Writing update

High tech stuff today. This one will need further research to nail down the science.

Today’s word count: 854

image: Ernesto del Aguila III, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH

 

Writing update

The third book is well under way, and it’s proving to be more ambitious than the first two. I tend to avoid outlining, preferring to let things shape up organically. But there is just too much going on in this one to not have some sort of road map.  Ha ha, see what I did there? Of course you don’t, because you have no idea what the story is. But I did something.

I’ve always preferred to write privately and keep the curtain closed. But I’m going to open it a crack this time, as I go along, to help me stay on mission.

However, time spent writing here is time not writing there. So the crack will reveal only this: each day’s word count. These are rough draft numbers. Bulk production is the name of the game at this stage. Finesse comes later.

As of yesterday evening, I had 8366 words.

Today’s word count: 782.

Lightning

A new study suggests lightning may be weak or nonexistent in Martian dust storms. Researchers vibrated basalt grains at various atmospheric pressures to test their ability to build up charge.

Lightning in a dust storm plays a role in my forthcoming book, Air: Generation Mars, Book One. Hard science fiction is a moving target. Still, the fictional strike in question is weak and only damaging to electrical equipment, so I think it’s plausible.

 

Utopia is a journey

“This perfect society we’re striving towards should always be a spot on the horizon, something we’re still moving towards even if it seems like we’ve fixed everything. Utopia is a journey: not the happy ending, but the continued improvement of ourselves.”

This is a near perfect summation of my thoughts regarding Dawn Colony in Generation Mars.

Ut melius faciat! (To do better)

Bombarded with words

Geraldine McCaughrean recently won the UK’s Carnegie Medal for children’s literature. Her acceptance speech gives me a bit more confidence in my prose choices for Scratching the Surface.

“Accessible language is, to me, a euphemism for something desperate. Most of its tyrannies are brought to bear on younger books right now. But blink twice and today’s junior school readers will be in secondary school,armed only with a pocketful of single syllable words, and with brains far less receptive to the acquisition of vocabulary than when they were three or seven or nine… We master words by meeting them, not by avoiding them.”

https://www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk/carnegie-speech