If there’s one thing I love to write, it’s people talking. And there’s no better place to talk than around the dinner table. This is, obviously, a calm before the storm of war. Before Faustina leads her legions over the mountains and against a professional military of the world’s last superpower.
Tag: friendship
Crusade, Part 1, Sunset
I kinda/sorta knew where and how to wrap up part 1 but the details eluded me for a couple of days. I was able to make some notes yesterday and had a final image early this morning to bring my “prologue” to an end. My 13.8k prologue…
From first meeting her in “Worlds Without End” I knew Faustina was going to be a very interesting person and all this has confirmed my suspicions. Part 2 will be about her Savannah campaign – what prompted it, how she got involved, the way south, and the battle and aftermath.
Little Aurelia in this installment just handed me the arc of part 3: a campaign to the lower Mississippi: not bringing nuclear power and civilization like the early Knoxville Society did in “Echoes of Family Lost,” but a straight-up neo-imperial effort to establish colonies and client-kingdoms between former eastern Tennessee and the Republic of Texas.
Depending on the length of all that, part 4 will either be an epilogue pointing to a sequel or it will make this one of my longest works as Faustina leads an army to St. Louis… and the massive political-military ramifications of such an act. Yeah… that might best be its own book… The Black Muslim Brotherhood that controls that area; the remnants of central Canadians coming south, fleeing the advancing ice… Complicated.
Blowing Hot & Cold
It’s officially the winter season at the Barnett Residence: with this recent cold snap I have un-mothballed our pellet stove in our basement. It keeps things about 80F down there. The ground floor is set around 65F and upstairs falls to 61F or lower when the wind howls.
Another busy DayJob week leading to no writing at all for nearly four days. On the morning of the fourth day I texted my wife that I was becoming morbidly depressed. She counselled me to hang on a bit longer. Wisdom: in the past day and a half I’ve written just over 3000 words about little Fussy and her first battle, the first part of which is just below the fold.
Tales from her Sickbed…
DayJob is nightmarish: all the of the IV rooms are, politely, “in flux.” “We’re all screwed” comes closer but we are all trying to KBO.
I was visited with Faustina’s next adventure last night. What I found entertaining was that when I sat down in front of the computer, I saw this, first. More Faustina and her legions next time. I promise!
Deus Volt, cont’d
I’m enjoying how this is turning out so far. I think I’ll have Faustina in hospital recollect everything right up until the rod dropped and she was badly injured. Things will all be real-time after that. And I have a suspicion where – one of the world’s functioning fusion reactors – she and this story might be headed. Two parts? Three? We shall see; I always knew she would get her own novel!
Deus Volt
Ever since I met her in “Worlds Without End,” I knew that Faustina, Gary Hartmann’s slightly younger sister, would have her own novel.
I just didn’t expect to have her showing me things so soon.
Like all of my stories, as I learned from Jerry Pournelle, this is starting in the middle: set maybe five or eight years after WWE, Faustina has led her personal army from Knoxville over the mountains and down the river to take the important port city of Savannah. At great cost to herself.
I confess that, as always, I’ve no idea at all where this is going and am interested as you are…
“First Among Equals”
I went almost two weeks without writing more than a paragraph. I needed at least one more short story for my January collection and thought to tell a story about Henge and her and Gary’s daughter, Aurelia. One paragraph and some notes.
And nothing.
Admittedly things were hectic at DayJob and much time was spent formatting “Worlds Without End” into a format acceptable to Smashwords, but I would sit at my laptop and wait to see what they would show me… which was precisely nothing.
A week ago a fellow I work with asked how the writing was coming. I replied the technical side was fine but I was currently stuck. Still stuck a few days later, I recalled his question. I based the coder Dmitri, Reina’s father, on him, I thought. There are no such things as coincidences… he was meant to ask that question! And that means…
I saw Reina standing in the snow. Twelve hours later I heard her talking to a visitor. I wrote this in four hours. What these people do with me sometimes…
