil defense forces, and has made a name for himself as an ace gunboat commander.

The basic premise is that the Colony is falling into economic ruin and must therefore make a mass exodus in order to survive. Their only real option is to flee into the Good Hope Nebula, where FTL drives don’t work and the Hameji can’t follow them.

Deep in the nebula are newly born stars with planets and proto-planets, and they hope to re-establish themselves there. Of course, nothing happens quite that smoothly, and James is going to find himself putting out fires most of the time.

While all that is going on, however, I hope to put him in the middle of a love triangle. I have the ending of it planned out, and it can ONLY happen this way in a science fiction novel. Oh man, the twist is going to be way interesting–and incredibly hard to pull off well. I’m up for a challenge, though, and I can already tell this one is going to be fun.

For some reason, things worked out so that I started this novel on November 1st. Because of that, I suppose I’m doing it for a nanowrimo–since hey, the rough draft is probably going to be between 120k to 140k words long, and I want to finish it before January. Sounds tough, but I’ve got the money saved up to take off a few weeks and work on my writing, so that’s what I plan to do.

In loosely related news, I hope to start running soon. My brother in law ran a marathon this year, and he’s going to help me get set up. Basically, I need to get in shape for the wilderness job I hope to train for in January, and also because hey, I need to take better care of my body. Besides, I’ve found that exercising boosts my writing tremendously, which is something I definitely need. Exercise = win/win/win.

The most pressing thing on my mind now, however, is the article I need to write about the history of “the class that wouldn’t die.” I’m working on a very tight deadline, and absolutely must produce. I wish I hadn’t been so flaky with the previous deadlines, but it is a volunteer magazine and I have had other pressing things taking up my time. Not any more–I’ll get it done right away.

In the meantime, I’m tired and must get some sleep. I wish I could function like one of Stephanie Myer’s vampires, but reality is a harsh and unforgiving mistress. One of these days, though, I’ll be free of her–just you wait!

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

Cordelia Naismith never thought she would find the love of her life on a scientific survey to an unexplored border world, let alone that he would be a Barrayan, one of the enemy. But Aral Vorkosigan is not just any other officer in the Barrayan Military. He is courteous, fair-minded, thoughtful–and above all else, driven by an innate sense of honor. To her surprise, Cordelia soon finds that she has more in common with the man than she thought possible.

But the rumors of war between Escobar, Beta Colony, and Barrayar soon conspire to drive them apart. Though Cordelia sees Vorkosigan for the good man he is, the rest of the galaxy only knows him as the “Butcher of Komarr”–an unfortunate title which Vorkosigan does not entirely deserve.

As Barrayar goes to war and Cordelia finds herself rising through the ranks of the Betan Military, she is forced to choose between loyalty to her country and loyalty to the man she loves. When the two are mutually exclusive, how does one preserve one’s honor while securing a degree of happiness?

I loved this book. Unlike some romances, where the male protagonist is a complete douchbag, Aral Vorkosigan is the kind of guy I’d like to be like. Bujold strikes an excellent balance between strong and sensitive that enhances, rather than taints, his manliness. Besides that, Vorkosigan is extremely fascinating, with a complicated backstory and motivations that are both believable and interesting.

Though it’s technically a romance, the book reads very much like military science fiction, with deliciously tongue-in-cheek phrases like “the cadet was too young to believe in death after life” and rigorous attention to the details of military life, such as rank and chain of command. The book definitely has enough explosions, space battles, and political intrigue to appeal to boys as well as the romance audience, but Bujold melds the space adventure elements seamlessly with the romantic elements, so that readers of either genre don’t feel left out or patronized.

There was only one thing that bothered me, and since it contains spoilers I’ll put it in black so that you don’t inadvertently see it. To read it, highlight the text:

After Cordelia ran away from home and married Vorkosigan, why did she never think about her homeland again? You would think that as a career military officer who had dedicated her life to her country, she would at least have some lingering doubts that she’d done the right thing by running away–especially when her husband became the new Lord Regent of Barrayar! To me, this seems in-congruent with her character.

All things considered, though, this was an excellent, well-written science fiction adventure/romance. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will definitely be reading more of Lois McMaster Bujold’s work again.

If it kills me

I will finish this novel if it kills me. At the rate things are going, it just might.

Things are kind of tough for me right now. I desperately need a new job–the one I’ve got is slowly sucking away my soul without even paying enough to get by–and job rejections are way worse than rejections from publishers (I’ve been getting a lot of both, by the way. Not that I’m looking for pity, but yeah.).

