Sorry for missing last Friday, I was busy driving to a family reunion and didn’t have something prepped ahead of time.

Anyway, I have good news! I’m making progress on my project for the fall. It’s possible that I’m not supposed to start it yet, given that this is in fact a school project, but I’ve already bitten off too much to chew so I don’t feel guilty about it.

I think I’ve already mentioned this, but the goal that I’ve set for myself is to not only write a middle grade sci-fi space adventure but to edit and write a second draft of it too. I’m not sure what the technical length requirements might be, so I’m using the 50,000 word novel as my measuring stick. Given that I’m openly inspired by Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be A Wizard (which the internet tells me is roughly 124,000 words) my 50k target is possibly conservative.

I have previously hit a regular 2000 words a day for a month at a time. My hope for this section of the summer is to push myself back up to speed, get into the rhythm of writing that much every day, and thus prepare for producing a novel not just once but twice. There’ll be an interruption to this pattern when I run off to work at LARP camp for kids, but with a little bit of luck I’ll be able to make it stick.

And if I cheat things just a bit, by getting some additional material for the project done while I’m ramping up to the pace I’ll need, I don’t think I’ll lose any sleep over it. Besides which, much of the material that I’m writing now is stuff that may never see the light of day. I’m writing scenes for the story (which will be about Barium Deep), but I’m also writing about the background of the setting and trying to figure out how things work. The more I can establish now (and the more excited about writing this story I can be) the easier it will be when I have to be writing it all through the fall.

This means I’m doing research. I’m reading articles on AI and augmented / mixed reality and space exploration and 3D printing and whatever other technological things I can find that seem appropriate to incorporate into my space setting. And I’m reading and watching things that feel like the right tone or genre or subject matter: So You Want To Be A Wizard, 2001: A Space Odyssey, some of the Vorkosigan books, Digimon Tamers, etc. It’s a bit eclectic.

Actually, here’s a cool video to watch. It’s totally not the same technology, and it’s a very different time period, but something about the claustrophobia, compactness, and industrial nature of submarines seems like it translates well to spaceships in my mind. That training & orientation video really emphasizes the intricacy and condensed nature of the WW2 submarine, and those both feel like things that would carry over to the future of putting humans in tin cans in space. You use the space you have on important things, like the machinery that keeps you alive and keeps your ship powered and moving. Unless you’re fabulously wealthy, everything else is extra.