Affinity

Got back into Affinity Photo, tweaked the cover for Early Fox (swapped the fat sans-serif Impact for a slightly slimmer but still thriller-coded Babas Neue) and threw together a wrap-around so I could put the paperback up. My second go-to for beta readers changed over to a required sign-in while I was in the middle of filling out the application, blanking the form and booting me out and now it won't even recognize my email.

I had rehearsal and costume parade to deal with, so I put off fixing that. Besides, the book ain't selling, and I'm more interested in working on the next.

No longer opening with my cadet doing maintenance. I thought it was a good way to get some attitude from her, sink some character beats, and establish that systems (and engineering, and some science) are going to matter in this book and there might be more than expected.

But it was way too much for an opening scene and I couldn't find a way to trim it down and keep the bit. And besides, it didn't fit the M.I.C.E. The new opening is at Threshold Station, on a few hours pass before T4M (Ln) leaves for the Frontier. With a bar and a fistfight because what else are you going to do with a bunch of young crew?

As an aside, I'm unsure exactly what I'm calling people generically. "Spacers" just sounds weird to me these days. "Sailors" might still work in a wet navy that hasn't seen a sail outside of the Academy, but it is pushing things the way "Marine" doesn't ("Marine" and "Navy" seem to have gotten well-enough established in SF they don't even need to append "Space" to them).

As of this moment, though, Keri is a cadet, the lads are mostly Ordinaries with a few more experienced Ratings here and there, and there's a Senior Technician and a Chief Petty Officer getting named, as well as the Third Officer (who is also ship's engineer -- T4M isn't a big ship). And no, I still haven't done the work of figuring out who holds what position, what ranks they have, and all that.

Another thing I'm trying out in practice as I write this test chapter.

I'm still feeling out how my protagonist talks and acts. At least she isn't the narrator this time, but I am choosing, unlike Andre Norton (I've been re-reading her lately) to use free indirect speech. That means whether a bit of background or tech gets explained in narration is largely a character decision. Fortunately Keri (like Penny) thinks about this stuff a lot, so it isn't out of character for her to muse on some of the workings of the universe.

But it still means I'm playing the game of demonstrating when I can, giving clues when I can't, and breaking the fourth wall to explain only when it is absolutely necessary. And that's only one of the many things I have to contemplate whenever I hit the name of a thing.

Does it sound too technical, this early in the story? The M.I.C.E. I spoke of is that I want to start with presenting the concept of the world; the colonies expanding in a ring, the dendritic network growing from Oberon. Then get into character, as Keri is supposed to carry the story. The clash with Cyrus and Atlas Metals Amalgamated is just the driver of the plot, not the point of the book. For that and just for general reasons I want to keep the tech to a dull roar and not go all "this is how a space station works" for multiple pages.

And I'm trying to balance a bit of whimsy/mythology/magic in the naming, and a hint of the scary frontier of knowledge of things that glow green and rip holes in space, without losing the grounded SF feel. It ain't gonna be hard SF, but...

This sort of thing; test chapters, sketches, character interviews and the like, are like story-boarding. You are trying out ideas that you will flesh out properly later, because actually using them in text on the ground is superior to sitting inside an instantiation of Obsidian or Google Docs doing world-building.

Not that I haven't been taking a lot of notes. Within the week I came up with Dren-shock (when a Dren is hurt, physically or emotionally, to such an extent that personality dissolves and is lost to the Drenoi). And many new questions about exactly what do you do about law enforcement when you are outside the space that Amber, or one of the closely-allied polities, directly controls? Oh, and the thought that at least until recently, only the Merchant Fleet operated starships within Amber space (Amber is the original colony launched from the sphere of influence around Sol to the new and exciting star cluster around Oberon and the hot blue stars that form the Fairy Ring).

Fortunately I've five history-adjacent mysteries that have built up my resistance against wanting to include everything. Even the busy world-builder has nothing on profligate creativity of the real world.

The Art of Forgetting

I've a light design due by the end of the month and I barely remember the steps. I'm hoping that as I start attending rehearsals and so forth it will come back to me.

Also feeling stuck in plotting on two different books. Familiar feeling, though. The second worst part of planning a book (the worst being having made those decisions, then realizing half-way through that they don't quite work, and having to re-plot in the middle of the book. That kept me up for over a month on The Early Fox).

