Just a short note today.
The Space Courier is no more. So in the light that I have made no sales from the Space Courier Book, I have replaced the name of it.
It is now, “An O’Neal Spy Adventure.”
That is the new cover. I also tweaked the marketing copy, so maybe people will be more interested in it. We shall see.
Now I have to get back to the land of Agersolum. I am working on Felix Book 2.
Cheers.
A few days ago I published a blog post about the differences between hard and soft science fiction stories. I talked about that the difference is the rules that are applied to the story and that in Hard Sci-Fi, the scientific community and the public make the rules. The author does not.
The reason for that is that science exists and is a real tangible thing, and therefore, the rules are already set and in place.
In the fantasy realm, there is a big difference between hard magic and soft magic. But the difference between hard and soft magic is the same as hard and soft sci-fi. It is about the rules that govern the story.
In storytelling, rules govern every aspect of the story. You create rules on what a character will and will not do based on that character themselves. Some won’t eat meat, some won’t take a human life to save there own. Some will always that oggle something pretty if it crossed there path.
Same with the world building. If the rule states that the time it takes to get from city A to city B is three days of traveling by foot, you can’t have it take 6 hours the next chapter over unless you give a good reason for it.
In the use of magic and magic systems, magic falls into one of two categories with a hybrid of each in the middle making a possible third.
Hard Magic is where the author gives distinct rules of it’s us. How it is performed, what it does and how. Hard magic systems turn that magic into a science. Science has distinct rules that it must follow.
Those rules limit its use. They give it tangible consequences for its use. Cause it is more interesting to see what a magic can’t do, then what it can. Better to have the character overcome the magic system in some interesting way. It can also be used to solve story questions. The limiting of the magic allows for that. It allows you to write a novel where the magic is a central part of the story. The main character can be a magic user. Think Brandon Sanderson’s Mystborn series.
The problem with this system is that having a limited system and the constant of writing the character into corners. Sometimes the magic system that you created will not dig your self out of the hole that you dug. The characters are screwed, and you know it.
Soft magic, however, is not explained. There are no written rules on what can and cannot be done using magic in that story. It gives the book a sense of wonder cause you have no idea what can be done and it is cool to see what the author can come up with.
The use of the soft magic should not be used to solve a major story problem. The main character should not be a magic user and magic should not be a central part of the story. Think Lord of the Rings. Gandalf doesn’t tell the hobbits how he uses magic. He just does. He also uses it at unexplained times and then a sword at others.
There are problems with using this system. A soft magic system comes off as too god-like if used too heavy-handedly. The solutions feel forced, and the ending will come off weak. Lackluster. Better to abandon magic at that point and have the characters use a non-magic means to solve the story problem.
Brandon Sanderson’s Second Law
Those links are a direct path to Brandon Sanderson’s site which gives a better explanation of the ideas of hard and soft magic and the rules of using hard magic.
Any discussion on this blog post or the earlier one is most welcome. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.
Until next time.
Cheers.
In the earlier blog post that I did on ‘writer’s block,’ I explained that it doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t. Go ahead and go back to the blog post. This will be here when you are done.
In this post, I will give some was that I have gotten out of the feeling of ‘writer’s block’ or what I like to call a creative slowdown. Be warned though, these are kinda like trying to get rid of hiccups. They don’t all work when you want them to.
The first strategy that I usually do is that I keep in mind that ‘writer’s block’ is a phobia and doesn’t actually exist. It is best to keep positive, and it has been shown that positive thinking works overcoming a wide range of problems. I keep that in mind when I feel a slowdown. It helps when I feel the pressure and the stress of having deadlines and a long list of projects that may make me feel overwhelmed. It is a hard thing to do as the media and the like portraying the author as a tortured soul that wears fedora’s and suffers from a creative slowdown.
Brainstorming is the second strategy. I don’t suffer from the lack of ideas, as I have dozen’s of manuscript titles all wanting to be the next one on the list. But I usually do feel a creative slowdown when I run into a problem with the current work in progress.
My current project I have going on is the middle-grade sci-fi that I am writing with my son. I have finished the rough drafts of book two and three. At the end of book two, I felt like the ending blew. It did a read through, and an edit and the ending is limp, lackluster and just plain wrong. This killed the last few hours of my writing session. It knocked me down. Then I started to brainstorm and to think about the ending and on ways that I could fix it. I now have a plan on how. I just need to do it.
