Space Mice

Almost up to the end of Part III in revisions on the third book. I don't see a lot of changes through most of the final part. There's a tweak to the "Guns and Monet" sequence. A few dialogue bits with Ichiro and maybe get slightly better beats with his relationship.

Then the nadir and turn-around, with a whole bunch of changes. At least I'm almost done folding in the corrected Japanese language, although I am tempted to hire the same translator to go back through the entire book (I'd forgotten just how many throwaway lines in Japanese there are peppered about.)

Then back to the fourth book and I have little hope now of getting that finished before the year is out. Even with Christmas Vacation (more like Christmas Mandatory Time Off which draws from saved vacation hours).

Had an entirely new sick so at least it was, well, new. Thought I was over it, was back at work, suddenly my skull started hurting. Not like a headache, like my whole scalp was in pain. Weird. I wrapped my head in a road blanket, turned on the noisy space heater, and eventually lay down on the floor of my little shop waiting for the pain to go away.

After about four hours I was feeling well enough to get up and drive home. And was in bed most of the weekend.

Anyhow. Had a thought about the space opera I've been tinkering with. And that is that I don't actually know what the M.I.C.E. is on this one. Is it about the setting? The characters? The action?

I've been re-reading the "Lost Engineer" series and I'm sort of liking it more this time around. Either that, or I'm still so brain-fogged I'm not noticing the problems. At least this time I know what I am getting; that it is weirdly short and also rushed, packing roughly the same material as a one-hour TV episode into a "book" which is a bare 20,000 words or so. No scene divisions, so the action lurches strangely from place to place instead of letting you know when "the argument in the corridor" is over and we are now "on the bridge in the middle of combat." Seriously, I think locations and cast changes in the middle of paragraphs sometimes.

There's also very little look and feel. I can get by without physical descriptions (they are overrated) but almost nobody in the cast comes across as a strong personality. In book three the protagonist is being shunned by the rest of the engineering section, led by her suspicious and surly supervisor...but that had to be explained after it was all over. Heck, I didn't even realize this "Commander Adams" guy was in her chain of command!

And got pulled into yet another of the "I read reddit posts out loud" channels, this one on TTRPGs and some of the interpersonal conflict that happens. And still archive-binging on Eureka. Both of these are giving me different lenses on writing. Eureka, for instance, typically has about four strings to each bow...err, episode. The main plot, a B plot, some season-arc stuff, and a theme they are trying to work.

Like, one episode will be about the Science Experiment Gone Critical of the week, the on-again off-again romances are cooking in the background and the Big Bad of the season is spotted lurking around one scene, there's a B Plot about Fargo doing something Fargo...and something about the importance of communication in a relationship.

Sometimes this is plot important. Zoey thinking about running away makes her the perfect person to talk down an armed drone (it makes sense in context. Well, it makes sense in Eureka -- a point the series makes more than once!) Most of the time it is there as a metaphor or a different reading of the crazy technological problem they are having that week. But what I especially notice is that they always try, but it doesn't always work.

So this is like reading fanfic. Or reading this "engineer" story; watching another writer try and sometimes fail is a way of learning more about how things work yourself.