Project 23 - Update - Actually Writing the Station Mystery

I’m trying to get better about getting things done and finishing projects. Of course, I’ve decided to try finishing an 80,000 - 100,000 word novel. I hear that this may not be the easiest way to get practice in.

Still I’ve been working on writing a “shitty first draft"¹ of my Station Mystery novel for the last few weeks. When I wrote about the book back in January I mentioned not being too sure how to go forward since I’m usually trying to do so many things at once. I’ve decided to focus on the Station Mystery as my primary project and try to prioritise working on it. So for these last few weeks I’ve set a goal of writing for half an hour a day, which I do after the things I have to get done, but before the things I should probably do. I’m not really consistent yet, but I’m moving in the right direction.

Half-an-hour is not a lot of time. I’m only able to write about 500 words if I write the whole time. On the other hand, I’m having fun, I’m actually doing it and 500 words a day is so much better than 0. So for now I’m going to say that it’s a good start.

When writing, I’ve instituted a general rule that once I finish a paragraph, I’m not allowed to go back and edit it and this is really helping me to get stuff on the page. I am allowing myself to leave comments in the margin as I go so I can either fix a thing, or just note something or just point out just how shitty the draft is. This gives me just enough of a push that I can let what I’m writing go without getting hung up on it being good or even making that much sense.

Since I first wrote about the Station Mystery at the beginning of January I did two starts on the first chapter and gave up, but my new rule is helping get things on the page. I’ve also rewritten the outline, with less text but more sticky notes in Miro. Those two outlines have helped me work out what needs to be said and what I’m supposed to be doing in each scene. Since it *is* a murder mystery, it’s also helpful for figuring out how the mystery fits together.

I’ve also started using Obsidian to build a world book for the story. I’ve been using it increasingly to keep track of things at work and it’s a really helpful way to track things like relationships. I’m trying not to world build too much and it helps to be able to make decisions on the fly.

At this rate I hope I’ll be finished with the first draft by the end of the year and by then I’ll have a whole extra year’s practice of writing and be ready for what ever happens next.

¹Lamott, A. (1980). Bird by bird. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group

Project 23 - A Space Station Mystery Novel

Lately I've been reading a lot of mystery novels, and I've been kind of inspired to make something mystery on my own.

There's something in good mystery books that makes character and space feel familiar and comforting, even while unsavoury things are going on around your detectives. A good detective in a good detective novel is noticing things and connecting things and I think that makes the world feel really real and rich.

So I've plotted out a mystery novel, and I decided to set it on a space station. As I've mentioned for the other science fiction novel I'd like to write, I've been thinking about it for a long, long time about those stories and that world, and I wanted another way to approach them. So enter our hero librarian, her three friends, the diner they hang out in, a cast of hopefully charming and interesting people, a few of whom may be committing crimes.

I've drawn a map of the story and I've written around 3000 words in an outline (with a bit left to go).

Spoilers?

Hopefully it will turn out to be a fun read, with interesting people exploring an interesting place. I like the idea of sci-fi and mystery mashed up and I'd like to see where I can go with it. I'm also just very fond of the idea of space stations, and once upon a time write about a walk on one.

That being said, since I'm all over the place in terms of the projects I'm working on, both the ones I'm documenting here and the other ones. I don't know exactly when or how I'll work on this or what will come next, but if nothing else thinking about it makes me happy.

Project 14 - Sketch Fiction - Sector of Interest : Wrap Up

Well, I've managed to write all six of my planned sketch stories. I'm disappointed it took me so long to do what was supposed to be a few days worth of work basically, but it's done. Hopefully I'll revisit a project like this soon and maybe do it a little more like I was originally envisioning. In the mean time, however, I'm really happy to say that I've finished Project 14.

Sector of Interest

“Sector Control, this is Bulk Hauler TMS-M884MXHQ. I am exiting jump-space from gate 5417-a into your zone of control."

"Good morning, Hedge Queen, we have your on our boards. Good to see you again.”

"Thank you Control. My Nav-model has synced, can I get a course to the Loading Station Six?”

"Confirmed, HQ. Sector-Nav will transmit."

“Thanks, control. Anything interesting going on out here?”

“Nope, HQ, you’re not that interesting and neither was the hauler eight hours ago. I’m guessing the hauler in eight hours won’t be that interesting either. Mail courier might be interesting at least.”