The third strategy is what I do when I am in the middle of a first draft. I am working along, and then I realize that a scene sucks. It happens. I reread a paragraph and wonder what type of narcotics that I am on. This can stop me. I will go back to fix one word, then one line, then a full page. Then I have been working and reworking the same stuff for months before I give up and say that I have ‘writer’s block.’ All cause I can’t get past that point to create new work.
The best strategy is not to. When I feel like your work isn’t up to any sort of good standards, lower them. Drop them to the floor. Get past the point and keep going. If I am worried about losing that lousy section, use the highlight tool in my your word processor and make a note about the part, then keep going. Once I get rolling again, I raise my standards back up until I have issues again. The key is to get it down on the page.
The fourth is when I sit down at my writing station, and I pull out my ‘outline,’ and then nothing happens. I can’t get going. Nothing is working. I am thinking about other things. Like the lawn needs to be mowed, or that I will just watch one youtube video. Just one.
That is a major problem. It is the easy distractions of the mind. They take as many forms as there are stars in the sky. The best way to combat this one is routine. Get a place to write. Something comfortable and my own. Preferbly away from distractions. Then set upo time to write. Gwt into the routine that I write and most times, I will.
If that doesn’t work, then I must go to the fifth strategy, get out of the house. Maybe I need a change in your environment. I go to a coffee shop or a bar. A library is good too. Get out and write elsewhere. It can pull me out of my slump.
The sixth way, is to know what I am planning on writing. It doesn’t mean that I have to have an outline. Just a couple notes on what I was going to do may help. Some writers intentionally don’t finish the scene that they were working on so that all they have to do is to read what the had of the last scene and then it’ll flow. This way doesn’t always work for me.
The seventh way that I have is that I will challenge myself to write a low number of words. Like 250. Then I find that when I get 250, either I am done for the day and I move onto the next strategy or I find that I have pumped out a thousand words and I am not stopping.
The eighth way is that after I have attempted a couple ways to stop the creative slowdown, I go and read a book. I pick it up the next day. During the rest of the day, I will think about what I have in the story and see if my brain will come up with anything. It does. usually when I am trying to sleep.
I hope that this helps.
Until next time.
Well, time is a fickle thing. It tends to run slowly at some points, usually when you don’t need it to. Like when you are waiting for something to happen. Like when you are waiting for work to end.
Or time will go really fast. Like when you are having fun, or you are on a vacation or the weekend. At that point, time is like a runaway train that doesn’t seem to want to stop. One moment you are yelling TGIF, the next it is Monday Blues.
Well, time has slipped by, and it is now December 9th, 2017. It is almost Christmas. I have yet to walk into a shopping center to buy a single thing. Our Christmas tree is still in the storage bin. I do not have the time to get myself out there to get it all.
The last post I did was the lyrics of a song that I altered. Well, I didn’t modify it. It was my wife. You see, I have been prepping a novel idea, the Inescapable game, that I am going to pitch on the Archivos Podcast. In the new year, I am scheduled to go on the podcast. I will pitch the story idea to the crazy guys, and we will be brainstorming it. So I thought that I should have a couple points of the story fleshed it out.
Well, I have a fickle issue with world building. I love worldbuilding, but I also hate having to spend too much time doing it. I’d rather be working on the actual story than the world. So to combat this, I tend to create worlds that I can write multiple stories in. My Agersolum world, I have at least a dozen stories planned for it.
To get back to the point about those lyrics, I have figured out a way to attach my Inescapable Game to my 500 Years Universe. Then I figured out how many novels that the Inescapable Game story will stretch to. I plan to write 15 books in the series. Split into three parts.
It was at that point that my wife started to sing that dreadful song.
So that is the backstory to that last post.
Until next time.
Well. As of this moment, I am now at 51108 words for NaNoWriMo. But as I have said before, NaNo is worthless to me unless I can get complete projects done.
At the moment I have complete my daughters story, ‘The Adventures of Evana Sweetland.’ And I have finished Book 3 of my sons ‘Space Courier’ story. But my son’s story isn’t finished. It still needs the last book.
Originally we planned to write the story in 5 parts. But as I wrote Book 3, I realized that I had included pieces that I was planning on for book 4. So now, I have gotten rid of book 4, put the parts into either book 3 or book 5 and then called book 5, book 4. Basically, Space Courier is going to be four books.
