Meet the New Process, same as the Old Process (only bigger)

[elfs]

So, after reaching 27,000 words or so at the Rainforest Writer's thing, I fell off the wagon for a week (I mean, c'mon, it's only March 17th of the 70 Days of Sweat some kind of Nano-type thingy, but for 70 days (okay, they admit it's actually 77), ending May 16th, with the idea that you'll have an actual draft finished by then. I picked it back up and kept going, and I've hit 31,000 or so today, so I'm ahead of schedule.

I'm working my ass of on the first full draft of Caprice Starr and the Slums of Mars.. I have no idea how well I'm doing; as a mashup between classic Silver Era space opera, Mundane SF, and Singularity Pulp, it's going pretty well. I've gotten the heroine into one Hell of a fix. Caprice, recently graduated from the Academy with the highest scores ever, joins the Science Bureau as an anti-Transhumanist field agent. Unfortunately, she gets assigned to the Mars Agricultural Syndicate Housing Authority, the slums of Mars, where nothing even vaguely related to transhumanism ever really happens. These are the common people, on the dole, who "drink and dance and screw 'cuz there's nothing else to do." Caprice is determined to find a way out, but to do so she has make herself distinctive in the eyes of the bureau.

So far, though, I've managed to kill her partner and the director of her field office, and in both cases she was the last person to see them alive. (Oh, crap, I'm not doing a Kei & Yuri on her too, am I?) No one will want to work with her in the future; she's becoming "bad luck." She's destroyed some valuable Bureau equipment and had at least one suspect break out of a holding cell, losing in the process an illegal humaniform robot who the Bureau believes killed the director but Caprice does not. Next up: A sleazy senator who offers her a way out of her predicament, and a classic hornrimmed accountant whose analysis of what's about to happen in the MASHA Housing Districts will be completely legal, and make the Ford Pinto Memo look like a blessing. Oh, and then the robot shows up on her doorstep with more bad news. As for "Chase the protagonist up a tree, throw rocks at her, have lightning strike the tree and set fire to it, have freezing rain fall from above and wolves circle from below," I think I've got that part down. It's making it all fit together (and having something left over for the next five volumes) that I'm having problems with.

It's also becoming less a commentary and pastiche of Asimov, and more just a plain space opera in its own right. I just love the name, though: Caprice Starr kinda rolls off the tongue. She still needs more panache, more character of her own, more pluck, but she's finding it. Slowly but surely. And she's not a passive "things happen to her" protagonist, which is a common problem with novels.

But I've been good. I've gone two weeks without working on anything else. I'll finish this damn book, whether it's good or drafty or whatever, and then I'll be allowed to do shorts for three months, then three months on the second novel (probably not a Caprice book; I'm thinking something from fantasy; maybe Janae or Moon, Sun, Dragons or something), then I'll revise Caprice hard and whatever is left over will be revisions of the shorts from the previous month.

I'm trying to get more discipline in my writing. The first thing is finishing a novel, and not an episodic one like Sterlings.

Comments

So, wait... is it just SF or SF-erotica?

[(Anonymous)]

Long-time reader here, I've assumed from the first time you mentioned Caprice Starr that you were doing a erotic parody of the Good Doctor's Lucky Starr universe. But you mention nothing about sex, so I may have made an ass out of umption.

Re: So, wait... is it just SF or SF-erotica?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It started out that way, and went legit somewhere in the middle. There is an undercurrent of sex there, as one of the characters is a love'bot (there's a line somewhere after Caprice arrests him where the only thing he has on him is a bottle of "personal lubricant" in his pocket-- "a form of human enhancement the Bureau did not look down upon too seriously"). I'm probably going to do the love scenes fade-to-black, mostly because I want this to be saleable. I'm going for a Mundane SF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction) dystopian setting with Posthumans about 8 light-years off in order to make "The Sirians" seem a plausible threat in a universe with no FTL.

I probably can't escape my roots. Caprice has an evil twin sister, and probably share some bisexual tendencies, but that's just, well, par for me.

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

Hey - you forgot to post the link to the Sterlings sale site.