The next Athena Fox book, A Fox's Sleep, is set in a mining town in Colorado. But right now, what it really wants to do is be another dual-time narrative, with the modern-day including Penny crossing paths with local law enforcement, Jim Rockford style (small town law enforcement -- a subject I know so very, very little about). And the other being the experiences of a boy who either works in or adjacent to a coal mine around the (rather long) period of strikes and subsequent violence.

That's a ton of research and that's not something I want right now. For the book, the smartest thing to do is sit down with another half-dozen books like the one I just finished (Death in the Pit: The Ludlow Massacre and the Birth of American Labor Rights), and not even think about plotting until that is done. But I really want to charge into writing itself.

For the space opera, first-book-in-a-series All Systems Blue, I still haven't nailed down how character and theme work together. What I want is a Horatio-esque; not just the career progression of a young officer against the background of military action (In Space!!) but a character that carries the book(s). Someone with an approach that is distinctive enough that when the big moment comes, the reader will nod and say, "Yup, that's our gal."

In the interest of getting it written this decade, I am sticking with the framework of getting more-or-less marooned on a mining world after an alien attack, having her "in a cave with a box of scraps" moment but only so far in that her cobbled-together hardware eventually gets her back to her ship. And then she gets dumped on "Legations" world, a place with a big city full of different aliens with trading outposts and embassies and all that who are about to get attacked by those same guys from the beginning...

Oh, and I've been working on new blurbs (aka, Amazon descriptions) for all five of the Athena Fox stories. And cover art continues. I'm happy enough with The Early Fox (a minimalist regional-mystery flavor New Mexico landscape and your basic sans-serif -- which I kerned myself, out of brute force and ignorance, not any particular training or skill).

I am not doing so well with new covers for #1 through #4. The one thing I'm sure of is I want to make them look current, and like mysteries with adventure/thriller elements. I'm giving up on the retro-pulp/Republic Serial stuff, or trying to push the Romancing the Stone role/reality confusion. Maybe there is such a market, maybe the right approach might reach them, but even then the stock photo model stuff isn't looking right in today's market.

There may be a reason I feel like the biggest thing I've accomplished over the past week or so is binge-watching multiple seasons of the Rodney McCay Show... aka Stargate:Atlantis

A reach

Last week, was watching the new season of Reacher, and old episodes of Supernatural, and both shows went to Philadelphia.

Well, I was in the City of Cheesesteak Love this weekend. Drank at McGillis, ran up the Rocky Steps. Thinking of setting a story there.

I sure as heck couldn’t do worse than those two. Sure, I get Vancouver Doubling, but this is a case where just throwing in an establishing shot of the William Penn statue atop City Hall doesn’t do it.

Edit: Episode 5, they finally have some scenes that look like they were filmed in Philly. And, okay, it messes up the essay, but Reacher actually did pretty well in some sequences in the opening episode, and elsewhere, that were definitely that city.

Okay, I was mostly in Central City; stayed in Rittenhouse and the job was just up from the Delaware waterfront. And there are generic glass blocks in those districts, and newer buildings.

But like Paris, or the City of London (aka, the part with the old Chris Wren streets), it is a town with a very specific stamp of architectural style. Especially when you add the more creative skyscrapers (the older ones, especially, have enough Art Deco and bas reliefs to be at home in Gotham City), you know at a glance what town you are in. No mistaking it for New York or Chicago or Boston.

Architecture is only part. The one thing you don’t seem to do is hear that Philly accent (the best sample I found was a recording on the crosswalk button). They do love that cheesesteak though.

(Also breaking the mold, Chicago locals aren’t fond of “Chi-town,“ and you had better not refer to San Francisco as "Frisco," but the vocals in Philadelphia are fine with “Philly.")

They are friendly, with their own multiculturalism. More permeable than San Francisco (which tends to lock into neighborhoods like a really small patchwork quilt), less comfortable than Oakland (the tensions are easier to find).

And maybe it is just the current fad, but their approach to history has a distinct shading. Okay, I haven’t been back to Beantown in a while but my memory is the only thing there’s more of than Dunkin’ Donuts are the “Paul Revere once had breakfast here” plaques. Same with the DC area. 

In Philly, there’s context. I’m surprised a certain politician hasn’t sent his goons over to demand a few plaques torn down. They’d be at it a while, though. There are quite old and established monuments right in the tourist part of town that celebrate not the flag-toting boosterism of the American Revolution but the hard (and constant) job of creating and upholding democracy.