And I am not done NaNoWriMo. I have ten days to write 22500 to 25000 words for this next book. That means that I must write 2250 to 2500 words per day to complete the book on time. The goal is to have a complete work that I can spend December editing and reworking so that I can have it start being published come January 2018.
So, while others are hanging up there hats and calling it done, I am still plugging away. I am not done yet. Not even close.
So this year has gone off with a bang.
First I’d like to apologize for the lack of blog posts. I have been distracted by NaNo. It happens. For the first bit, I was writing 3k to 4k words a day. I was on track with my double NaNo goals. Then life happens.
And it happens. One day you are going strong, then the next you have fallen behind. All you can do is to try and catch up when you can. We had ordered some Ikea beds for the kids, and it took 3 hours to build them. Each.
Plus I had to go through my storage bin and find some boxes. It’s all delays. Ie. Life.
And it happens. It is not a bad thing. Cause life does that. No need to get anxious or frustrated by it. And if it weren’t NaNo, there would be no need to try and catch up. It is best not to. It is best not to be stressed by something that is outside of your control. It happens.
My NaNo, it is Nov 11, 2017, and I am at 28k words. I am supposed to be at 36k words by today. But that is only cause I am crazy and I am doing a double NaNo. Typically, I would have to have written 18K words.
So, that means I am a touch behind, but still going strong. I have also finished the first draft of the Evana Story. It is done. Time to move on to Book 3 of my Space Courier story.
Wish me luck.
Until next time.
As you probably tell, my blog site has some changes to it. It has a new home at peddehouse.com. You see, I am moving forward in my dream of setting up myself as an indie publisher. That means a professional webpage and a professional email address. It was surprisingly easy and inexpensive to set up. It is pretty close to where I want it right now. There is some more content that I want to get on it, but it’ll have to wait.
I do have words to write. The saying that the stories pretty much write themselves is only a saying after all.
I have officially changed my NaNo project this year. It is not one story. It is technically eight. Well, eight if I can pull it off. I plan on writing five 5k stories for my daughter’s story. The Chronicles of Evana Sweetland. It is a set of Early Chapter Books that I am writing for her. It is the same deal that I am doing with my son. Her story, her characters, her plot.
That should put me at the 25k mark. I then have three remaining stories of my son’s Space Courier books to write. I hope to get at least two of those done. each story will run between 22k to 25k. Two stories will put me at the approx. 70k mark. I hope to get the third done too.
As far as I can tell, I am on track to get the first of the books published by the new year.
Until next time.
In part one, I talked about how the first colonists got off of the Earth and some of the reason’s behind it. In this post, I am going to talk about more specifics on how a corporation could make money sending people to space.
The first question the inevitably comes up is the extraordinary cost of getting anything into space. I’ll leave the politics out, but that basics of it is that it will cost approximately $10,000 per kg to send anything into Low Earth Orbit and approximately $30,000 per kg to send anything into Geosynchronous Orbit. Please note that LEO is anything around 160km to 2000km above the surface of the earth, while Geosynchronous Orbit is 35,786km above the surface of the earth. That means that it currently costs $75,000 to send an average human into LEO and 2.25 million to send one to Geosynchronous Orbit.
That price tag is huge. Impossibly huge. It is a huge barrier to human space exploration that it is what is holding everything back. It is not the risks to humans or the technologies that have to be devolved in order to make it work. It is money alone that is the barrier to space exploration and if anyone says otherwise, they are lying.
The biggest part of the cost to space exploration is the insane amount of fuel and material that it takes to get the cargo out of the gravity well of earth. The cost of moving cargo around the solar system is far cheaper. I am sure that you noticed the difference of moving cargo to Geosynchronous is only three times the cost for 17 times the distance.
A company can make a huge amount of profit by mining ice asteroids and providing the clean drinking water to the ISS. And that is only the tip of the iceberg for the amount of opportunities out there.
There are asteroids out there that are comprised of a large amount of rare earth metals. These metals are what make computers and modern life possible. But they are called rare earth metals because they are rare on earth. Out in space, however, they are not as rare as they are on earth. There is a nearby asteroid that has more platinum on it that has been mined from the earth since we knew of its existence.
That can be done by robots up to a point. At some point it becomes essential for humans to go and live in space. Only certain experiments can be done in a micro gravity and then there is the entire question of the asteroid of death issue that a multi-planet species will fix.
Once they get to space, human’s have a wide range of different needs that will need industries to meet. The best way to do that is to produce those goods in space. Where they don’t have to pay for the goods to be shipped out of the earth’s gravity well.
