elfs | Ah, Chapter 5.

This morning, my brain having decided it was going to melt down if I wrote one more word of Dove having wild pagan sex (aww), I decided instead to go back and review the next story in the Honesty series (the Misuko & Linia stories), Honest Impulse, which started out as a small short story and has blown up into a novella, heading for novel territory. I discovered where everything went wrong: chapter five.

It isn't too bad. It just needs a lot more content. The chapter opens with Linia and Shandy talking about their mutual attraction as if it was already a settled issue, and it's not. Shandy is also a lot more confident in this chapter than she was in the previous ones. I need her to be the neurotic college kid she is. I also need her to be a lot more upset when the chapter ends-- this is a McKee formula chapter, where Shandy enters nervous and unconfident, becomes confident and assured, and then leaves the chapter even more devastated than when she started.

All of which sets her up for chapter seven, where, having given up any hope of having a relationship with Linia, Shandy goes on to wreck her educational career, her summer internship, and pretty much the rest of her life, all because she's a decent human being.

I'm wandering into cheesy bad SF action-adventure territory toward the end, established well in advance. As usual, I've discovered my job during the second pass of any story is to spot all the openings I've left for myself that could be foreshadowings and either use them or remove them. Shandy has a rather sparse dorm room, although she has two things going for her: she has a bed with all kinds of tinkly bells (gosh, dunno where that came from!) and she has a poster of an Alliance CityCrusher battletank on her wall ("I've always wanted to drive one of those. You heard the Second Battalion is in the desert right now, practicing with one of those, right?"). Our villain is a failed robotics scientist but the finest neural interface roboticist in a hundred light years. When our professor loses his reputation (remember, in the Journal Entries at this point, reputation is more important than currency) and goes mad, I wonder what will happen. And who will be called upon to save the day? Hmmm.

Which begs the question: can I write a powered armor vs. spider tank battle as exciting as a David Weber money shot? And without seeming to rip off any number of Masamune Shirow or Harry Stine stories? (Although to be honest, Stine always did wimp out by having the main characters lose their robots and armor halfway through his books and showing how real and tough ordinary flesh and blood soldiers would still have to be on future battlefields.)