The physics of orbiting bodies is about to take away our communication with Mars for a couple weeks.
Cowboy Bebop
Check out the opening credits for the live action Cowboy Bebop coming in November on Netflix.
www.youtube.com Busy busy
The bulk writing, the writing just to get traction and capture the story is long done. Now it’s finesse and fleshing out and filling holes and making consistent: the hard stuff. This is going to take some time.
In the meantime, here’s an outhouse on Mars.
Word count over the past few days: 3796
image: composite using artwork by Luis Peres from the second book and an image from https://www.flickr.com/people/scottkmacleod/
Writing update
Today’s word count: 288
These counts will be very bursty and uneven for a while. Some days will see entirely new sections, with high counts. Others will see glue text, as I bring pieces together and smooth the edges.
(BTW, the images I post with these updates do, in fact, have relevance to whatever I work on that day.)
image: public domain
Writing update
Today’s word count: -1461
I said changing tooling at this stage would be dangerous.
But I expected this. It’s all part of the Delta-v equation for putting a story together.
That figure reflects the 2063 words removed in redundant sections and the 602 new words I wrote today.
So far, I’m digging Scrivener. Splitting and moving segments around is trivial: exactly what I need as I start bringing sections together into a coherent whole.
image: Richard F. Penn (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delta_V_Earth_Moon_Mars.png)
Writing update (changing horses)
Scary stuff today: I am trying out Scrivener (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview) for the first time.
I’ve always written my books in Word, opening a new file for every scene or thought, then pasting them all together into one document at some point when it felt right. This worked great for the first book (~5000 words), not as great but still ok for the second (~17,000 words), and will likely be terrible for this new one (currently ~21,000 words and growing). The proliferation of files and resulting loose-ends is becoming difficult to manage. Scrivener is a writing tool that is designed to help manage a large writing project. We’ll see.
Why is this scary? Well…
Today’s word count: 0
image: Chuck Dent (http://www.dentranch.com/index45.html)
Writing update
My use of the word “finished” in the previous post, regarding a bout of research, was inaccurate. The research is never finished.
I got a little further on the writing today, but also realized I need more info on a key topic.
Today’s word count: 1237
image (Apollo era A7L Primary Life Support System): NASA
Writing update
Just finished a huge bout of research: reading papers and contacting professionals in an effort to make sure the story fits with known science and technology. Today is the first day I’ve actually sat down to just write since my previous update.
Today’s word count: 1154
inflatable airlock image: NASA
Ingenuity sounds
The atmosphere of Mars is thin, but it still transfers sound.
NASA How cool is this?
Researching…
Reading papers on coronal mass ejections and solar particle events until my eyes bleed.