That means that the best way to develop long term space colony’s before we are able to build a space elevator is to cut the earth out of the equation for as many things as possible. No high prices of goods from Earth brings down the cost of living in space.
In my fictional world, that is what the corporations fight for and get. The ability to go space and the ability to ship materials back to Earth and to expect to make a profit of goods and services.
These corporations start by mining asteroids and building space stations in space. The develop Mars as a Space Colony and it is the private industry moving forward that prompts NASA to send a space mission cause heaven forbid a private industry getting to space before NASA.
That brings up a rather large amount of different issues as well, which will be talked about in a later blog post. Most of which aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things as the the story takes place in 2500 CE and not 2025 CE.
The story world changes from the time of the first explorers and settlers to the time of Des and the Jovian Empire. Just look at how life was like at 1525 CE to now in 2017 CE.
Next time I will go into more detail on what I think that brief history of what happens to each of the planets. Well, maybe one planet. We’ll see how it goes.
It is time to enter the battle. The epic battle between Outliners and Discovery Writers.
Both sides are frothing at the mouth and ready to fight it out. Ink will fly. Paper will ripe.
Okay that metaphor died on arrival.
My thoughts on Outliners and Discovery writers. Notice that I called it Discovery Writing and not Pantsers. I find that the term Pantsers doesn’t do the writing method justice. I think that it is a little bit of a low blow in the epic fight.
Well. It makes you think that you have no idea what you are doing. That you are just winging it and have no idea what you are doing. That your inability to want to create an outline means that you are somehow incompetent in writing.
The discovery writers, however, don’t like to feel confined in an outline. They don’t want to miss the spontaniousness that comes with discovery writing.
What does this mean for me and my opinion in this issue? I see the good in both sides of the argument.
Outliners like to plan there stories. They go into the griddy details on what needs to happen and when. They look into the little pieces of info that a discovery writer may miss until the 2nd or 3rd draft. The are better at writing more complicated stories that involve multiple viewpoints or time frames.
Discovery Writers enjoy a certain spice in the stories that they write. A well written discovery written story feels more natural and tends to flow better. Discovery written books tend to have less view point characters or time frames.
They both have issues and the issues with the methods need to be mentioned too.
Outlined stories can be stale and the characters may have a motivational problems. It is usually when the story makes a left when the outline goes right. Or that the outline says that a character must do something that the written story doesn’t allow for.
The problems with discovery written books is simple. Plot holes. As the author doesn’t have a plan on what is happening, there can be un-foreshadowed scenes, and plot holes through out the story. Discovery written stories tend to need more revisions that there counterpart.
So what do I do?
It depends on the story. I do both.
I will leave a pause for the reader to freak out at the political statement.
Done?
Good.
I write both. as it depends on the story. I have written some where I have done complete outlines to them. I have written others where I Discovery Wrote it. I have done some where I have gotten part way through a Discovery Written book to discover that I had gotten lost and I need to outline my way out of the mess that I was in.
What was better? It depends.
The Outlined one was a collaboration with my 6 yr old and we did an outline as it is his story that I am writing. He just have the grammar of a six year old.
The Discovery written one was a NaNoWriMo challenge that I didn’t have enough time to get an outline done, but I had a fairly good idea on where I was going. The one that I needed to outline my way out of it was that I was writing a book, then I decided that the backstory was just as entertaining as the story and needed to be part of the story.
My conclusion. Don’t worry about how you write the book. Just write it. Decide how you want to write it and get those words on a page. getting word count every day is much more important than worrying about how you are writing it.
Until next time.
Nathan Pedde
Good news everybody.
Well, news.
Well… how do you start these blogs anyways.
Anyways. Last night I managed to finish the first draft of the my middle-grade sci-fi book. Well book 1 of it. It is going to be one book of six. Of many many season’s if my son has any say on it.
So I have ‘When the lights go out’ in the beta readers. I am editing ‘Culture Shock’ right now and Book 1 of ‘Space Courier’ is now marinating.
That means that I am now working on editing my ‘Culture Shock’ book and I still have to finish my ‘Felix the Swift’ book.
My wife dug out a large pile of my note books. The note books have bits and pieces of different stories and story ideas. I have a problem. I am going to spend some time to organize them and sort them out. I am hoping to find some half finished stuff that I can add to the WIP list.
Anyways. Short update today. I will post some of my thoughts on stuff later.
Cheers
Atomic Slingshot Press 