Brainstorming Setting: Airships

I was originally thinking that there are not airships, or at least not yet, since that might throw off my town geography.  Unless… what if there were more caves?  Or just that there are limitations to the ships… mostly that big haulers are bulky and ungainly.  Gee, what a surprise.  Dealing with the smaller ones, though… How to handle them with defenses?

The normal propulsion is slow.  That's the key. There are airships, but while it can get them fairly fast eventually, the acceleration is slow.  The bigger the ship the slower for one propulsion, of course, but bigger ships can have a number of them (always a tradeoff between the amount of cargo space and space dedicated to propulsion).  That means that the small ones, with one propulsion unit (which I'll have to name sometime, or ID at least) aren't much faster than a walk, and someone at a fast trot could overtake it.  On the other hand, a quiet one at night…

So there should be some way for the ships to be detected, probably by means of the propulsion.  I would like the propulsion to be silent to human ears, but emitting something that detectors can pick up when the ship is within a mile or so.  This will allow fortresses to be alert against airship raids, to the amount necessary anyway.  Until they realize some of the things I'm thinking up.  However, if even the fastest of the airships doesn't get much faster than, say, 30 mph after a good run-up, that means that an archer should be able to shoot them down if necessary, and pre-mounted ballistas or something like that should be able to make short work of all but the hardiest blimps (those would be made by armies, of course, as siege weapons).

This means that airships also travel high for as much as they can, in order to avoid piracy.  After all, if the pirate can't reach them with hooks, then they can't catch the ship except in fairly unusual circumstances (that should make the pilot or captain uneasy about doing, for that very reason).

I'm thinking there could be other situations that someone might be able to accelerate an airship more quickly than expected.  A rope/pulley system, for example, if there is someplace it could be anchored to.  I wonder if there's some other propulsive method that could be used for short term and light ships, something like a fire extinguisher in space, along those lines.  Perhaps pressurized water?  Or maybe by burning out the aether accelerators (good for a long slow burn, used up too quickly for a short blast).

Um, more airship thinking: They are most vulnerable for the loading/unloading parts (also known as landings)... and also near those landings.  That should play into the world a little bit, I think.  The way I consider it, there would have to be pirates trying to take the airships, but on the other hand there would have to be defenses against that.  The best defense is height, but the airships give that up for landings.  Therefore, the pirates are likely to be the biggest danger during the landings. Not immediately at them, but hiding close by.  It would be a risky business, because presumably the landings are also where the most powerful people, the ones who are able to maintain their own armies, would be looking out for things.  So I think there would probably be specific troops designated for patrolling for pirates, and also probably a crack team or two dedicated to getting out and attacking the pirates when they appear.  Of course, their appearance could be a bluff, etc., especially when more than one airship is nearby.

A pirate's best hope to take an airship would be to take control of it and fly it away from those who would resist them doing so.  That might mean trickery at times, though the more straightforward and risky plan is grappling hooks as it goes by, followed by a quick climb and a fight at the top.  If they succeed, they have it and are presumably so high up that nobody else will be able to catch them.  If they fail, they die (or at least are mangled by the drop to the ground).

I can think of a couple ways of working this in.  The first is to have those troops patrolling around the vicinity whenever there is an airship coming in or leaving, and I think that those may start to be more frequent around the time period this starts.  The other would be to have the priest mention intentionally not finding and healing those who drop from the sky, as opposed to the MC (whom I really need to name and write up a character sheet on).  Possibly due to the morals of the priest/shaman in that the pirates chose a life of crime and fighting for their own gain, and therefore chose to accept the chance this would happen.  The MC, on the other hand, had it forced upon her, and could therefore both be healed, and be taught the ways of fighting back.

Thinking Out Loud

Or more accurately, thinking by typing.  This is mostly a brainstorming post.

I think I've decided to go with an idea I had months ago, of a steampunk Zorro-type story set in Peru during the colonization.  More of an Antonio-Banderras Zorro, and less the older style, though I'm not sure how much difference that will make by the time I get to writing.

Note to self: rewatch the Zorro movies for tone, and maybe to review the beats.  The movie worked well.

Right now, I'm thinking my main character will be a bit younger than I recall Zorro being; I'm thinking around 15-16.  I might have him a bit younger to begin with, so that he can grow physically as well as in skill while he is "exiled" from his regular place.

My current plot basically consists of the MC being forced to leave the city for some reason, and half-unconscious and maybe hallucinating, finding his way to a tiny jungle temple where an old native shaman resides.  Training ensues with the shaman/mentor, after which he returns to foil the bad guy's plans.

