Monday, September 17, 2018

Writing Update

I’m repeating myself here but, quite some weeks back I took some text I’d extracted from one of my previous books and began to rewrite, with the intention of turning it into a short story. It’s now turning into a book for which the working title is Jack Four.

For a while now I’ve had the idea that I’ve been writing myself into a dead end. My fiction has been increasingly set in space with plenty of exploding spaceships while the characters, whenever they are human, are uber-human – they always have mental and physical abilities that are way out there. Meanwhile I’ve known that some of my best loved books have a large component set in planetary environments with weird alien ecologies, and contain character that, while not necessarily conventionally human, are more human.

In this book I decided to get away from former and get back to the latter. Jack is a clone whose only advantage is the knowledge of the person he was cloned from. He does not possess that person’s memories and is inexperienced. I also manipulated the story to stick him down in a hostile planetary environment and, to that end, let’s talk about monsters. People seem to like my monsters. So what do you reckon would happen if someone kept a zoo of such creatures in a space station and then, because that station was needed in a war (maybe a prador-human one) dumped all those creatures down on the surface of a planet?

I’m having a lot of fun with this and week after week have been hitting my writing target of 2,000 words a day five days a week. Jack Four has just passed 70,000 words (about halfway). I hope, when it’s done, you’ll have fun with it too!

6 comments:

Skullsdirect said...

Good news. I love planet based narratives. The Skinner's environment is fascinating. Lethal and compelling in equal amounts!

Tim said...

Ooh! Sounds like another winner. My 1st book of yours was The Skinner and it’s still one of my favourites, anything of yours with extreme (lethal) ecology is good for me!

subrata sen said...

I'm really looking forward to this ... a chance to explore planetary ecology and human psychology. More like SKINNER perhaps.

Dan said...

A couple of useful biological plot devices would be what happens when you have wildlife adapted to a planet with a long eliptical orbit? That would have very cold, long winters and brief hot summers. Stick that on a more earth-like scenario and it is going to get very confused...

Unknown said...

This sounds great alien ecologies are always a good setting Can't wait to read it.

Unknown said...

Do the hallucinations from fasting help feed your imagination/stories?