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Saturday: plotting!
Jan. 28th, 2023 11:34 amIf future me is trying to reconstruct this process to either continue it or remember it or whatever, you can also look over at the project page in NaNoWriMo and look for docs over in google. Altho I cannot promise you I won’t completely overhaul them all between when I write this and whenever you next go looking for them with only foggy recollections.
To recap: my kids are older, and I have a bit of time to collect my thoughts and think about what I want to do with my time. I’d like to work on an actual fiction project, even if it’s just pantsing a novel using NaNoWriMo techniques. As I started that process yesterday, I was reminded of the last time I did this, about a decade ago, when I found the project entry at NaNoWriMo. I was going to ignore it, but then I was like, you know, unlike other incomplete fiction projects, _Hop, Skip and Jump_ is _not_ dated. It aged _great_ as an idea. And the first chapter draft sucked me in completely and made me want to read it, which is of course impossible because it does not exist.
Last night in my zoom cocktail hour with Seattle friends, I brought it up and a variety of people had a variety of interesting ideas. I said I had been watching the first few episodes of ST:TNG with A., and in one of the holodeck bits we learn that holodeck technology relies on a lot of the same stuff that transporter technology does. That brought back all kinds of memories of other TNG and ST universe episodes and related conversations and other SF usage of this kind of technology. I’ve been trying to identify what the error is that is causing a very low rate of people not arriving, and who might be trying to cover it up and why and J. asserted that people not arriving would absolutely be noticed and I’m like, yeah probably not. I mean, people fail to arrive in cars all the time and trying to get that taken seriously is tricky.
I commented that I really wanted this to be some sort of subtle buffer overrun.
After the cocktail hour, I sat down and started writing out the characters I was probably going to need and giving them placeholder names. I needed whoever hired Estrella and Arthur, and I needed some people elsewhere at the consortium to represent the various sides of the conflict within the consortium as motive forces and also as potential allies and foes for Estrella and Arthur. I needed some people to represent external pressure from law enforcement (some kind of missing persons specialist at a high-level liaison operation that coordinated between law-enforcement agencies) and from the public (journalists). I was going to need someone to figure out the technical details of the problem and how to solve it.
This morning, I woke up with a whole bunch of additional ideas for how this could go down, and the technical details person has become a major figure in this book in a _super_ ambiguous way. And it is indeed a buffer overrun. Also, like all Lost and Found situations, there’s someone who would prefer that the valuables that were “Lost” don’t get Found by their owners, because they are, after all, valuable. Of course, if you do that, and you’re prepared to let actual humans stay lost along with the other things you don’t care about, you’re a _really_ problematic person. If this isn’t my bad guy, they are definitely a close approximation thereto.
To recap: my kids are older, and I have a bit of time to collect my thoughts and think about what I want to do with my time. I’d like to work on an actual fiction project, even if it’s just pantsing a novel using NaNoWriMo techniques. As I started that process yesterday, I was reminded of the last time I did this, about a decade ago, when I found the project entry at NaNoWriMo. I was going to ignore it, but then I was like, you know, unlike other incomplete fiction projects, _Hop, Skip and Jump_ is _not_ dated. It aged _great_ as an idea. And the first chapter draft sucked me in completely and made me want to read it, which is of course impossible because it does not exist.
Last night in my zoom cocktail hour with Seattle friends, I brought it up and a variety of people had a variety of interesting ideas. I said I had been watching the first few episodes of ST:TNG with A., and in one of the holodeck bits we learn that holodeck technology relies on a lot of the same stuff that transporter technology does. That brought back all kinds of memories of other TNG and ST universe episodes and related conversations and other SF usage of this kind of technology. I’ve been trying to identify what the error is that is causing a very low rate of people not arriving, and who might be trying to cover it up and why and J. asserted that people not arriving would absolutely be noticed and I’m like, yeah probably not. I mean, people fail to arrive in cars all the time and trying to get that taken seriously is tricky.
I commented that I really wanted this to be some sort of subtle buffer overrun.
After the cocktail hour, I sat down and started writing out the characters I was probably going to need and giving them placeholder names. I needed whoever hired Estrella and Arthur, and I needed some people elsewhere at the consortium to represent the various sides of the conflict within the consortium as motive forces and also as potential allies and foes for Estrella and Arthur. I needed some people to represent external pressure from law enforcement (some kind of missing persons specialist at a high-level liaison operation that coordinated between law-enforcement agencies) and from the public (journalists). I was going to need someone to figure out the technical details of the problem and how to solve it.
This morning, I woke up with a whole bunch of additional ideas for how this could go down, and the technical details person has become a major figure in this book in a _super_ ambiguous way. And it is indeed a buffer overrun. Also, like all Lost and Found situations, there’s someone who would prefer that the valuables that were “Lost” don’t get Found by their owners, because they are, after all, valuable. Of course, if you do that, and you’re prepared to let actual humans stay lost along with the other things you don’t care about, you’re a _really_ problematic person. If this isn’t my bad guy, they are definitely a close approximation thereto.