The Nope Book Revisited

When I sat down the other night I was having a moment where I wanted to write something, but it wasn't flowing in the way I wanted it to, nor were the focal points of the piece I was hoping to write coming together.

In revisiting this, I was thinking about the purpose behind the 'nope' book. On the first page I've included some of the goals I had hoped to achieve, and I'm far enough along to actually see how well I've fulfilled them.

My first goal I had mentioned way back in January of 2018. I recommitted to that goal on July 4, 2018. The goal was to simply write every day. It didn't matter what I wrote, but that I wrote. So far, I haven't quite kept up with the writing in my book, but I have in another forum on the web. I came here though, because I wanted to find another community in which to focus on writing. Mainly that of the science fiction genre.

In the nope book, I also noted that I wanted to try out different methods of writing. To explore ways to improve my writing, and to grow as a writer. I haven't done a lot of that, but I did start to examine the snowflake method starting out with one small idea and then branching out, expanding the thought in relation to the central idea.

In the first part of the snowflake method it asks that you write a one sentence summary of your novel. The blurb that came out was:

'A science officer and her crew are headed to the AC quadrant to check out a recently discovered planet. While our MC expects that the planet will be uninhabited the planet is populated with sentient nodosaurs who communicate telepathically.'

In a previous post, I had introduced Aphelion, the nodosaur who makes the first contact, whose ____ causes a frisson of fear in our space faring crew. Now, when I look back on this, I think 'Good grief' I've just written an episode of Star Trek, or have heavily borrowed from something I've read. Yet, I think the whole point is to write a familiar enough story that a person would be able to imagine something tangible, but create a whole new scenario in which to entertain them.

Which is where this prehistoric race is often visited (read enslaved to a degree) by an extremely war driven race and our crew has managed to miss their arrival and departure by a few mere days.

I have set up my thoughts where my MC and her crew must first discover the planet, and meet Aphelion. Interestingly enough, I don't know yet whether Aphelion is friend or foe. He's base driven much like an animal, and animals only like you if you feed them.

Now I'm into researching the plausibility of how my crew may arrive, reviewing propulsion systems and craft, and start thinking about how my MC can even make a 400 year trip. Has warp been invented or has there been some other mechanism by which we travel.

In the midst of all this, I also want to pull out a philosophical thread that has been on my mind for some time.

So, while I only went 8 pages in, I think I have some good material to work with. Maybe.