The context was always there. On the Olympia, displays on the naval victories of the Philippines campaign did not shy from the atrocities committed, or the profits made by United Fruit. This isn’t just inside museums, either. It’s all over the streets.

Oh, and yeah. I was viewing all these exhibits on the tangled weave of human rights, corporate profits, and the struggles of a young nation to define itself and how things were supposed to work, and my light reading for the trip was a book on the Ludlow Massacre.

So I’m taking notes on, I guess you could call it three books now. 

Spending what felt like the larger part of the trip enmeshed in the travel technology gave me some thoughts for Blue. An exhibit on the post revolutionary war China trade at the Independence Seaport Museum gave me some fun thoughts about trade activity on the frontier. And there were some possible parallels, even, with the naval battles against Barbary pirates. 

Keri Sinclair is still up in a J-tube trying to fix a circuit, and her world is changing by the hour. It is what is supposed to be happening at this point in writing the book, but I am getting real impatient to start cranking out chapters.

When she gets out of that tube, she's got a visit to still-unnamed-station in her future. This is at least a big transship station. Might be shipyards and stuff too. Not sure yet. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is Oberon is visible from there. Whether Oberon is visible from anywhere else, I don't know yet. Strange stars are... strange. That scene is growing bigger and bigger. A failure of her skills as an officer. More about the relationship between her and the ranking enlisted in the power room. Probably a brawl. Probably drinking, too. 

Less progress on the other two. I've named the coalfield wars adventure A Fox's Sleep. That part of it (that Penny is trying to keep a low profile) is likely to be the least of it. I've sort of settled on a data center, I want to explore the way that the more obvious social control of the company store et al were polished up by Rockefeller and his cronies until they are subtler (and often harder to fight). 

And archaeologically, it is about protecting a site and applying for it to be on the Registry. What I want is for a boy that died during one contested event to be a sort of town mascot, and for his story to be used by two sides of a political fight. They don't want fresh archaeology done because they have gotten good at spinning it the way it is.

Oh, and the Bell Witch. Maybe.

Thing is, the specifics of the Ludlow Massacre are so fascinating. I don't want to change anything about it. I binge-read several Lincoln Child/Douglas Preston books recently as well (hey, they are mystery-thrillers with a strong regional flavor. Exactly the market I'm aiming for now). One featured the Roswell incident and stayed within the (updated) facts -- such as Project Mogul. Another left New Mexico for a Donner Party story that, again, stayed pretty close to the truth.

But then there was one with a party of hikers in New Mexico going mad and running out of their tents near-naked into the snow and I am ashamed I got a full chapter in before realizing this was the Dyatlov Pass incident. Okay, the writers did manage to tie it to a couple of fun bits of New Mexico history in the end, but there are more and more places where they chose to change the facts to make a better story.

And it still bugs me. I've had to do it, I'll do it again, but it bugs me.

It's like putting the Chicago "El" in a story set in Philadelphia.

Talking to machines

The cover came back. Instead of tweaking what was a nearly-finished design, she moved everything around and ran AI on the remains. New Mexico turned into Cabo (one white sand is like another, to AI). I did a soft confront on her using AI to communicate with me, and she returned a soft admission. 

I am very, very tired of getting nothing from cover designers but more ideas I can play with. I'm back to making my own.

And I'm stuck on Early Fox because one of her ideas was so good I really want to see if I can make it work.

The space opera goes as expected. I'm okay with the first scenes taking a while. Now I'm into the tech density question; how much world-building here, how much in the entire book. It should go faster after this. It is space opera, after all. Whereas classic SF is (supposed to be) about the ideas and/or the technical execution, space opera is towards the adventure side of things. Less technical explanation, more fisticuffs.

Mostly.

That's my new fear. I've been stopping every sentence to look up stuff. It is nice that I sort of know my way around tech, so most of the stuff I've been dreaming up, like nanofoam fire suppressants, is already something somebody is writing up papers on and putting them in NASA Tech Briefs or JSTOR.

But as much as I mean for Blue to spend most of the book running around with a blaster in one hand, the plot I've constructed for book one (and the parts of her character that make her different and interesting) require there be a spanner in the other. There's a Robinsonade happening; the first third of the book absolutely will take some looking stuff up.

And in the last of my nowhere plans for nobody, I checked out one of the forks of LTX 2.3. Those are on confused legal ground. The original is free but there are restrictions -- in fact there are safety rails built into the model (which I generally consider a good thing).

