Forward – The creative process

 

I’ve been sitting on this one for over a year now. Somewhere inside my head there is a sci-fi novel (or possibly novella, I don’t have high hopes for the word count). It began one day when I just starting writing without a plan and came up with the beginnings of a short story. That piece remains unfinished and unpublished, it’s sitting in a draft on this site and may never see the light of day. It had only the vaguest of plot direction, but it did provide me with a setting. After stalling on that piece I decided that I needed to approach the creation of this work with more of a plan. I fleshed out a backstory and plot, expanded the setting, even developing 4,000 years of history and a constructed language. I hit a wall however when it came to character development. It may boil down to a lack of empathy on my part, but I have difficulty creating motivations for characters to fit into my story. Plot is one thing, in the most basic form it’s a matter of hitting the right beats, but the motivations of characters and the conflict that generates is what draws the reader into the plot. No amount if carefully crafted backstory is going to save you if your characters are all robotic plot-directed pawns without any drive or passion. So this is where I am as I write this. Stagnation around character development led me to shelve the process until some undetermined future point.

To motivate myself into progress, I’ve decided to try what I call the Andy Weir Method. Mr Weir is the author of The Martian, a best selling hard sci-fi novel which became a film. The novel was originally published as a serial (in the tradition of many great sci-fi works) on the author’s blog. At the request of his readers he then collated it together into an e-book and self-published it, only to find it turning into a best seller. I figured I’d give this a go and put my work up here in installments for the edification of my, on average, one visitor per month. I make no guarantees of a regular publishing schedule, or even completion. We’ll just see where this goes…

Getting ahead of myself, I wrote a prologue. Whether this section ends up being crucial to the plot remains to be seen. It does set the scene, if not the tone of the novel. Many writers warn against prologues, since they usually unnecessarily precede the main plot when really you should just get on with telling the story. However I looked at this as a start point to get the creativity flowing, and in a homage to George R. R. Martin it introduces a character who meets and untimely end.

 

Kegaoh – A Sci-Fi Novel

 

Prologue

 

The sunlight chased the arc of night across the face of the planet. In its wake, the light revealed the bands of clouds which made up the top layers of the gas-giant’s atmosphere. Bright patterns swirled and whorled in eddies, like paint in water but slowed to glacial speeds, contrasting against the darker reds and umbers of the upper and lower bands of the tropics, and blending into the beige equatorial band. Here and there, a darker grey wave breaking through the brighter tones hinted at the turbulence beneath the surface. In the darker crescent of night, electrical storms flashed near the equator, coruscating wave-fronts spreading millions of kilometers in the darkness. Near the poles, the eerie green glow of the auroras danced palely, crowning the world top and bottom. The giant’s major moon, a dark blue-grey captured planet, cast a shadow like a bruise on the daytime surface, while two of the seven lesser moons glowed like bright crescents against the black of space.

Simon Lohny yawned and closed the image on his console.

He was on the overnight watch in the CommsMon. It was his lonely duty to watch the myriad of displays which output the status of the various communications relays. Their streams of company data endlessly flowing back and forth between Head Office and many divisions, installations and franchises on Rhaeso-Gamma and the other planets and colonies in the system.

It was a tedious shift, the CommsMon system was largely automated and rarely needed any human intervention. The Company Charter stipulated that human oversight of all automated systems was required 26 hours per day to ensure “accountability”. Simon knew what that meant; if the automated systems screwed up, the company needed someone to blame for the error. Computers can’t be demoted, humans can. While any mistake he made here might take days or even weeks to be discovered, the bureaucracy always traced things back and found their man.

In the dimly lit control room the harsh light of the screens flickered as the streams of status messages, network pings and orbital vectors constantly refreshed. Simon completed his hourly cycle through the 120 different Comms Relays to check the transmission integrity and made a note to check the atmospheric updates for Rhaeso-Beta before the end of his shift. A dust storm coming through the upper tropics was likely to require them to re-route messages the morning’s quota calculations via the receiving stations at the southern pole. The increase in EM activity on the gas-giant Rhaeso-Epsilon also needed keeping an eye on.

He rubbed his eyes blearily and looked at the time. Three more hours until shift change-over. He’d kill for some areca juice to keep his fatigue at bay, but if he left the control room unattended his absence would noted on the logs, and if something went wrong…

Simon’s thoughts dwelt on his family. Demotion, even temporary one, was something Simon could ill-afford at present. His wife Cyrah had recently given birth to their first child, a daughter they had named Daenella. All of sudden there had been a bright new centre to his universe, nothing else in his life mattered except keeping his daughter safe and happy, and he had realised that getting himself onto the promotion ladder would be the best thing he could do to provide Daenella with the future he wanted for her. That meant enthusiastically taking on extra work, like this overnight shift, and performing his duties with alacrity and by the book. Although the amount of time it took him away from his family pained him.

The sound of the security doors opening at the end of the corridor outside the CommsMon took him by surprise. He hadn’t expected to see anyone in this wing of the building until his shift handover. Glancing out of the control room windows he saw a man pushing a large garbage cart with an assortment of cleaning supplies. His shaved head, pale complexion and drab grey overalls marked him as one of the Zadovi, the labour under-class. Some sort of janitor Simon guessed. A pity, some company might have helped pass the time quicker. Talking to a Zadovi was not something you did however, other than to give them instructions. Most of them didn’t even appear to know how to speak, and their strange, pious devotion to even the most menial of work was unsettling.

He returned to his work, taking several minutes to review the computer’s recommendations for the re-routing of Comms on Rhaeso-Beta, when a prickle at the back of his neck told him he was being watched. He turned to see the Zadovi standing outside the window outside the control room, staring at the displays. Realising Simon had seen him, the man gestured at the security door into the room.

Simon hesitated. Security protocols dictated that no unauthorised personnel were to be admitted into the CommsMon control room during the overnight watch. Did this restriction extend to the cleaning staff as well?  After all, the control room needed cleaning just like everywhere else, and besides, it is not as if this Zadovi is going comprehend any of the information on the displays. The man was probably just admiring the repeated loops showing shifting cloud patterns on the weather satellite feeds. Just to be safe however, Simon switched several off the more sensitive read-outs to encrypted mode before deactivating the security door, which unlocked with a sharp click and gave a short buzz to indicate to the man that he could enter.

 

[You need a section here detailing the fault, and the system’s auto-response]

 

“Myna forgive me”, the Zadovi said suddenly, swinging his mop handle in a swift movement, knocking Simon’s chair out from under him.

Simon clutched at his console, “What the… What are you doing?!” he cried, but the man gave no answer. With blank expression and a final swing he brought the heavy mop handle down on Simon’s skull. There was a sickening crunch.

The man shoved Simon’s lifeless body aside and quickly hit the key to override the auto-response. He then spent several minutes erasing the warning logs, removing any record of the fault and the override command. Grunting, he hefted Simon’s body into the large bin on the cleaning cart and covered him over with garbage.

The Zadovi stopped and beheld the image of Rhaeso-Epsilon-Six cloaked in shadow on the console. “Kegaoh” he whispered, touching the display and then kneeling, he raised a finger to his brow and prayed.

“Blessed Aynaoh, deliver your people to their purification and guide them to Keohahk. Such is the will of Myna”

With that he rose, sighed wearily to himself, then pushed his cart out of the control room and down the corridor, as the display in the control room showed first bright sliver of the arc of dawn, cresting the edge of Rhaeso-Epsilon-Six, the world known to the Zadovi as Kegaoh.