Starwalker Villains: Sneak Peeks!

As promised, the sneak peek excerpts of the villain shorts have gone up on the Starwalker site. I’ve been poking through them a lot lately, editing and adjusting things, and the opening sections to the villain series are now up.

They’re quite different pieces, and I love them both for different reasons. Delving into the dark side of stories is fun! I wanted to make them understandable without making them overly sympathetic. I wanted to make them real people without making them good people. It’s surprising how hard that distinction was to make.

Henry started out in my head as a thug. Standard musclebound, red-shirt-wearing, mercenary, ham-fisted thug. But as I wrote him, he grew into something else – he’s smarter than I first imagined him. And he has a quirk of belief in his perspective that I wasn’t expecting, but I’m enjoying it the more I get to weave it in. The first part of this story doesn’t give much away, but there is much more – and much worse – to come.

Keida is much lighter, and in some ways, worse. She’s a hybrid of a few characters I’ve written before, a thief with her own moral code and goals that are all about herself. She was originally a throw-away piece I did for my writing group, set in another world entirely. She didn’t even have a name until I had to post her piece up yesterday.

It didn’t take much to adapt her to fit into Dyne (the super-powers in the original piece were easy to merge over into abilities gained from cybernetic implants and prosthetics). I’m not entirely sure where her story is going yet, but I can’t wait to find out.

I have one other potential villain piece, but I’m still trying to work out how to fit it in. The main character is naughty, but not exactly villainous. Yet. That one’s going to take more pondering.

In the meantime, it’s nearly NaNoWriMo, and almost time to get going with the main stream of Starwalker again. Back to planning and organising stuff!

Starwalker Villains: Coming Soon

Over the past few months, an idea has been slowly growing in the back of my brain. Like a mushroom.

It started when I did a couple of pieces for my writing group. We were writing scenes based on general themes and I wound up doing a superhero-type piece, but from the villain perspective. I’ve written lots of superhero stuff before (in the online RP I used to do), and felt like taking things from the other side of the struggle for a change. The next one involved a barfight – again, sliding away from the ‘heroic’ side of things.

Then I started to ponder if I could do a full story (those pieces were just fragments, really – scenes in longer stories I have yet to write) from a villain’s point of view. Without turning the character into an anti-hero. Is it possible? I honestly have no idea. But it sounds damn fun to try.

So, of course, my brain spun it on. What about a series of shorts – not full novels/blogfics/huge monstrosities, but something more like a short story or possibly novella (I do like to go on). Different characters, different styles of writing. I could play around with it.

This led to: what if I set them in the Starwalker universe, and placed each one on a different colony? I did a list and came up with eight or nine possibilities. Loads of material to pull from there. A chance to explore not only the Starwalker world, but the dirty side of things at the same time.

It’s not the kind of thing I usually write, and that’s also part of the appeal. It sounds like fun! I’ve done a handful of pieces since I started noodling this idea about – nothing is complete yet, but I have some promising beginnings. Characters are taking shape. Stories are poking their heads out of the dirt and searching for a spotlight. Here, kitty kitty, and don’t mind the claws.

I’ve pencilled the project in for next year. I’m not sure how long Starwalker will run – my plan is to write it until I run out of stories to tell with the ship and her crew – but I’m not planning to wait until it’s finished before I start posting the villain shorts. I want to build them up over the next few months, trickle them along in the background until I’ve got enough for a half-decent (and possibly coherent) posting schedule.

I’m also tossing up ideas for how and where to post them. Do I do it on the Starwalker site? Interrupt the regular story with random shards of something else? Set up a new blog for it? I’m not sure which way I’m leaning on that yet, but there’s plenty of time to figure it out.

Next year is still a ways off, but I don’t plan to make everyone wait quite that long before I show you what I’m babbling about. As the regular Starwalker run is currently between books (and I’m taking a much-needed, if short, break), I’ve decided to post up excerpts from the existing villain shorts in the meantime. They’re not finished and I’m still honing the details, but they’re ready enough for you to get a taste!

The first sneak peek goes up on the Starwalker site tonight. I’d love to know what you all think!

Starwalker: Book 1 complete!

Huzzah! After much deliberation, I have decided that last week’s post is the end of Starwalker: Book 1 (ignore the dates, I’m backdating them all at the moment to keep the realtime aspect alive). At just over 100,00 words, it’s a good size, and worked out well, I think.

I’m going to be writing Book 2 for my NaNoWriMo project this year. Can’t wait to get going – I can feel the ideas bubbling away in the back of my brain already – but I have a couple of weeks to ponder them and catch my breath. So, a brief hiatus for me!

With all of the NaNo preparations going on at the moment, a hiatus is exactly what I need. More on that soon. Also, there will be more on my other upcoming Starwalker project. For now – yay Starwalker! Book 1 done!

In the captain’s head

The end of the current section of Starwalker is proving tricky to handle. I’m trying to work it around to a place where I can neatly tie off one story arc and move towards the next. My characters are fighting me a bit, and balancing all the plot elements is a challenge.

