Posts published in “Writing”

At some point over the past weekend, I broke 40,000 words on Nano. This is no time to get complacent: even though I'm a few days ahead now - only 6200 words from the end - and I'm supposedly on vacation, I may need to go back to work tomorrow to deal with a minor, well, not crisis, but something that demands my attention.

So while that mountain above has impressive height and slope, it ends in a plateau, because the month of November is not done. And if you don't retain focus, you can end on that plateau, because the end of November is friends and family and Thanksgiving and Black Friday and the year-end scramble at work, if you have one.

SO while I have a lead, I'm going to do what I can to keep it. Speaking of which … I wrote 375 words between what I wrote above and the end of this article. Here's an excerpt:

“So, still thinking Halfway was a steal?” Sirius asked. “Was it worth it to spend your inheritance on the hideout of a war criminal, no doubt on her way back here?”

“She’s not a war criminal, and she’s not coming back,” Serendipity said. “She’s a prolific and nurturing mother. She would never have left her grandchild behind, much less her own daughter. Same rules as Norylan’s parents: if she could have come back, she would have—”

“Nurturing mother doesn’t mean,” Sirius said, “she wasn’t a war criminal.”

“A few hard choices don’t a monster make,” Serendipity said. “She led the First Contact mission between Dresan and Murra. For all practical intents and purposes, she founded the Dresan-Murran Alliance, the most harmonious grouping of aliens in the universe—”

“Founded on annihilating everyone who didn’t fit that mold?” Sirius said quietly.

For a moment, Serendipity didn’t say anything.

“I can’t take responsibility for the sins of someone who wasn’t even my ancestor,” Serendipity said, “but I’ll defend the values they bequeathed to me, values they developed trying to learn from their mistakes. When my grandmother came, I could have had her kill you all—”

“Hey!” Sirius said. Then he punched her arm. “Ass!”

“Hey!” Serendipity said back, feeling her arm. “Ow—”

“No, you couldn’t have had her kill us,” Sirius said. “She would have sliced up that blaster, and maybe lopped a few arms, or perhaps just gut checked a few of Toren’s goons with the back end of her scythe blades. Your back was turned. She took the room in an instant—”

“She’s a killer,” Serendipity said. “You don’t know her—”

“She’s a First Contact Engineer and a pregnant mother,” Sirius said. “I saw her face. Yes, she’s scary—I’ve never seen anyone that scary—but I could also see relief when she saw we were children. I refuse to believe she would just windmill through us all, rolling heads.”

Serendipity stared at him.

“I’m not sure I agree with you,” she said, “but I think you’re also making my point.”

Back to work.

-the Centaur

On track. A brief excerpt:

“We could always double bunk, if it comes to that,” Leonid said.

Andromeda and Serendipity both looked at him. Then shot daggers at each other.

“Why would you need to double bunk,” Serendipity asked. “This ship was designed for a crew of six hundred and fifty. It seems like you’d have plenty of bunks—”

“It’s the load of the oxygen farm—how large a space it can oxygenate,” Leonid said. “We used to have twelve segments, but we were down to six—before the crash. Now, once we get back to space, we’re going to need to husband things more carefully. For example, adding you and Norylan—”

“Yeah,” Sirius said. “I’ll bet you just chew up oxygen.”

“Not to mention calories,” Andromeda said.

“Hey,” Serendipity said.

“Seriously, both of you eat a lot,” Leonid said. “I’m guessing … six thousand a day?”

Serendipity seemed to weigh that. “I think that’s about right—for him,” she said, nodding at Norylan. “And I was pushing close to eleven thousand leading up to the tournament—”

“Eleven thousand calories a day!” Leonid said. “You eat for four people?”

“In training, a human Olympic athlete can consume ten thousand calories a day,” Serendipity said defensively. “A normal centaur requires closer to six or seven, and an athlete like myself pushes closer to nine thousand on a regular basis—”

“Let’s budget nine thousand for starters,” Leonid said. “But Norylan—”

“Is an Andiathar,” Serendipity said. “Their metabolism is very different—”

“No wonder he was starving,” Sirius said.

“Don’t you have fights, tournaments?” Serendipity said. “Toren was huge. He’s got to be pushing four, maybe five thousand calories a day, even if he isn’t in training—”

“Six,” Leonid said. “That’s why I guessed what I guessed for you—”

“I’m a little out of his weight class,” Serendipity smirked. Her face fell slightly. “How did you all get this way? I mean, I know you were attacked by pirates. But there’s more to it than just one attack. You’ve got traditions for fighting, ways of decorating your suits—”

“Don’t you like them?” Leonid asked.

“Oh, I do,” Serendipity said, moving that thread of hair aside. “But … what made you decorate them? Did it develop naturally, or were you trying to intimidate the pirates? Or to impress each other? What are your stories?”

“You’re a historian,” Sirius said. “And this ship has seven centuries of history—”

“Seven and a half,” Serendipity said. “Tell me the stories of your people.”

“We don’t tell stories,” Leonid said, motioning to Beetle, who drew out his strumstick. “We sing them.” Serendipity’s mouth fell open, and Leonid smiled. “Beetle, you’ve got some pipes on you. Sing the Song of Irannon, and remind us why we keep fighting on.”

Onward into the deep…

So yet another day of Nano has rolled by and I'm still managing to cough out 1666+ words a day (the lighter blue lines above the red water line). I've added 11,795 words to the manuscript, which by my counter is just shy of 25% of Nano - roughly 3.6% ahead of where I need to be, or almost one full day (the surplus is the second, darker blue line in this visualization).