“Oh that’s right, I almost forgot. The courier had some engine problems and the Station Master at Hai Shen gave us the mail packets to pass on to you guys here.”

“Huh, good to hear then HQ. Data or physical as well?”

“Both, Control. I can transmit the data once we’re in one-hop range and I’ll get Johny to run over in the tender and pass the physical packet over to you guys. Looks to be about 6 cubic meters.”

“Rodger, Hedge Queen. Sector-Nav will transmit a solution for the tender too. Stand by.”

“Thank you, Control. I’m glad we get to be interesting after all.”

“Don’t hold your breath, HQ. We have a pretty high standard of interesting out here.”

Project 14 - Sketch Fiction - Neighbours

This is the fifth of the six sketch stories.

Neighbours

They sound that fucking klaxon whenever a ship is going to drop. All it does is scare the cows, and let me know that the cows are going to be even more scared in about a half an hour, when a damned space hulk drops on our heads.

The land was dirt cheap. Is dirt cheap. All for 0.8% chance (per landing) of falling debris hitting the farm and just a 0.00013% chance of catastrophic explosion. So now I’ve got a great plot of land, with neighbours that pull a spaceship out of orbit twice a week and then smash it to bits.

Usually they’re pulling down ancient bulk haulers, giant asteroid cages with jump drives that basically fall apart on their own as soon as they’re down well. Sometimes it’s something more interesting, like a tug or  a guard cutter. Every once in awhile they drop something really interesting like a deep space survey ship or a yacht or even a bombardment platform once, but usually it’s just the work-a-day stuff.

It’s more interesting to watch at night, where you can usually see a star come to a stop in the sky and then start getting bigger and bigger. In the day, I just get to wait for a little spec in the sky to grow until it looks like a bird and then a shuttle and then suddenly a giant, hulking, behemoth.

I think it’s the grav-mirrors that upset the cows, but I don’t know why. The mirrors make a high pitched noise that bugs the dogs, but most of the other animals couldn’t care less about them. It’s just the cows. Maybe cows are just adverse to physics defying monstrosities floating in the sky.

If I have the time, sometimes, I’ll walk up to the top of the ridge to watch them. The ship floats down on the grav-mirrors. It’s a little surreal to watch this giant thing that used to move effortlessly through space drop slowly through the air until you’re standing on the ridge above it.  Once they have it positioned, they drop it the last few meters, then they pull the grav-mirrors out and send them back up to hook up to the next ship.

As soon as the ship’s down, they swarm all over it. They run three shifts a day, twenty-four hours-a-day. Whenever they drop a new ship they’re working on it right away. As soon as the last entrails of the last hulk are gone, the next one is dropping right to the sound of that klaxon.

They’re very polite. They’ve dropped “significant’” spaceship bits on the farm four times now. Each time then send a crew right away, hauled off the junk, decontaminate the area and paid me for the crops or the animals killed. Then, six months later, I can go back to using the land again.

That might be the problem actually, herd memory. Sylvie was killed by space junk, heralded by klaxon, so we should all be wary. Mountains shouldn’t float, why doesn’t the human panic? That, or maybe they just really hate the fucking klaxon.

Project 14: A Walk Through the Station

This is the first of 6 sketch stories, where I write a very short story that briefly describes a scene or a feeling. It's the first time in a very long time that I've published any writing, so please be kind.

4 Future Projects

There are a few things that I've been holding on to, in the hopes that I'll be able to get to them even though I don't have the skills or experience or time to tackle them right now. I don't know that these totally count as brain crack, but they're close enough. So I'm going to put them up here and make them projects so that I can stop thinking about them and maybe get some stuff done as well.

These are all pretty long term projects that don't fit in right now, which is why I'm putting them up here together. Until I'm really ready to do things with them I'm not going to give them deadlines through.

Project 8 - A Space Station Simulation Game

So I like management games. I may or may not have spent the petter part of 2 months last year planning transit routes across various cities. I've certainly manage the living daylights out of all the historical railroads and a fair number of amusement parks. I've commanded revolutionary Chinese armies and built them into thriving kingdoms. I've also built quite a few successful airlines. All that, not to mention the booming megalopolises I've guided along the way. (And dwarves ... there was some time with the dwarves.)

