quote:Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group. Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).
What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them? Describe what you worked on. Set goals for next week. Did you learn something during this week?
Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).
Writing on a novel Characterization World Building Relevant research
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As for me:
Last Week's Goals:
DUAL MAGICS SERIES (THE SHAMAN'S CURSE, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY,and WAR OF MAGIC): Social media promotion. Yes, some.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: Continue writing first draft. Schedule change at work for this week and next is killing my writing time. Hope to do better over the weekend.
MAGE STORM: Read through what I've already rewritten. Not yet.
posted
I managed to write in my steampunk-dragonpunk-UF-historical fiction fusion. And I came up with a title I could use, not perfect but still closer to anything else I have come up with-which aren't a whole lot. But I forgot it before I could get home for the day. (Sigh)
I revised some of The Courier Added more description and more of the five human senses. I was so far into the second chapter, opened the file and started where I thought I had ended. That sub scene did need more fleshing out. But then I saw that I had actually gone over that section already and at that time didn't think about making it more so.
I believe that is all on the novels.
Next week I need to do more of the same.
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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posted
I got completely stuck this week on a new concept dealing with space/time and quantum theory and ran face first into the actual physics of the whole thing. I wasted endless hours/days/weeks trying to solve the actual problem. My head is still spinning in the realization that the problem has no rational solution and it's about reality. I literally had to keep a journal and every time I thought I had it figured enough for the story I would run head long into another completely irrational problem to reality. It's driving me bonkers, because the more I think about it, the more time/reality makes no sense.
I've been down the rabbit hole before, but never tried to chase the rabbit and catch it. I got pages of leading research which make zero sense when you attempt to put them together from various fields of study. I hate to say it but there seems to be something seriously wrong with our reality, and its far bigger than a mathematical problem.
Took a break to check in here and step back from the drawing board.
posted
Welcome to quantum reality, W. Everything exists everywhere, and all at the same time. Why not take up herding cats instead, it'd probably be more catisfying.
posted
walexander, maybe you could use some handwavium* to come to some kind of resolution, and then tell a story about someone doing just what you've been doing with all this stuff?
posted
Another authentic prose approach to quantum mechanics is that effect precedes cause in the minutia of it all. Plus, that only through quantum mechanics does information transcend relativistic asymptotes, both the speed of light and its n-space congruent opposite absolute zero, primarly due to use of the Imaginary number i variable in relativity and special relativity equations.
Information does indeed escape a black hole's relativistic event horizon and information as well transcends space-time paradox limitations due to relativity. It's all relative to an observer's n-space perspective, time, location, and situation.
Spatio-temporal displacement due to relativistic effects of quantum mechanics makes possible, even if improbable, that an information effect precedes its causal incitement. Fiction allows that an as yet unproven beyond doubt scientific principle only need be necessary and authentic to dramatic action movement, no matter if the movement defies or bends conventional wisdom. Like faster than light information transmission and reception, a temporal paradox that the information arrives before it would naturally arrive in normal physics. Say two black holes collide some hundred light years away from an observer. Another observer nearby the collision sends a message about the event, received by the first observer. That information timely arrives before its natural observable time for the first observer.
If the message is received immediately, timely enough for precautions, it is then a time paradox of a hundred years premature of the time its passage moves in the normal physics realm. However, it is possible if improbable. The spatio-temporal displacement paradigm of both observers sharing a congruent relative time means the hundred years elapsed when they separated from a shared relative time. Neither per se futureward or pastward from each other, spatially and temporally displaced relative to each other equivalent to their spatial separation, the message received immediately doesn't violate an information paradox because the elapsed time runs its natural course due to observer situational relativity.
posted
This week, I've been developing plot ideas for a very new middle grade fantasy/steampunk adventure story. I'm in the "so, who are all these characters and what interesting things are going to happen to them" phase of development. This is not a deep novel. It's meant to be a fun romp for 10 to 12 year old kids.
Goals for next week: write the next chapter and get my character from the orphanage where he was recently adopted to his new home aboard a pirate ship without being caught by the authorities hunting down his mysterious new guardian.