So far the model I have been messing with is more accurate in some places, seems to generate somewhat less animated animation, and might be slightly faster. I have yet to get into the huge number of nodes that can give more control.

People are already using this stuff commercially. A lot of the energy towards staying on-model, and tightly controlling the timing and camera moves, is coming from people doing product showcases. I don't know if these are being used internally or going out on cheaper advertising slots, but this is happening. And some band videos as well.

So it ain't just dancing cats. Whether this is good or bad...

Phase 1

Writing the test scene (the opening scene) for All Systems Blue -- the space opera. Which means discovering the character's voice, the style in which I am writing, how well free indirect speech in third person is working for me and how I mean to handle it, how the world is presented, and as expected; I'm running into a lot of world-building questions.

You really don't know what you need until you've got people in it, regardless of whether you are a games master with a bunch of unruly players, or the writer and sole creative spirit.

I'm aiming for the 90-100K range with this one.

Also dealing with cover artists and editors and blurb-wranglers and I'm sick of it. I just want to put The Early Fox out (the archaeological-adventure series which is currently getting staged as a mystery-thriller) and return my concentration to writing. 

I feel like half these people at Fiverr and in the cover shops are not actually talking to me, but shoving all that correspondence through Claude. I'll say in my query that I need help with cover art on a novel, and I'll get back an ELIZA-like "I understand you want to talk about cover art." It really is that blatant.

My current -- subject to change at any moment -- feeling about AI is that it is a tool and it is inevitable. We are dealing with the teething problems of any new technology now, and much of the presentation is oversold and much of the adoption is premature. And that means the problems are also significant right now.

I won't say there aren't systemic issues but there are with all technologies. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new here. We humans have always been prone to offloading whatever we can. Saving labor. Saving time by having something else do it, or by cutting corners when we can get away with it. And offloading the need to think about everything in our environment, relying on simple rules or better yet, systems of rules (like religions or political beliefs) that give answers we can use and more-or-less rely on.

Right now, the market pressures are extreme and the pace of economic activities (and change) is extremely rapid. That's an opening for scammers, charlatans, and for human laziness to overtake any spare brain cells we might have to consider whether the AI is giving us good information.

Eventually it will be subtler. The tendencies of AI will be as well understood as how watercolor paints work or what you can realistically accomplish in three weeks of rehearsal. Implicit there is that the results will often be good enough, but there will exist a boundary where it isn't good enough and it will be considered the wrong tool. Going along with this, AI becomes more interactive. I am seeing this in AI video generation, where it has moved sharply beyond where the user puts in a prompt and hopes, to where the user can manage at a closer scale, dictating camera moves, pre-designing characters, and so on.

The earlier version of it was a black box, and this is how it is still being used by the terminally lazy. Used intelligently and with a good work ethic, yes, it can help edit a novel. Used by someone on Fiverr who dares to call themselves an editor and might not have even looked at the manuscript themselves? That's crap, that's insulting, and I'm damned tired of people who think I'm sucker enough to keep paying them for it.

Because even when you toss out the stealing and the environmental costs and the many and fascinating abuses, even when you boil it down to just whether the result is good... the result ain't. It can be, but when it is used as a crutch, when it is used out of laziness, when it is used only for quick cash, those results are not.

Anyhow.

Not one to stow thrones, I've been messing around with LTX far too much lately. I haven't installed some of the front-end stuff that makes it more controllable, as the Comfy-UI front end has a bad habit of breaking everything with each mandatory install (its the freeware version of Windows 11!) To protect my rig I leave it off line. And that makes it harder to install new tricks.

The latest down the pipe is MinMax H3, which is even more scriptable with multiple references of multiple types. And much higher character consistency. LTX 2.3 has that same object permanence problem all AI has: you can start with a fully rendered character, but if they ever leave the frame, what will return may be something different. So does MinMax, but at least you can give it a stable reference to look back on.

Having a combined video-audio output is a mixed blessing. Mostly to the good, because character animation matches the vocal track in a way even the audio-track-plus-starting-image method in Wan2.2 didn't. The weird thing is, since you are giving it a starter image (the usual approach) you can make multiple clips with character consistency, but you won't get consistent vocal performance. That makes it very difficult to marry clips together into a longer video.

It also doesn't normally loop, though there are workflows to achieve that. My last run of experiments was mostly pressure-testing by running either pixel size or frame length out to excess numbers to see what would happen. I could get one or two renders out to 1400 frames -- almost a minute at the default frame rate -- before memory leaks started throwing errors. And at a much much higher consistency than anything else I'd tried before.