Most of these games have a pretty low level when it comes to AI. And I've thought it would be interesting not only to do the planning, but also to manage a staff/crew that has to help get the work done and administrate themselves.

I've been thinking of various games of this sort for years. I've wanted a  version of Tie-Fighter, where you still pilot all the missions, but as you advance in rank (which is a skill based system as I recall, not just based on the number of missions flown) you take a larger and larger role in planning the missions. But that's another story ... or game.

In the game I'm thinking of for this project, you take on the roll of a recently appointed station master assigned to a newly opened sector. Each sector will have a primary theme, mining, settlement or military which will steer how your station develops. 

Ships will arrive and you'll have to provide services to them, including cargo services, fuel and supplies and shore leave. You'll have to cater to your onboard population, who will have jobs on the station, or work near the station or just visit coming back from the frontier. You'll need to keep your station running and expand it to meet growing needs of the station and the sector. You'll have to police the station and work with the military to make sure the station is safe from pirates and other unsavoury folks with space ships.

You won't do this alone however, you'll have a staff. You'll have senior administration which will take care of the operations of various parts of the station, but you'll have to make sure that you've given the right jobs to the right people. If you get things right over time you'll all get better at running the station.

Now I'm not 100% sure that this will actually be fun. I have a passion for games that tend to play themselves. I like the management genre, so I feel like there's a seed that might actually be able to blossom into something cool. It probably won't be for everyone even if it works, but hopefully it will be fun for someone.

It's also worth pointing out that Spacebase DF9, developed during the Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight, seems pretty similar to this. The flavour's a bit different and it's developed by people who know what they're doing, so it may turn out to be way better and way more fun. I have honestly been thinking about this game since before the Fortnight (and I'm not apt to be on the level of Double Fine to begin with).

Project 9 - An Action RPG

I've loved Secret of Mana for more than fifteen years now and one of the things I'd like to do is see it revisited as a grown up game. Basically I'd like to make a 2d 16bit-esque, controller based action RPG that's as fun as Secret of Mana, but addresses some of my pet peeves about the genre.

The feeling of playing Secret of Mana was always one of it's biggest draws for me. Particularly as you get more powerful, charging up an attack and landing it just right feels like you're really accomplishing things. This is reinforced by having the nice colourful numbers pop out and then bounce on the ground before disappearing and of course as you do bigger damage the numbers get bigger (as in they show up in a fatter font with larger sprites).

Traveling in Secret of Mana was also very nice. You start out kicked out of your village with the whole world to explore and as you go you get destinations that are farther and farther away. At the beginning you might hear about a place but later you get the chance to travel there. At the end of the game when you get to fly then there's a whole other set of explorations where you get to find all these tiny and surprising locations (which sometimes become much larger).

I love Secret of Mana for more than just those two reasons but they're the primary ones I'd like to recreate in my own game. There are also some things I'd like to include.

The first of those is that the size of the world is always weird in computer games. If you look at Secret of Mana the largest city in the world has maybe 50 people in it. You come from a town with maybe 8 people. This of course makes sense for the limitations of the technology at the time, but it still makes the world feel a bit strange.

My proposed solution to this is to not use the whole world, but only a little bit of it. You can't walk across the whole of the world in Secret of Mana, but it only takes 10-15 minutes to walk between most major metropolitan areas and less if you're not intent on murdering everything along that path. When you can fly you can make it around the globe in a minute or less. My thought it to limit the world to an island. It will still be smaller than the real world (I'm not Rockstar) but at least the scale will make more sense. This should sooth some of the over thinking that I for one tend to do about the world and it will also help focus the story.

The second thing I'd like to address is the amount of combat and killing in rpgs. This one I'm a little less sure about since for most games this makes up the majority of the game play, but I'd like to put a little more weight and consequence into the game. You will still be a person with a weapon, who has to fight to survive and to right wrongs in the world, but I want it to count if you kill something. Given a recent article on Gamasutra about RPG genres I think this will also help focus the game, and keep it about the story rather than about being the right level all the time.

As far as the story goes, I'm still working it out. I know that there will be a fight between the forces of the wild and the forces of civilization. This isn't a fight between good and evil (in itself), but a fight between the wild island and the invading forces of an imperial civilization from the mainland.