The emphasis is going to be heavy on adventure and wonder, with some budding romance.  A 15-16 year old male protagonist means boys around 12-14 will probably be the readers, which is somewhere in that transition between girls are weird and girls are wonderful.  Should the romance be nontraditional?  I'm thinking that making him mixed blood and her pure european may be enough.

Alternately, would the roles work reversed?  The woman as the MC and the zorro figure, the man as the romantic interest?  How would it affect the story?  The main readers would become girls 11-14, with similar interests but more emphasis on romance.  I would have to do some setting changes to allow it, perhaps; slight modifications to mores due to the steampunk setting.  On the other hand, it would mean even less suspicions on the woman herself during the zorro parts.

What would a girl be doing that would be so bad she'd be driven from the city, though?  I can think of a couple things, which aren't pretty; but do those things fit in a YA adventure story like this?  I may have to think through this part, but in some ways I'm liking the reversal.  I especially like that the woman is more active, and in this modification (and social class) for the time period, that would probably work out well.  She'll be pretty, of course, though think herself plain.  The boy will have to be someone we can root for, but showing it may be tough.  I think he'll have to try to act nicely to those of lower status and be put in his place by his father.

Darn, but I seem to have a thing for mean fathers.  I may need to check on that sometime.

So from this I need to extract, in the next couple of weeks, a concept, a theme, characters, and a beat sheet/outline.  It would be good to have the outline in hand a bit before the start of November, in order to give myself time to look it over and make sure it's doing what I want it to, but that may be asking too much by this point.  In fact, I think I'd probably be happy with just having a solid set of characters and some sort of action plan I can refer to.

I'll go into more details later, I hope, but for characters I need: the MC, the love interest, the shaman, and the bad guy (for sure).  Those are the main ones.  There should probably be one or two other bad guy types, though the one I referred to was the main baddie.  I wonder if there should be one or two others that the MC has a relationship with, of some sort.  Something to show that the MC isn't just living life waiting to die.

I may need to come up with a map or two, just enough to keep my areas in the city straight.  I'm wondering if I'll need a b plot, and if so what characters will be needed for that, and how I'll work them in as well.  I should skim through my writing ideas to see if any of them will trigger more ideas to work on.

Concept... concept may be difficult.  I should do a post on that also.  Right now I've got something along the lines of "what if a kid in steampunk colonial peru became Zorro?"  However, I don't think that's quite enough of a hook for the concept... although it does have a few unexpected elements to it, combining steampunk and colonial South America as it does.  I'd probably lose the "Zorro" line after some further fleshing out as well, but there's a lot that Zorro conveys that I'd rather not lose.

I need to work on broadening and deepening that, but perhaps that can wait for the dedicated post or two as well.

The theme seems easier to approach... I'm thinking something along the lines of racial prejudices and breaking caste settings, for better or worse (mostly better).  Maybe just prejudices and discrimination; not that I know much about being discriminated against, but that might work well with the MC being female as well.

Gravity Review

As a bit of a detour, while I was away being trained, a coworker an I went to see the movie Gravity in IMAX 3d.

My main impressions were as such, roughly chronologically: Holy cow it's cold in here.  How low do they keep the thermostat?  Wow is that screen big (I've been to IMAX movies before, but not that often).  Cold.  The pre-previews stuff was mostly dumb, and made my eyes slightly hurt while looking at the screen.  The previews all went as follows: Cold.  Oh, interesting.  I'd like to see that.  I wonder what happens next?  Oh, wait, the trailer is done.  Cold.

The movie itself took very good advantage of the 3d aspect, IMO.  Without going into too many details (at risk of spoiling the movie), it starts with some astronauts in space, and the panorama of the Earth, with depth, behind the crew is space was fabulous.  In many other occasions, the 3d effect added wonderful depth to the film, without being obtrusive to me in any way.  The only time I realized the effect during the movie was when I subconsciously tilted my head for a different view on something, and the movie went out of focus due to the glasses no longer being aligned.  It was a problem I quickly remedied.

The viewpoint was such that I had to close my eyes a few times, though I since that was due to the camera spinning around wildly I have to assume that would have happened without 3d as well.

Many shots were done in apparent weightless environments, and I found after the movie that it seems the filming didn't ever get to space.  I don't know how they got all the shots they did, but as a non-aerospace engineer, none of the physics rang false to me (one did appear to be false, but has an in-movie explanation within a couple minutes, so I'm willing to give that one a pass... for now).