As if that weren’t bad enough, my current novel, Worlds Away from Home, is turning out to be a train wreck. There are all sorts of problems with character motivations, improper foreshadowing and plot set up, etc etc. That makes it REALLY hard to get motivated to write each day. Yesterday, I wrote only 245 words (youch). Today, I did about 2.2k, but that’s still way less than I need to be doing.

The thing that worries me the most is the thought that the audience for this particular story may be slim to nonexistent. It’s solid space opera, but with a romantic element that challenges a lot of the mores of our modern, sex-saturated society, as well as many of the conventions of romance within science fiction.

The main female protagonist is something of a pushover–but she has to be, in order for her growth arc to have any umph. The main male protagonist is an orphan on a quest to discover his own origins, kind of like a cross between Mogli and Pip. His quest, combined with her parents’ manipulative attempts to get them physically intimate too soon, are the main things keeping them apart.

But in a genre where physical intimacy usually marks the romantic climax, how do you make it out to be the obstacle against that climax? Will science fiction readers go for that, or will they hurl my book across the room because of it?

Well, if they hurled my current draft, I wouldn’t blame them one single bit. So many plot holes and awkwardly written scenes–ugh. I’ve got to seriously rethink so much about this story. But a later draft? I don’t know–maybe it would work. It would probably need other hooks to keep them engaged, such as cool world building elements, but I think I could make those work.

Anyway, I suppose it’s nothing unusual. For every book I’ve written, I’ve come to a point in the rough draft where I thought the story was completely unworkable and should be scrapped. It’s a tortuous, masochistic process, but I suppose it’s normal. That’s some comfort, at least.

My goal is to finish this abomination by August 15th, then move on to polish Mercenary Savior and make it really shine.

Another goal is to get a decently paying job (at least $8/hr at +25 hours per week) in order to afford to go to DragonCon in September. Another goal is to reteach myself algebra and calculus through the math books my dad (who is a geometry teacher) is letting me borrow. Another goal is to actually get a social life. BLARG.

Thoughts on the convolutions of discovery writing

It’s been forever since I posted, so I figured I’d put something up and let you guys know what I’ve been up to.

I’m happy to say that Worlds Away From Home is going well; I wrote just under 20k this week, which is more than I’ve written in a long time. I hope to keep a steady 15k to 20k for the next three weeks as I finish this draft.

I think I’m through the roughest parts (famous last words, right?), and I’ve got a fairly clear idea where I want to take this. That is, I have a target ending that’s both specific enough to give me direction and vague enough to give me some flexibility. If I’m doing things right, I expect these characters will surprise me before the end.

When I first started this novel almost two years ago, I hit a bad rough patch right around my current spot and had to put it on hold for a while. At the time, I thought it was because of a particularly difficult scene (which I just rewrote), but now I see that the problem was much bigger.

I thought that I was telling a story about a guy who nearly falls for the wrong girl and ends up with the right one in the end, when really the first girl was the right one. Once again, I found myself telling a very different story than the one I set out to tell.

Interestingly, in order to see what I needed to do to fix the problem, I had to write a completely unrelated novel in the same world about the same overarching world events. My problem, I think, was that I spent so much time world building that I stopped paying attention to what the characters were doing.

With the current draft, I’ve discovered that this story is very solidly a science fiction romance. There’s plenty of sf action, but it’s the romance that drives the plot.

While this discovery comes as a pleasant surprise, it also worries me because the potential audience may be very small. Traditionally, science fiction has been anathema to romance, and while that may be changing (as evidenced by this interesting post at tor.com), I wonder how well this book will sell, especially because it’s not your typical romance. In some ways, it’s actually a critique of our typical ideas of romance.

Oh well. I suppose there isn’t anything I can do about it except finish the damn thing and worry about selling it later. These types of thoughts tend to be counterproductive to the creative process, especially when you’re more thank 50k into the draft.

Overall, though, I’m optimistic. I like this story that I’m telling, and while I may cringe at the mistakes I make as I go along, I know that I need to resist the urge to fix them until the rough draft is complete.

Writing for me is like wandering around blindfolded with a Polaroid camera and taking a picture of something that sounds cool. When I take off the blindfold and check the picture, it takes a while before I can see the coherent whole. Usually, though I have some idea what to expect, the end result surprises me.

I love it, though. That element of surprise and spontaneity is well worth the lack of control, because usually (if I handle things right) it helps to give the story depth, meaning, and honesty that my conscious mind simply could not give it.

I’m very optimistic about this novel. Now that the world is solidly built, I can focus everything on the characters, and that’s where the true story lies. I’m currently having a lot of fun torturing them, but I know where their headed with their growth arcs and how all of this ties together (well, most of it, anyway). If I can pull it off, it should be quite satisfying. In the meantime, I’m excited to seeing where it takes me.