There's a few ways I want this to manifest, one of which is in the architecture of the buildings. You will see in very wild areas very green colours and wood and somewhat organic shapes to things. In very civilized areas you'll see much more regular shapes and stone and golden yellow colours.

I'm also interested in having more mature characters in the game, rather than the jrpg standard of teenagers with spiky hair. I see the story of the game being told from two different perspectives one of a retired soldier who is working as a shepherd in the very north of the island and the other is a young merchant in the south. At the beginning of the game I see the soldier having to react to a sudden attack on his flock by dire wolves and the merchant will have to react to an attack on her caravan by bandits.

Over the course of the game the player will switch back and forth between the two characters until eventually they meet in the middle of the game and the middle of the island. Towards the end of the game they will have to work together to resolve the tensions on the island in which ever way the player chooses.

Project 10 - A Sci-Fi Novel

I started writing this novel in junior high school, which was a very long time ago now. But it's sat in my head and been mulling and melting around in there ever since. This is the story of John Onoray and Jorris Boss and The Third Imperial Commando Group as they fight to defend and then reclaim the Terran Empire.

If that sounds a bit tropey, well it's because I started writing it when I was in junior high school as I mentioned. It's better now than it was then, originally it was mostly about space warriors with incredible powered armour that was loaded down with missiles. (For the record, I didn't actually base this on Starship Troopers ... I actually tried to make Robotech more reasonable...) Eventually I realized that books need things like antagonists so created some super clones that were designed specifically to fight them.

The characters are still with me and I still have the skeleton of a story that isn't quite as terrible as what I started out with. I'm also interested in the idea of a character saving the world despite being unsaveable themselves, and this is a story that explores that. So I'm going to write it, even if it sucks and do my best to see it through to the end. If it's really terrible (and it'll be my first novel, so it will be) it can sit in my desk and at least I can finally think about other things.

Project 11 - A Fantasy Novel

This book is motivated a little bit by the movie Hero. Not anything to do with plot mind you, but I love the purity of colour in that movie and wanted to try to do something that evoked that same feeling. The problem is that while I have a feeling I want to evoke and a setting I've derived from that feeling, I don't really know what the story is yet.

So far, I know that the story starts in the city of Rooves, which is a city that grew up out of the coalition of five tribes that came together from the planes and coast to build a strong city.  Each of these tribes is represented by a different colour that is shown in the way they dress and their building (hence the rooves). Each of the tribes has a particular area of strength, but all economic and social activities are common across all the Rooves. The White Rooves are mostly focused on mining and metal smithing, the Blue Rooves are focused on land-based agriculture, the Yellow Rooves are focused on sea-based agriculture, the Green Rooves are focused on on sea trade and the Red Rooves are focused on military.

Within each of the Rooves people have a personal name, but also an animal that is representative of the work they do. So a general might be Eran the Red Tiger or a smith might be Marik the White Bull. Each house is lead by the Colour Dragon. Exactly how I'm going to make all that fit together without being weird is something I'm not sure about. I want the society to be egalitarian and merit based, but I also like having a certain amount of hereditary nature to the families.

The city is ruled by the Council of Dragons, which is made up of the Dragons of each of the Rooves. For each of the matters of the city which needs organization there is a council with representatives from each of the Rooves.

Finally there's a somewhat secret 6th tribe, the Black Rooves. They're extremely reclusive and seem to function as fortune tellers, but I haven't nailed down exactly how that's going to work either.

The main character is Cassimi the Blue Falcon, a young lady just starting her career in the Messenger Guild. She's the niece of the Blue Dragon and the Daughter of the Blue Tiger (who is the general of the cavalry in the city). She's intelligent, energetic, but young and inexperienced. I want her to be tough, but I'm not sure if that's something she'll have to develop over the course of the book. Beyond that I'm still working on how to give her a good arc that makes her interesting.

The story starts with her on her first day as a messenger,  then continues as she has to unravel a mysterious attack, eventually needing to travel to find out that dragons have returned to the world. Then ... something, possibly she has to rush back to save the city from something, but that seems really boring.

So there's still a lot to do, but if I write it I can edit it and maybe get something good out at the end, like the Sci-Fi Novel. And, if there's not too much good to get then I can enjoy the experience, let it lay in my desk too and go on to do other things.