Weekly WIP Update

I added 11.5K words to The Starlight Dialogues this week, taking the total up to 40.5K, or roughly 40% of my anticipated length. I can reasonably look to have the first draft done in about 4-6 weeks.

That total’s down a bit, but I’ve been housesitting for my parents all week, and the veterinary misadventures of their incontinent cat ate up half of my Wednesday (and made me late for kung fu class for the first time ever (unless you count the two times I’ve missed it as being a week late)–as I went into the kitchen to crate kitty and take her to the vet, I walked straight into a boobytrap that, for the sake of the dojo mats, I felt the need to scrub off my shoe before heading out). I did, however, put 1.2K words into a new Aether Age story, so if you add that to my total word count, my pace barely dropped at all.

What did I get to write in the last week? Yesterday I wrote my first space battle! Like, with spaceships shooting at each other through the INKY VOID! I don’t know how, over the course of one sci-fi novel and about fifteen SF short stories, I managed to avoid doing that until now, but it was a blast (har). Tried to make the physics and logistics as real as possible, and if anything the inclusion of a few boundaries only made it easier to visualize how the whole thing would play out.

My intrepid crew also reached the AI’s home base. The Starlight Dialogues is turning out to be pretty heavy on the sociology, with a distinct sociopolitical solution in each of its settings, and theirs is the most extreme yet: they don’t really need anything besides a bit of energy to keep themselves alive, and as they have very little in the way of infrastructure, there’s no consumerism and very few “real” jobs among them. It’s not a total utopia–they’ve got a tyranny of the majority thing going on–but it’s a whole different set of conditions to work with from the varied human needs of food, water, shelter, etc.

By this time next week, I ought to be past the halfway point and have the crew landed on their final destination. After racing through numerous Earth societies, the Martian colony, and the AI habitat, it’s going to be different to stay in one place for the remaining 40-50% of the book. Failure ahoy!