Tag: science fiction

Rehab

After not formally writing for a week and half, I feel as if I should be entering rehab; I have (looks about) five pages of notes from downtime at DayJob and quiet times about my house but when I just didn’t the time to sit down in front of the laptop.

That came to an end today.  Daughter #2 off on a cancer fun-raiser, wife doing something about the house somewhere… I’d no more excuses.  I fired up the pellet stove in the basement and came down thirty minutes later to write.  So far, it’s working.  3k words of Faustina’s recover in the Knoxville hospital flowed right out.  There’s much there:  her physical condition, the reaction of her family to her injuries, and her fervent desire to return to “her boys” as soon as she is able.  It will be a balancing act for her, in, I think, three parts.  Here’s part one.

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Savannah 3/3

Needs work.  Couldn’t quite get into the proper groove of things this weekend:  post Christmas and Daughter #1 back to college.  It was nice to have her home for three weeks; of course she’ll be back in five days as she wanted to come with us to Ohayocon on the 10th-12th.  That’s my weeb girl!

This is enough that when I rewrite it and edit it into a novel that it will work.  As any regular reader knows, I keep things sparse and terse.  It might be a little too terse here.

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Savannah, 2/3

Some good news.  Some very bad news.  Faustina is learning to think under pressure.

Most of my fam is out of the house for one reason or another tomorrow.  Barring any oddity I shall complete not only part three of three but also quite possibly bring Part One to a conclusion.  What little I have seen of Part Two is… rather weird.

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Savannah, 1/3

Hope everyone had the New Years Eve and Day they desired.  I’ve spent most of the morning avoiding writing (two loads of dishes, repaired a space heater, collating a week’s worth of leftovers) and the afternoon sitting down and writing.

Below the fold are the first moves against the city of Savannah and the Peoples Liberation Army units that occupy it.  There are several references to military history and we learn that like her Machine namesake, Faustina has what a normal person would consider to be a very odd sense of “fun.”

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Locked out

Finished the segment I began yesterday:  Faustina having a brief chat with the mayor of what’s left of Asheville.  With that in the bag, I went to review some maps about their upcoming troop movements.  Yeah, there are those three dams, but I’m sure the barges and escorts will fit through their locks…  Those dams look a little small… let’s look them up and also check ‘street level view’!

Well, dang.  Having spent a half-dozen of my formative years around the Columbia River, I took it for granted that a great waterway would have locks for barge traffic.  I realized now that the Savannah River is not a “great waterway.”  Important, certainly, but it is a creek compared to something such as the Columbia.

I still think I can get their artillery onto barges in Augusta.  But the legions are going to have to cover the 160 miles from Asheville to there, first.  Then, while the barges – under guard – move down-river, the infantry will march another 125 miles.  I see that a few days of maps, calculations, and re-writes are ahead of me.  Hope to have something by Wednesday.

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Family Dinner

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.

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A Question of fire

Part Two is all about Faustina’s crusade to take Savannah, the deep-water port of former Georgia, off the occupying Chinese and hand it on a platter to the resurgent city-states of the Tennessee River Valley.

Me being me, not doing “action” well, most of it will be about the people and their relationships.  In this case, we start off with the government of Knoxville defining their problem and facing up to the only solution:  the use of force.  The fact that a demi-human girl has a near monopoly on said force is another thing entirely.

As you can tell from my posting, I was lost for days about one simple question:  how is Faustina paying for all this?  No matter what they feel for her, troops expect to be paid and weapons cost money… a lot of money.  Until I had that answer given to me – and when it happened at DayJob on Monday and I burst out laughing (confirming their suspicions that I’m mental) – I could not write a word.  Here’s half of what I laid down.  More tonight or tomorrow!

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