This week, I figured out what this book is about for my MC. Young Felix must prove himself worthy of staying on as a member of 'The Last Man'. He only just discovered his desire to be part of a "family." He'll spend the rest of the book trying to hold onto this new group. Meanwhile, the crew of the Last Man is set with the task of hunting down a mythological beast (a Kraken) and harvesting a piece of it without getting themselves killed in the process? Why? They plan on selling the item--reputed to have amazing magical properties--to someone with a lot of gold. I've unearthed the underlying plot of what I'm envisioning to be a series of novels. The charismatic captain of this crew hails from another world, a magical world. She was banished to the non-magical world where my story picks up, and she really wants to go home. Hidden all over the globe are pieces of a device that, when all the pieces are assembled, can open a portal between the worlds. Her "buyer" for the piece of the Kraken happens to have a piece of said device. I also brainstormed some fun items that the captain either already has in possession or will have to acquire along the way to accomplish the current task. These items are of a steampunky-magical nature. My magic system is tech-based. Magical mirrors, fountain pens, compasses, spectacles, pocket-watches, etc. They are all artifacts that have entered our world from the other world, carried by other banished outlaws.
Posts: 45 | Registered: Aug 2016
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Write new stories. Edit old stories. Put some out for wider reading/criticism. I didn't do much editing this week due to lack of time. For the same reason, I ended up completing much of my writing for the week in just a few days. Not ideal. But I produced three self-contained short pieces, this time (new for me) each plotted out in advance. Obviously writing in this rapid way isn't going to hone skills of producing beautiful prose, but I want to get in enough practice at telling complete stories with a full, believable, and interesting dramatic sequence and plot, before I move on to more stylistic elements.
I also got two stories, in different ways, out of my hands and into the hands of others beyond my first reader. I'm pleased with this.
Goals for next week:
Write three more short stories, edit some I've already written, put some of those edited ones out there for wider reading/critique. Tackle at least one of the more complex stories (longer, but not novel-length) that I've started but not been able to finish in one go, and have therefore pushed onto the back-burner. Plotting these out properly would help, as would plotting out some of my novel ideas. Perhaps once I get up the confidence with plotting short stories, this will become easier. One step at a time...
What did I learn this week?
I can write quickly, and not awfully, when necessary. Planning the skeleton of a plot helps a story run smoother. Making maps of expected and unexpected steps in the story works too, and helps me see different possibilities for advancing the plot in fresh ways.
Review session feedback: the stories worked pretty well; they were more economical and better planned than earlier stories. But in parts, they still lacked viewpoint character emotion and connection. I also could benefit from taking a few more risks and playing around a bit more in my writing--a question of confidence.
Posts: 76 | Registered: Sep 2016
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posted
I am glad we have more people taking part this week or was it last week.
Hmm, well according to the discussion on quantum mechanics and "Information does indeed escape a black hole's relativistic event horizon and information as well transcends space-time paradox limitations due to relativity" I guess I could say that either way.
Or We want time travel, we want time travel, we want time travel
posted
I'm not sure why it's upsetting me so much why I can't seem to solve the riddle of the universe while doing my dishes. It has something to do with it's about factual reality, not fantasy. It's an impossible subject just like death and taxes, both completely unsolvable until it's too late.
Posts: 634 | Registered: Jun 2010
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posted
The cosmos is all relative to an observer's setting, especially fantastic fiction writers and their narrator and character personas. Fantastical motifs only need be necessary to and probable for the real action, which is portray the human condition in all its warts and beauties. Not factual motifs per se, authentic to a milieu's invented physical laws. Only the riddles of the fantastic invention need be resolved, if that; not the current theories of the cosmos resolved.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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Though the ideas behind my post are not mine originally. They come part from Aristotle's comments about fantasy motifs' need for necessary and natural, probable if improbable occurrence, and relation to a dramatic action, and part from science fiction canon's topical motifs.
Does H.G. Wells' The Time Machine lavish attention on factual science? Nope. The novel is of the philosophical type, asserts a moral law packaged in an energeic drama, and one more relevant aspect; that is, what if the future were as knowable as the past is through a study of documented history -- the novel's true designs.
Wells did what prose best does, he placed the action in an immediate invented reality, within a rigid, consistent invented milieu's natural laws, futureward, rather than in an emulated mediation of past history's secondhand report or known factual knowledge. Wells' point, or points -- well, he satirizes the runaway advancement of technology to an extinction threshold.
A moral, too, that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --- George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense: The Phases of Human Progress, 1905. And, uh, "The period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." --- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
Wells contributed to an as yet unresolved conversation that is as old as humanity, not, per se, to the advancement of physics knowledge.
quote:Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury: Tried to figure out how to add a "like" feature a while back. Couldn't find anything that would work.
Sorry.
Won't hurt us to type out, "I liked that post" or words to that effect.
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