It’s time for more Barium. The past two days have been productive, and I’ve entered the part of the year where I’m trying to hit 2k words a day every day.
I should note, this is all very first draft stuff. No guarantee that it will end up in a final draft in this form, no guarantee that it makes much sense. No guarantee that it follows or establishes continuity with other Barium pieces I post here.
But there’s a lot more of this coming, so enjoy.
I’ve got another bit of scene for you, something I was playing around with yesterday while trying to figure out how to shape the conflicts near the middle of the book. I don’t think I have posted all of the relevant background material for this segment, and it doesn’t directly follow from previous ones, so I’ll give you a brief intro. Daemon is an unbraked AI, highly illegal in this setting, and is confined to a large black box sitting in the cargo bay of the family’s ship. There’s a simple terminal with actual physical keyboard built into the box, the better to prevent Daemon from interfacing with and spreading to any other systems. Barium and Cesium’s parents have been contracted by figures unknown to recover this black box and deliver it. Barry and Cesi have been surreptitiously chatting with Daemon for some time now.
This is the first time that I’ve not written one of Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenges since January (with the exception of the times when I’ve been working at summer camp without internet, but even then I think I got lucky and he didn’t post a challenge). I feel weird, honestly. I had ideas for this week’s challenge, but I’ve been so busy for the past few days…
Instead, I offer you the newly edited version of Barium Deep. It hasn’t been deeply revised, and there are more changes to come, but I think I’ve managed to improve the piece’s clarity and presentation. Let me know if you like it!
Gorgeous artwork by George Hull, for the game Star Citizen
I didn’t write the following bit of space drama with the above image in mind, but it’s a beautiful fit anyway. What follows is another piece of “middle grade” fiction, one that holds true to the more classically action-adventure oriented stories that I usually like to tell. Enjoy!
(Note: There’s now a great deal of other Barium Deep material here. This is the edited version of this same post, and this is the collection of other posts linked to Barium Deep.)
Remember how I mentioned being dissatisfied with my work on Wednesday? As you might gather from the title, I wrote another 500 word piece rather than use either of those two. I am, as ever, somewhat dissatisfied, but I still like this one. It’s… fun. And somewhat painfully reminiscent of my childhood. Enjoy.
Part of my homework for this week was to write a “two page” character intro for an engaging Middle Grade character. I dislike “pages” as a measure of length when I’m writing, since I don’t use Word and see no reason to change that, but that translates to roughly 500 words. Of course, I wrote one and wasn’t satisfied, so now I have two that I’m not totally satisfied with. I feel like they do a better job of introducing conflict and drama than they do of introducing a particular character, if only because I have little tolerance for writing an opening scene that doesn’t start something.
In any case, here’s two Middle Grade scenes presented back-to-back, with no real relation between the two. Oh, yes, and one of them is actually about Jerome from my Elven Progenitors setting. Enjoy!
Fistful of Wits 