Roughed out the basic plan for The Tiki Stars. Over the past few weeks I've been finding the underlying plots and themes that tie together what is currently planned as four sections.
Still feeling tired. Took a break with a space opera on Kindle/Prime. Julia Huni, the Trianna Moore series, four books for the price (free!) of one.
And the parallels! Book one is a station-side adventure that orients the reader to the universe and gets the basic world-building done. Book two is nefarious plotting and corporate skullduggery. Book three, trouble on a passenger cruise. And book four adventure in the jungle. Sort of. (It is planet-side.)
And what do the notes say for my new book? Part one is world-building and establishing the ground rules with a sort of South Seas-flavored adventure mostly around the space port of a tropical island. Second part is asteroid miners, golden age rockets and space suits with rivets and a touch of Space Western. Third sequence is in two parts; a man-v-alien monster thing (with some cassette futurism elements) then takes a turn into glossy Space-Age Bachelor Pad world with a SHADO-like organization of alien hunters. Part four is jungle adventure; revolutionaries, poachers, and a lost temple in a volcano.
But really that's the easy stuff. I got to plot all this adventure. I realized yesterday I need to drop an exotic and dangerous local life form into whatever is going on in my little Smuggler's Cove. And all I've got for a plot at the moment is reason for a fist fight in a bar. And I have even less plotted towards whatever is going on with struggling mining companies and claim jumpers and whatever else is happening in the next one. Of four.
Yeah, probably not the smartest book for me, especially if I want to write fast. I realized half way through the Paris book I don't even really need to plot Athena Fox stories that far ahead. Just have the frame, because when I'm actually producing text I basically dream up a thing, open the maps to find a good place to do the thing, and that's when I actually need the research close at hand.
My notes are, "Penny does something clever here" or, more likely, "They talk, he tricks the secret out of her," or "She chases after the guy but he does parkour and gets away." I don't bother figuring out the details until I'm writing the actual scene.
See, those books are very linear plots. They are almost Plot Coupon books; Penny blunders around learning lots of stuff that mostly doesn't matter, with a guy coming through the door with a gun every now and then just to keep the adrenaline moving. Then at the climax, she Hercule Poirots the clues and announces the solution (without, thankfully, a full drawing-room scene).
Doing a tighter plot...that's new to me. And for all I've been worrying about underlying themes and the difference between what works in a museum exhibit (they had some cool period consumer sound stuff at MOMA last weekend...basically, cassettes!) and what works on the page, that is just the spices on top. The meat of this thing is the mechanics of who gets the drop on who. And why.
Fortunately, the models I am emulating were basically written at a run as well, with the author having just as little idea how he was going to have his hero win the fight THIS time...
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