Hi everyone, I'm a data scientist, experienced in technology aboard US Submarines and a manufacturing plant in the Carolinas. Most of my writing in my career has been technical. I've had an active imagination and created stories in my head since I was about nine-years-old. I made up stories for my children at night when they were younger. I did not write fiction. I completed my first novel just a week ago. The first draft has 93K words. The primary genre is hard SF, with a hefty amount of the paranormal/supernatural, and a hint of religious overtones. I wrote in 3rd-person objective POV. It includes descriptions and dialog, without any insight into what characters are thinking. My current, and first, WIP idea has been soaking since 2015. Life hindered any progress until the pandemic freed up a some serious time. I spent nearly 400 hours over the summer designing my novel. This included the outline, drawings of equipment, biographical sketches, pseudo theoretical physics, pseudo paranormal, and writing the initial 14K. I finished up my work during Nano-2020. I'm working through my 2nd draft in December and January. Here is my workflow: Read each chapter out loud to my number-one critic, my wife (my alpha reader/listener). Mark-up the 480-page manuscript for obvious mistakes like typos, missing words, wrong words, etc. Underline any and every detail that describes the SF. Evaluate the overall story line. I've already butchered a chapter and added it to another location. Update my Microsoft Word version. Backup everything on Dropbox. I started a new writing project. I call it Word Crafting 101. In preparation for my 3rd draft in February, I need to beef up my writing. My 10,000 word project requires me to write a handful of sentences incorporating facial expressions and body gestures described in "The Emotional Thesaurus" and sensory descriptions from a lengthy list of sense words. I participated in the Nano forums but the activity is slowing down. That's what led me here, hoping these forums are active year-round. I enjoy 15 or 20-minute writing sprints on two Discord servers. I usually write about 250 words during a session. These sprints motivated me to eat a cow one bite at a time. I look forward to rubbing elbows with other writers and I develop my craft. Regards, Chuck
@montecarlo Thanks!! I only had about 2-years of my life underwater, but it gave me a lot of time to study people's responses and behaviors to stress. It also helped shape my ability to create SF systems. I hope you benefited from your time onboard your boat(s).
I think 3rd Objective is pretty common in hard sci-fi, because it's written by scientists who tend to like hard objective facts and don't like mucking around in the wetworks inside the human head or heart. I did start to write a story that way but it was unintentional, as I just mentioned in your other thread. Here are a couple of my blog posts where I wrote about it (there's some pretty enlightening discussion in the comments underneath): Objective vs Subjective in 3rd person New round of thoughts on 3rd Person Subjective/Objective Switching between close and distant 3rd Then after this I started to get really serious about learning the various POVs and how they work. 3rd Objective definitely has its place, and I could see using it for certain kinds of stories.