Let me say now – I’m loving it. This is part of what I love about writing in this serial write-and-post format. I can’t go back and change things, so I have to surge forward with what I’ve got. I have to juggle characters, plot points, foreshadowing, continuity, and future plans, and make it all make sense. It is hard work sometimes, but it’s also the best fun.

Most of the time, I let the characters lead the action. Their backgrounds, personalities and purposes push them forward in their own (occasionally annoying!) direction. Sometimes, the hardest work is getting them to come around to the position they need to be in to make a section of the plot work (I can’t have any of them blowing up the ship, after all – not yet, at least). I’ve had to rewrite several posts because one character or other has gone off on a tangent that isn’t maintainable, or is just plain awkward. But I’m careful about trying to make them all behave true to themselves – my aim is to have my hand in guiding them be as invisible as possible.

When I got to the end of last week’s post (Last Ditch), I was disgruntled with how things had turned out. Not with the plotting – we were in exactly the position that I wanted us to be in. Poor Elliott, he finally got the guts to go stand up for Starry and confronted the captain. Awesome for Elliott, but I thought the captain came across very closed. So far, the leader of this crew has been in the background, almost invisible, and sometimes passive. That didn’t feel right to me.

That’s not to say that it’s out of character – it’s not. John has his reasons for being the way he is. Part of it is his style of captaining – he sits back and listens to people, lets them talk, weighs up the options and then tells them what his orders are.

Part of it is that he’s not entirely in charge on the Star walker – there’s the mission and the demands of the experiment pulling strings, dictated by Cirilli and her people. I don’t honestly know who would win in a throw-down power-struggle between Cirilli and John.

Part of it is also the weight of recent and past events in his life. It’s this latter part that I don’t think the reader has had a chance to see or understand yet. John hasn’t really made himself known yet, not even in his own log posts.

When I finished editing and posting Last Ditch, I sat and pondered how best to tackle this. The solution was startlingly simple: the next post had to come from him. How he deals with this crisis and the decision that he makes about Starry’s fate is going to define a lot about him. It’s also a good kick in the pants that should pull him out of his passivity.

So that has been this week’s task – delving into John’s head and watching him come around to his decision about Starry. Glimpses of his pain and an inability to deal with it. Seeing the rest of the crew through his eyes (and, curiously, who came to speak up for Starry and who didn‘t). It’s been fun!

I’m pleased with how it came out, overall. I think (and hope) he will be more sympathetic from now on, and a more proactive character in the scheme of things.

This section isn’t going to finish too soon, I think – the idea is to identify all the ‘players’ in the story of Starry’s short life, and there’s one or two more still to be revealed. We’re one step closer now. Onwards and outwards, I guess!

Starwalker breaks 1,000!

Just checked my web stats for August, and Starwalker had over 1,000 unique visitors that month!

It’s not my bestest month ever – April cranked up 1180 unique visitors – but it’s my best one since I dropped the posting down to only once a week. Wow.

Completely awesome. It almost tipped over 200 in a single day a couple of times, too!

Also, today Starwalker tipped over 90,000 words. Yay!

Plot burp

I have reached a strange place in the Starwalker plot. One saboteur has been caught, but there are suspicions that she was not working alone. The extent of the scheme hasn’t yet been uncovered.

This has led me into a bit of a quandry. On the one hand, I want to get the whole sabotage/betrayal issue sorted out, tied off, and kicked smartly off-screen. I don’t want to draw it out so long that my readers get sick of it and want it done already. On the other hand, if I do it too quickly, I might wind up missing out on some opportunities.

What I really need to do is dig out my original planning pinboard and see what the next phase is due to be. It it still in the garage after my house move, safe from damage and kittens who like to steal pins (I wish I was kidding about that). I’m juggling so many plot elements right now that I think I need to revisit the whole plan, see what shape it needs to take and how I might get to some of those places.

I’m almost to the mid-place of my original plan, and it is over 85,000 words now! I’d like to tie this off in a way that is both satisfying and moves on to the next phase of the story.

Challenges, challenges. Looks like I’m going to be busy replotting things this weekend, and possibly rewriting the post I’ve got ready to go up next.

Can’t wait to get going with it.

Reactions wanted!

I’ve often said that I’m a feedback-whore – I love hearing from readers. It makes me happy.

I try to keep as many avenues for feedback open as possible, and am always on the lookout for new ones. With the Apocalypse Blog, it was emails from readers. With Starwalker, it’s comments on the blog, and then the forum. On the weekend, I added a new way for readers to give feedback to Starwalker.

First, let me explain how I got there. I was doing my semi-regular poke around the Web Fiction Guide forums, when I came across a thread that started out discussing weblit and traditional publishing, and wound up pondering the familiar question: why don’t more readers comment?

As it happens, one weblit author did a survey into exactly that, and her results are interesting. Not entirely unexpected, but it does have some great insights – I recommend that any weblit authors take a look.

It’s also worth taking a skim over the comments on that page, as that’s where I found the suggestion to add reaction buttons. Thanks to another helpful weblit author, I discovered that there is a handy WordPress plugin that adds reaction buttons to posts.