Since my seed was the largest I ever started with - 32,793 words, including the complete novella "Stranded" plus all the story notes I put together over the months since I wrote that story - completing Nano this year will leave me with 82,793 words, which I'm guessing will be very close to a full manuscript. Most of my novels clock in around 150,000 words, but this one feels like 90K.

Oh yeah, an excerpt:

“How do I know,” Toren said, “you won’t send soldiers to evict us once your people come back here, whenever that is—”

“Roughly fifteen months,” Serendipity said, looking at him sidelong. “And no-one can evict you. I am Governor of Halfway, and I’ve offered the crew of Independence oasis, and the ship a permanent berth. Leonid accepted. Halfway is Independence’s home port now.”

Toren rocked on his heels a little. “There is no port, you foolish—”

“That is a port,” Serendipity said, jerking her head at the spaceport. “It’s not a castle, it’s not a mansion, it’s not a secret lab—though I suppose to Norylan’s parents it was all of those things, to me it is the kernel of the civilization I hope to build here—”

“You build,” Toren said. “You mean to build a civilization—”

“It’s why I came here,” Serendipity said. “This port lay fallow for ten thousand years because a war cut off the spacelanes, and I was the first person to recognize that it might be restored, now that traffic has begun moving out here again—”

“Including from the Frontier,” Toren said, staring off at the port, “which didn’t even exist ten thousand years ago.”

“I had to move fast,” Serendipity said. “After all, you got here just when I did.”

Toren stared down at her. “You’re crazy. Crazy, you know that? When the Allies get here, they’re going to ship you off to a nutter’s pod. And I still don’t know whether me and my crew are going to have to flee when they come. And you know which of us is right?”

Serendipity’s eyes tightened. “No,” she admitted.

Toren’s eyes gleamed at her. “Me neither.”

Uh oh! Serendipity once again facing off with Toren? A dangerous development. What's he figured out she hasn't?

Onward into the deep!

-the Centaur

MAROONED is still progressing. Taking a break now, but I'm keeping above the curve so far.

“Seren, this is serious,” she said. “We have a spacecraft to rebuild. If we can get this housing running again with a standard cabling software, we have to do it, whether his software is inclined or not. We can’t afford to romanticize your little pet—”

“He is not a pet,” Serendipity said. “He may be my ‘familiar,’ but he’s a full person, with a full person’s rights and responsibilities. This housing isn’t just a piece of equipment we can do what we want with. It’s his body, and we need his permission—”

“If we need the parts—”

“If Leonid needed some biomass to keep the oxygen farm running, would you be happy if he just threw you into the cycler?” Serendipity asked. “No? Wouldn’t that go double if you were in a coma, expected to recover, and they just decided to cycle you anyway, just because?”

Dijo stared at her with those odd contact lenses.

“Let me see him.”

Again she felt reluctant, but Serendipity realized that if she really wanted to be part of this crew, she had to recognize Dijo as her superior. Slowly Serendipity stepped back, reached in her satchel, and carefully brought out Tianyu’s still form.

Filled with mercury batteries, built on a thact frame, the minifox felt unusually heavy in her hands—dead weight, she thought, and cursed herself—and oddly small and sad. Without the millions of tiny motors fluffing his fur, he looked flat and drab, doubly so because of the soot.

Serendipity laid Tianyu down on the worktable between her and Dijo. “This is my best friend,” Serendipity said. “I mean that. More than my cohort, more than my PC’s, in some ways, more than even my parents. He’s always been there for me, when by right he could have chosen to go elsewhere. You will not treat him like a collection of parts.”

“Well,” Dijo said, leaning down, “he’s an impressive collection of parts—”

Serendipity reached down, putting her fingers under Dijo’s chin and lifting her back up. It was an easy move, an aikido move despite the initiation of force, and despite resistance she easily straightened Dijo back to standing. Dijo stepped back, a bit shocked.

“We have a ship to fix, I owe you help fixing it, and I’ll serve under you if that’s what you think I should do,” Serendipity said. “But this world is mine. It’s my responsibility to protect all the people within half a light year, even the ones you can’t easily see as people yet.”

Dijo raised her hands, licked her lips. She was scared.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she said.

Onward into the deep!

-the Centaur

So far, so good. Not really a good excerpt to be had here, first drafty stuff … ok, how's this:

“It’s interesting,” Dijo said, “that you’re sort of a technological witch.”

Serendipity looked up from her cauldron. The first step in getting the robots back up to speed had been getting Tianyu back up to speed, and to do that she needed components. With her fabricator in Toren’s camp … her next best bet was her nanoseed.

She’d requisitioned a large cooking kettle from Leonid and filled it with biosludge, then heated it to the proper activation temperature. With a droplet from her nanoseed and the right dopants, Serendipity should be able to generate enough nanoplasm to make anything.

“How do you figure,” Serendipity said, stirring the cauldron slowly.

“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” Dijo said, raising a cylinder. “You’re making potions. You’ve got a familiar. You have what seem, to us technological primitives at least, like magic powers. All you need is a witches’ hat and a magic broom—”

“My mom wears the hats,” Serendipity said, “but I do have a farstaff.”

“It can fly?” Dijo said, shocked. “Not just teleport you, but actually fly?”

“It can indeed,” Serendipity said, taking the cylinder. “Molybdenum. Excellent.”

“Ammonium tetrathiomolybdate in solution,” Dijo said. “That’s from the hyperdrive, by the way, so don’t go using it medicinally unless you separate it first.”

“Why would I use it—oh, copper toxosis,” Serendipity said.

“Do you really have a ship’s worth of Lore rattling around in your head?”

Now off to see Gravity … which will probably be good inspiration for MAROONED!

-the Centaur