Spooling Up the Fiction Engines
We may have mentioned our novel launch once or twice in the past few weeks, but in case you missed it: Miss Brandymoon’s Device is available! For FREE! Right NOW! Go download it, we’ll wait.
You’re back? Great. Before you go immerse yourself in our book and forget about the outside world, we’ll give you a quick update on our activities in the writing cave.
Son of Science Novel is next on our agenda. We thought we were ready to write it. It’s been discussed to death, outlined thoroughly, and broken down into scenes (at least the first act has been). We know the characters and settings pretty well, have reference photos for inspiration. From the outside we look overprepared.
But from the inside we’re still finding gaps in our knowledge. The layout of the not-so-abandoned-after-all cold war doom factory will be important not just in this early scene, but in blocking later scenes as well. We need a floor plan now so we don’t write in errors that we’ll need to fix during revisions. Kent fires up Illustrator and puts his brain in Dungeon Master mode!
Do we really need to write a whole scene wherein Boss tells Underling to recruit Heroine, when we can simply show the recruitment? Will readers question Underling’s motivations? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Jen puts on her Problem-Solving hat!
Some of this might look like procrastination, what with the multiple visits to Pinterest and the innocent google searches that turn into bottomless research clickholes, but it’s all valuable. It’s all immersing us in the story world, one we haven’t visited for a while. The better prepared we are, the less we’ll need to change later.
And as everyone knows, it’s dangerous to go alone. For us, having a writing partner makes the journey less perilous.
Read a description of Miss Brandymoon’s Device