NewBook is now over the hump in rough draft, having crossed the 60,000 word midpoint for this book.\u00a0\u00a0 Its first 40,000 words or so have been reworked to improve characterization (which will lead to smoother progress later on. )\u00a0\u00a0 It’s unusual for me to have the mid-book slow-down due to characterization problems, but so it was this time.\u00a0 I expect another slow-down period transitioning over the 2\/3 to 3\/4 finished problem area, but–if I fixed the characterization problems–that one will be plot related and usually means a mistake made between now and then.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Because this isn’t the book I thought I’d be writing next (even in the Vatta-verse), all the research I’d done setting up for that<\/em> book is useless in this<\/em> book.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Different planet, different climate, different people, different way of getting into a tangle, and thus requiring a different way of getting out of it.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I watched a video online today that made me think immediately of the differences (about a guy who was handed a bike to ride that had been geared to turn left when you turned the handlebars right, and vice versa.)\u00a0 However, since the earlier research is not a body-reflex-memory thing, my brain was able to change direction more easily without falling off.<\/p>\n But it’s certainly led me into some odd places for the necessary research, things I’d never thought of researching before because “I don’t write books in those settings.”\u00a0 Well looky here,\u00a0 I am right smack in the middle of a book in “those settings.”\u00a0 The stack of books I’ve bought , the stack of bookmarks on my computer, are an indication of how far down the knowledge tree I was.\u00a0 Today’s chore (among others) was looking up the biochemistry of anger, because I had written a sentence about someone’s angry response and the medical counter to it…and then stared at it and realized I was running on a vague notion.\u00a0\u00a0 And sure enough, the hormones involved aren’t the ones I thought they were.\u00a0 Being the data glutton I am, I then had to do more digging into every chemical mentioned, but have pulled myself out of that<\/em> sucking mudhole (I could spend all of several days on this and I need to get words into the file…) to post here and then go back to the conversation that sparked the latest dive into research.\u00a0 (And you thought all I did was hang out on Twitter and other online time-sinks, right?)\u00a0\u00a0 There was the research into geothermal power generation (what does it look like–what buildings are onsite, what is in them, what happens to things that come up out of the ground (desired or not) in the process of using geothermal energy to generate power?<\/p>\n Other questions that have come up and still aren’t answered (despite considerable digging for some of them and even appeals to academics who haven’t answered my emails–and I don’t blame them, it’s just inconvenient for me.)\u00a0\u00a0 Given a planet reasonably like ours in size, mass, and chemical composition,\u00a0 with plenty of water on it,\u00a0 what would the polar oceanic currents be like if there were A) no continent or sub-continent sized land mass over one pole? and\/or B)\u00a0 no permanent all-year-round polar ice caps.\u00a0\u00a0 Here, we have a circulation of both water and wind in one direction around Antarctica…but what if Antarctica wasn’t there?\u00a0 If it was all water on that end of the world?\u00a0 Would the circumpolar current of wind and water still exist?<\/p>\n Then there’s “If terraforming involved not only a means of wiping out the native species, but also rearranging land masses–via messing with tectonic plates–and then reseeding with Earth species when the dust had settled, how long before the biosphere recovered and was suitable for human life?”<\/p>\n And others.\u00a0\u00a0 Some are important to this story in its “story-present” and some are involved in the “story-past”.\u00a0\u00a0 All require thought and looking things up.\u00a0\u00a0 I like looking things up.\u00a0 Sometimes when I’m looking up Thing A, there’s a reference to Thing B…and that looks like it might be useful so I wander over to find out about Thing B, but then…that connects to Thing C –> Thing D\u00a0 and at D I find a whole bunch of branches to E, F, G, and H, each of which also connects to more than one thing, and then it’s after midnight again.<\/p>\n But now for a snippet.<\/p>\n Where:\u00a0 Somewhere on Slotter Key<\/p>\n Preceding events:\u00a0 Explosion in a secure IT\/communications facility belonging to [redacted]\u00a0\u00a0 One fatality.<\/p>\n ………………………………………………………………………….<\/p>\n “Stupid woman,” the first man said. “Why didn’t she just inform her supervisor–she’d looked up the procedure in the manual.”<\/p>\n The second man sighed, fogging the faceplate of his protective gear. “Now we’ll have to do a new background check on her. Maybe she suspected something.”<\/p>\n “Or maybe she was just bored.”<\/p>\n They cleaned up the mess, and by the time they’d satisfied themselves the area was safe once more, Nils Rolander had arrived. By then, another of the boxes was blinking.<\/p>\n “What a shame about poor Merced,” he said. “I would never have suspected her of initiative.”<\/p>\n …………………………………………………………………………<\/p>\n As always with snippets, this may or may not be in the final draft, and if it is it may or may not be anywhere near its current position (in terms of chapters.)\u00a0 But it does give you a fairly good idea of what kind of person Nils Rolander is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NewBook is now over the hump in rough draft, having crossed the 60,000 word midpoint for this book.\u00a0\u00a0 Its first 40,000 words or so have been reworked to improve characterization (which will lead to smoother progress later on. )\u00a0\u00a0 It’s unusual for me to have the mid-book slow-down due to characterization problems, but so it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,5],"tags":[12,28,107],"class_list":["post-2460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-snippet","category-the-writing-life","tag-research","tag-snippet","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2461,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2460\/revisions\/2461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}