The other thing I was messing around with was multi-character dialogue. It did sometimes lose track of who was who, and the range of performance styles can be limited, but it was pretty surprising how natural the results could get. In fact, I just finished an experimental render in which I prompted a 1970s holdout to stroll into the scene carrying a guitar and sing a song badly. First try, and it did pretty much everything I'd been hoping.

Which is another thing. Although I'm told MinMax H3 is even better at smoothly combining character action, dialogue, and camera movements, I've been impressed at how much more agile LTX 2.3 is about camera moves. It was pulling teeth to get Wan 2.2 to even pull a zoom. LTX 2.3 seems to understand the dramatic intent of a camera move, and will integrate it with action.

Of course, it probably helps that I'm writing camera motions and character actions in between chunks of dialogue. As with all things AI, it doesn't always do them in the order prompted. But quite often it comes close to story-telling norms.

Now if only I could do multiple shots and cut them together. I still haven't done a character LoRA and there's an additional step of converting a LoRA to work with LTX 2.3 (and I really miss the LoRA I had with WAN 2.2). So maybe I will try that MinMax install.

It seem silly making video clips nobody will ever see. But some days I just want to sit down in front of the gaming rig and mess around... and how different is this from building factories nobody will ever visit?

A very annoying object-permanence adjacent thing is the Boots Problem. The AI is almost hard-wired by the training data to move the camera. Often pushing in, but other times the directives for the scene will cause it to pan off what is in the starting image.

At which point it will totally make up whatever was out of frame. You perfect Star Trek officer will turn out to be wearing Crocs. And you can't fix it with prompting, because anything in a prompt will almost certainly show up in the final render. So if you add "wearing uniform boots" to the prompt, then instead of pushing in, or doing a pan, it will make a strong effort to get those boots in frame.

Neither is a good solution. Extra references would be... if I cared enough to get those working.

The boron part of the story

I'm going with boron. It has the downsides of mostly being a mined material, but if I stick with the idea of Oberon station as a wormhole tap (for ridiculous amounts of power) you can still make the stuff the hard way.

In fact, the whole boron chain has some cool world-building aspects to it. First, if you've got the infrastructure to be pulling the raw stuff out of the ground, you can be using it in various high-tech materials; boron-fiber composites, borosilicate glass, etc. For fuel use, it has to be refined. It has to be extremely pure, and you need 11boron and leave the 10boron alone.

Which is easier than U238; with an atomic number of 5, the difference of a neutron or two makes a significant difference in mass. There's a couple different chemical isotope exchange distillation processes, the second one a "greener" one (aka fewer nasty acids to deal with). Or there's laser distillation.

And for that matter, you can breed the stuff by slamming a proton beam into oxygen-16. And I don't have any idea what the surface of Oberon might be like (it is an exotic star) you can always find some water ices or molecular clouds when you want them.

So that gives us three nice layers of tech. Oberon Station could be producing Boron out of pure, err, interstellar gas, purifying it with more lasers, and sending it straight (because it is purified in basically the same sequence of operations) to packaging up as starship fuel.

On other industrialized colony worlds, mine the stuff as borax or whatever (a lovely thing about boron is just how hydrophilic it is, meaning not only are there beds of concentrated deposits, but these are happening on planets with a water cycle (that is, probably habitable ones). And being as these are heavily industrialized colonies, those dark satanic mills can run the stuff through chemical distillation. And, as I said, turn a bunch of it out to local industry.

And then you have the worlds that could happily mine you some borax, but a twenty mule train isn't adaptable to the task of purifying and distilling the fuel, meaning you are getting the thing I wanted; the high tech worlds at the center of the web are exporting the power that makes the trade lanes possible.

And the stuff is a stable isotope, if it wasn't for oxidation and other potential contamination, you could shovel it like coal. Or like cocoa; pick your allotrope. How it is packaged I don't care but the only part of it that calls for special handling is the purity, and the consequent price.

And when you get it into your engine room, outside of confinement questions (they are still playing with inertial confinement) the short version is you superheat it into a plasma then fire an accelerated proton beam at it. Which you might be getting by blasting some hydrogen feed stock. And then the output is mostly aneutronic and as such not only less of a hassle, but you can use direct electrical conversion instead of running a steam cycle.

