Blue Coal

The person that was advising me on genre placement -- and we'd just moved into cover design -- got vanished by Fiverrrr. Second time that has happened. Sure, I get the money back, but I've lost all the time I sunk into working with her.

So I've got a formatted manuscript, but no cover. I broke out my old drawing pad to sketch some ideas but that has been going slow. When I get out of this current sick I'll open up some maps and see if I can do something with that.

I need that cover before I can sign up for ARC, and I want to do that sort of thing before I release. So the book is still in limbo; essentially unread, unless you count two editors.

I am currently using a jigsaw puzzle model for the brainstorming portion of a novel. That is; that there are edge pieces which you already know you want in the book, and the more you fill the remaining open space, the more it is clear what shape the missing pieces will need to be.

When I finished the trunk novel -- Shirato -- I actually spread print-out over the floor to try to understand how big the chapters were, how many pages there were between events, and how much more needed to be written. Now I have that as an instinct. And my instinct tells me I'm missing about a third of the plot for All Systems Blue.

Except, this one it feels like it isn't going to add a chunk of new, it is going to elaborate on what is already there until it fills the space.

I just binge-watched Last Resort (it's sort of The Silent Service with an American boomer), a couple of movies so forgettable I can only remember the name of one of them (Moonfall), and read some stuff from Brett Devereaux about the antics of the "Statue Profile Pictures" crowd. And, of course and as always, reading the truly endless pages at Atomic Rockets.

That jostled things enough. Unfortunately, the fleshing-out is pushing me towards a slow burn opening. I wanted to do a Storm Over Warlock; start the narrative with Keri being marooned on a hostile world after her ship sent a small party to find out why a remote mining installation stopped transmitting.

Instead I'm needing to start back with T4M (Ln) still back in the Core Worlds, with time for discussion of their role in Fleet, and for Keri to get into a one-sided fight, plus we get to look at Oberon Power Station before we set out for the Frontier.

But the politics got a lot meatier, meaning there is plenty for my protagonist to do both on the mining world and on the "legations" world; a world where a whole bunch of different aliens (humans included) have set up enclaves for trading and politics. The "Corsairs" are absolutely are an agent of state policy (for much as the Klaathi have a state), and Atlas Metals is not just the victim of their raids; they are ready and eager to return in kind, and may have left the crew on the mining world out to dry for exactly those aims.

One big thing I haven't got, though, is anything cool for her to do with engineering. I've got some moments for The Thing, when she is left without good options and takes the explosive one nobody in their right minds would have considered. But those are mostly leveraging the situation. I want her to be able to do something crazy-dangerous and undoubtably destructive that comes out of the tech and science at play. The "What do you mean, bring up the hyperdrive inside a gravity well?!" sort of thing.

And the problem with that sort of thing is figuring out why people aren't already doing it.