Aphelion Delta

  1. Some of the writing/detail is a bit of a repeat. I am continuing to write here, but am also migrating my writing to a more public blog.

    I wasn’t quite sure what to write here, but I wanted to diarize some of the details behind my novel ‘Aphelion Delta’.

    The book itself started with an idea about a mission to Proxima b in the Alpha Centauri quadrant. I had every intention of writing hard sci-fi, but I found myself floundering to keep the story afloat. The flame of inspiration which had burned so brightly began to flicker and fade. It was at that point I decided I was going to ditch reality in favor of a more loosely written piece.

    What came after was gloriously ridiculous, full of catchy one-liners, and a tonne of silly cliches. While no longer part of the novel, my favorite one-liner from that draft is this:

    We’re so gonna get our friendly Canadian asses kicked.’

    I will leave that with you. At one time I thought it pure gold, yet as my eye has become more practiced, I see it for what it is. Garbage.

    While that version of my story was certainly fun it still wasn’t exactly what I was after. Despite my literary infractions, I had a very clear vision of what sort of a book I wanted to write and for what purpose. I wanted my reader to share an experience with me, one that would leave them feeling as I had after having read sections of Ben Bova’s, ‘Mars‘.

    With this purpose in mind, I got serious. I began writing daily, I joined some local writers groups and kept scouring the internet for instruction I could use. I kept writing and editing until it was ‘good’. There were times I’d revisit what I had written and I would vacillate between ‘My god, I don’t even remember writing that.’ ‘Have I developed a split personality and he/she/it has decided to write the book?’ to ‘I wrote this and I don’t actually hate it!’

    My all-time personal favorite thought though was a note I wrote in the margin after a particularly heady sex scene.

    Get rid of all the hard sex, sci-fi book not erotica or letters to Penthouse…

    Ironically enough, I still think those steamy excerpts are the best part of my writing. I’ve just left them out. I know where they should be, but the tension, frustration, and love I felt in writing these scenes spill out nicely into the dialogue without actually having to be present.

    I also struggled with the thought of what it might look like for a human woman to have relations with a fully functional android. Many times sci-fi shows men engaging in relations with sex-bots, I wanted to explore the implications and thoughts of a woman who got it on with a walking and talking version of a battery operated boyfriend. That research left me asking ‘Are we as a society ready to discuss these morally grey areas?’

    I shelved that idea and didn’t bother looking for further input, because I wanted what I wrote to be solely mine. I’ll probably revisit it later when I’m closer to publication.

    The afterglow of good writing mentioned a couple of paragraphs above lasted until I threw my baby to the beta wolves (authors/readers/forum folk/family).

    I’d sincerely like to thank Korbyn Blake https://www.korbynblake.com/ and Matthew Howard https://www.amazon.com/Matthew-Howard/ for their efforts to help me become a better writer and for their constructive beta reads.

    Through their invaluable and extremely thorough feedback, I became keenly aware of my inability to string sentences together to create both good dialogue and tension. I also received feedback on sentences that were incredibly long. Looks like I haven’t quite killed that little writing faux pas yet have I?

    Through this forum devoted to the mechanics of writing, I discovered I knew nothing about writing. I mean how difficult could this all be, right? I’ve read a considerable amount of science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction. I still continue to do so. It should be second nature for this sort of a story to flow out of me. Right? Yeah, big surprise there. It doesn’t happen that way. There are outlines, plot building, world building and this is just the tip of the proverbial Titanic-sized iceberg that almost sank my little foray into the literary world.

    Not only did I discover that I needed to do a lot of learning, but I also discovered that other writers were actually putting a lot more effort into this whole writing business than I was. I began to let the evil entity of self-doubt permeate my thoughts.

    If these authors and their publications aren’t getting the recognition they deserve what makes me think mine will?

    It was at that point, I started looking at why I was writing. Sure, I wanted to share an experience. What else though would drive me on when the clouds of doubt began looming?

    I decided to delve a bit further into that reasoning as a back burner project, simply allowing it to stew in the back of my mind and onward I went.

    As part of my world building exercises, I started looking for ways to create worlds virtually. I initially hoped I could then use them to prompt ideas for writing. It was this search which led to my finding a VR platform called Second Life. Initially, I had little appreciation for the site as a whole and had actually deleted my viewer and washed my hands of it.

    It was by some stroke of fortune, I hadn’t uninstalled the program properly and after a couple of days off, I logged back in.

    In a moment of world-building desperation, I decided to switch my search parameters to include artwork, hoping that I may come across someone who had created science-related artwork that might drum up some semblance of thought.

    Instead, I stumbled upon a digital art gallery named Fractal Insanity which took my breath away. While completely unrelated to world-building, it provided the inspiration for the colour changing artwork I wrote of in Matthias’ ready room. More importantly, it changed my opinion that Second Life was a waste of my time and proved that it was more than it originally seemed.

    I then began searching alien planets and began hopping through a number of different ‘worlds’ or ‘sims’ as they’re called within SL. I found more of the inspiration I was looking for, and the luminescent foliage of SL became embedded in my written world.

    More to come…
    jannert likes this.

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