(Mostly. Biggest problem is 10boron poisoning. You are breeding the stuff in the reactor and you've got to get those products out of there because they do reactions which are much dirtier.)

(Which also might be with lasers.)

Today I also had a wonderful bit of serendipity. I was writing a test draft of the first scene. It felt like I needed to name my protagonist's home world. So, Keri Sinclair comes from an "ag-world"; a farming planet, breadbasket for the more centralized and population-dense worlds. They are your typical poor-but-proud. And as is already noticed, there's a bit of Celtic (and English) mythology going on.

I was thinking about Stirling Bridge, but I wiki-walked in the wrong direction and ended up on Bannock. Which reminds of Bannockburn. But is also a bread eaten in Scotland.

Oh, yeah, and connected to medieval Scottish breads there is some wonderful stuff about the manorial tenant farmers of Scotland, all sorts of thirlage and multure, grassum and quern-stones. And I'm probably not going all crazy with Scotts terminology and culture for Keri's world -- it is enough they are thought of by other worlds as hayseed farmers -- but that vassalage et al gave me a direction for her character other than joining the Navy (that is, the merchant fleet) for the education and a lack of any better options.

No, she joins because her people consider it an honor and an obligation. She doesn't need to find it later, translating from her dutiful role as middle child seeing after the young ones after the oldest children have gone off to college. No, she can walk in intending to serve her duty to the best of her ability.

The only problem is her idea of what that duty means may not quite match up with that of some of her bosses.

"The time has come," the Walrus said

"To talk of many things. Of starships and helium-3... "

And now I want to write a cozy fantasy and title it Of Cabbages and Kings. Apropos, the cabbage rules in Skyrim, second only in cooking utility to wheat (wheat, besides making bread, is a powerful alchemical ingredient.)

Yes, I re-installed Skyrim on my gaming PC, with a couple dozen graphics improvement mods.

More to the point, I was outlining a potential long-ish scene on Oberon Station, where possibly T4M is getting refueled. I went to look up physical properties of 3He. And you know what? It kinda sucks as a fuel.

The point of the exercise is that the core worlds are lousy with generated power, and can afford to produce extremely high-density fuels. And that FTL travel sits at the peak of my imagined pyramid of power usage, taking more power than can be accomplished economically with anything as simple as fossil fuels.

Helium-3 ain't it. The return for mass spent is small, and the kind of structure you need to get across the Coulomb barrier of 3He-3He is massive as well. The most common sources for the stuff are also as a byproduct of things like CANDU reactors (heavy water cooling) or tritium for bombs (going out of style). So in any near-future scenario, it would be a product of a robust civilian nuclear energy program and found in relatively small amounts.

Really, the big excitement for people is that it is technically aneutronic (practically? Well...)

So unless I reach for some sort of stable exotic matter for the power plants, it looks like antimatter is it. Or lower the bar until you can make it happen with fission, leaving antimatter for the military. Which is a distinction I was already thinking about for hand tools; those superconducting magnetic storage for civilian gear, and nuclear isomers for high-power or military applications. The latter is also essentially one-use in the field, whereas the former is ridiculously easy to recharge.

Incidentally, I've already got an inciting incident around those SMES cells. The mining camp is using a SMES bank in conjunction with solar panels. The lower-cost version that requires an outside source for refrigerant and you can see where this one is going...

Fission has a similar downside to fusion, in that everything that isn't a bomb is designed for duration, not peak power output. Except for, well, rockets. That aspect of delivering full power over a long time I guess you could crowbar into the FTL drives by having them charge for days or weeks and then having a jump limit defined by that stored power.

Anyhow, instead of cabbages and kings, I'm dealing with candy and spinach -- to borrow the terms from Mythcreants. And learning about the full glory of Dutch disease (not to be confused with Dutch Elm disease), rentier states, petro-aggression and how the resource curse can lead to stratification and even gender inequity (the short version is, a concentrated high-value resource lowers mass employment, concentrating wealth and refocusing government concerns from a taxable populace to the owners and often external investors).

The best insight I've had on Keri Sinclair over the past week or two is I'm going to make her earn that Candy. This isn't just character arc, though. Having her have to learn how to be a wizard hacker on-screen means more scenes, and more chances for world-building. I'm taking away physical conditioning before she realizes she needs it to keep use of the implant from hurting so much (and until she meets the Colonial Marines, who she still considers a bit mental on the subject).

And all in all I've chosen the slower start. Which is why I have plans for a sequence set on Oberon Station.