Commenting takes time and effort on the part of the reader. There might be many reasons why someone chooses not to comment: some readers don’t want to take or have the time to do that; others may be looking just to be entertained; and others may simply have nothing to say. That’s all fine! I know I’m often too busy to fill out a comment form when I’m going through blogs, and most of the time I wouldn’t have anything particularly interesting to say beyond ‘I agree/like this’. Sometimes I make the effort, but often I don’t.

Having a button to click is much easier. One click and there, feedback given. You can indicate an opinion without filling out a form or trying to formulate actual words. Quick and easy, so even a busy person won’t feel held up by it.

It’s not intended to replace comments at all – I still love and encourage comments. I do adore it when readers cheer on my characters, just let me know they’re reading, and all the other fun stuff I get in comments. Keep it coming! But now you can click when you’re not feeling so chatty.

I had a bit of a headache over what to put on the buttons. This particular plugin is very configurable – you can have as many buttons as you like with any labels on them. Awesome! Wait. What do I want people to click on, now? Um.

I wanted a negative-reaction button, because it feels weird to me not to give someone the chance to give negative feedback. I struggled with finding a label, though – I started with ‘sucks’, and then downgraded to ‘needs work’, and gave up because I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t troll-bait. So right now, there is no negative option (though there’s always the comments!). I might rectify this if people want it and I can think of something to put on it.

So, there you have it. A new avenue for feedback – click away! Tell me what you think! Suggestions for more/different buttons welcome. And the buttons are on every post, so readers can go back and click on favourite ones if they want!

Have fun!

Starwalker posting update

I have just finished posting up this week’s quota of Starwalker updates. Great news – two brand new posts for you all! The mystery of Elliott’s collapse unfolds, and not in a good way. It’d be no fun if it was all smooth sailing, right? Starwalker just ain’t that kind of ship.

As those of you reading probably know, I’m trying to catch up after a couple of weeks off. So I was delighted to be able to pen a couple of posts and start to fill in the backlog. Oh, if only it was that easy. I’ve hit a heavy bit of plotting, and stretching it out to one post a week is just not feasible right now. There’s a lot to cover and my lovely little characters are not so sluggish that it takes them a week to get around to these things! I’ve spent half of my writing time lately just wrangling dates and timing.

So today’s postings – Unquiet sleep and The nightmare box – both cover only one week of actual plot-time. It’s going to take at least a couple more posts to get the current issue resolved (one of which is written), so it looks like there might be two coming next week as well.  Then maybe I can work on closing the gap and getting the posts running to date! And then maybe I can work on a buffer!

And for those of you who think that it will be done once the sabotage business is figured out – no way. I’m on chapter 6 out of 12 I have planned, so there’s lots more to come. There’s no time limit on this the way there was on the Apocalypse Blog – it’s going to keep coming until I run out of stories to tell.

Off to put my feet up for the evening, now that my posting is done. I feel accomplished. Enjoy, everyone!

Stumbling in

Last night’s writing group was great fun. Thanks to footie and traffic, everything ran a bit late and we didn’t get a huge turnout. There was enough of us for a good discussion, though, and it was wonderful to have Kylie Chan’s advice and insight into being published. I’ll aim to post more about that soon.

I wound up getting home so late that I didn’t have time to sort out my Starwalker post. It’s all written and edited! I just need to get it uploaded and formatted, and post it. The formatting takes attention and time, and I’ll sort that out as soon as I get home tonight. Sorry everyone – it’s on its way, I promise!

Falling into step

Things are starting to settle down a bit here. I have my apartment-type area set up and have settled in. The kittens are getting used to the new digs, even nervous little Jasmine. It’s feeling like home again.

Work is quietening down too. Old manager gone, new manager picking up the reins. I run the team anyway, so the biggest change is who I have to talk to about stuff. The new manager is receptive and friendly, so no problems there so far. I’m currently on a training course, learning the other monstrous side to the software my team has to document. My brain is filling up.

I haven’t caught up with Starwalker as quickly or thoroughly as I had hoped. It’s taking me longer to get used to the commute than I had anticipated – I’ve spent at least half of my commutes dozing due to exhaustion lately. I’m doing better this week, and feeling able to do more and more writing, so I know I’ll get there.

On the plus side, I’m keeping up with Starwalker and am excited about the story even after the break. I’m at an awkward part of the story, coming up to a peak in the plot that requires some logistical wriggling. It might help if I had planned all this stuff out from the beginning, but hell, until recently, I wasn’t even sure who the saboteur was. It’s fun writing it this way, though I’m paranoid I’ll write myself into a corner. I plan to keep going as I am until it breaks, though – it’s working for now, so why not?

With luck, I’ll be able to catch up to the realtime posting dates soon. I have to restrain myself from doing interim posts in the meantime (it’s possible I will fail at this – there’s a post that wants to be written that won’t wait a week from the previous one).

It’s a relief to feel like I’m finally getting on top of things. To feel honestly enthused about something without out the weight of everything else resting on me.

I have my writing group tonight, with a guest talk by the lovely and talented Kylie Chan – I hope I get a good turnout for her. We won’t be getting into our new meeting-place until September, so things are a little weird until then.

That’s about it for my update today. Better get back to work!