As for the plot itself, again avoiding spoilers, it was a well-constructed work.  The plot wasn't the feature, IMO -- that would be the scenery and the visuals -- but it was completely serviceable.  It did tend toward the disaster-adapt-repeat formula, a little obviously at times, but as I said, serviceable.  The mentor figure is appropriately removed, going out on his own terms.  The emotional beats are there, including a spike of humor at times to help alleviate the tension -- or to prep the audience for an even bigger shock by swinging their emotions elsewhere moments later.

Overall I'd recommend it, but mostly for the visuals rather than the story.  If you do, try to see it on a big screen, with 3d is possible.  I doubt it will translate nearly so well to a TV screen.

NaNoWriMo Prep Forthcoming

I've decided to do an experiment and publish my NaNoWriMo prep here.  This will hopefully provide a few benefits, among them forcing me to get to my preparation work that I've been putting off.  As well, there's a chance that I would get some feedback that may help me as I go, and another chance that someone else may find the process useful for their own work.

Some concerns that play through my head, put out as if my subconscious is questioning my conscious:

• Are you worried that somebody will take your work?
  
  Somewhat, but overall I don't think that this is a reasonable fear.  This is only preparatory work; there is still a lot of effort to be done to turn it into a story.  In addition to this, each writer is going to be interested in and emphasize different parts of the prep work, so the resulting story should turn out quite different even if people work from the same source material.
  
• Are you worried that you'll flood your readers?
  
  You mean flood them with regularly blog posts instead of the occasional one when I remember?  Not entirely.  Google's new auto-publish means I can't just select the best to share and save the rest, but I trust my readers (if I have any) have made it to the level where they can skim past a published link to a blog if it doesn't interest them.
  
• Aren't you worried that you'll fail in public?
  
  Definitely.  However, I don't actually expect to.  One reason is that I've done prep for and tried NaNoWriMo multiple times, and am pretty confident in my ability to finish NaNoWriMo successfully, which is the definition of successful prep work as well, IMO.  Another is that I've always experimented with my prep work, trying to find new things, so if it fails, it might be kind of fun anyway.  Finally, I attribute the remaining fear to just the usual cause of author fright, and move on.
  
• What's the prep this year?
  
  I've decided to do a combination of Story Engineering and Million Dollar Outlines.  More specifically, I'm going to try and develop the prep work according to Story Engineering, and use Million Dollar Outlines to inform the process.
  
  This means a reader can look forward to rumination on concepts, characters, themes, and outlines, potentially all mixed together for the benefit of all... or at least the benefit of me.
  
• Does having your subconscious present as a separate entity worry you at all?
  
  Should it?  Hmm.... I may have to think this one over a bit more.

So there it is.  I'll try to label it all and hopefully not spam too much.

October Goals

As previously mentioned, I'm trying to keep these shorter and more defined so that I can better track done or not done at the end of the month.. and perhaps in between.

1. Write at least 250 words each day.
2. Finish the NaNoWriMo newsletters
3. Prep for NaNoWriMo this year.
4. More revision of my latest story
5. Post my latest story for critique.

The first goal is the same as I've been doing, and I'm happy to say I haven't broken my streak yet.  That's over 120 days for me so far.

The second and third goals tie together somewhat.  The newsletters need laid out, and that's just going to take time.  There's no way around that.  Also potentially taking time is figuring out my prep this year.  I want to experiment with other styles of planning to see what works, but I'm running a bit low on the time I have left to plan.

The fourth and fifth goal are also related in that I want to have a story polished and out for critique by the time we hit November and I'm completely distracted by a novel.  I'd like to do a couple revise/crit passes on the story, since it will undoubtedly be harder to pick up in a few months, but such is life.  

Reviewing September's Goals

Here's what I wrote then:
Write at least 250 words each day.
Finish and submit a short story.
Critique at least 6 stories.
Write NaNoWriMo newsletter articles.
Revise 1 short story for critique.
1: Done.  In fact, I think I made it through the month with at least 400 words each day, but that all still counts.

2: Done.  This was a close one, because I got some more insightful feedback on the story I had been working on, and almost didn't submit it.  However, I got a round of revisions in, and out it went.  I can only do so much, and now it's time to move on to the next one.

3: I didn't count to be sure, but I'm counting this as done.  I can recall off the top of my head at least three, and given the way things have been in my life lately, if I can even remember last week that's pretty good.

4: Done, mostly.  I have to revise them slightly, but they are indeed written.  I'll transition the next part into next month's goals.

5: Done. I have revised a story two times, once for more critique and once for submission after that critique.  I also revised another story to prep for critique, one that I've been enjoying lately.

So, overall, mission accomplished on my September goals.  I think keeping the shorter list helped, though I nearly didn't submit my newly revised piece after the gut-check of a really useful critique.  I'll try to keep October's goals similarly constrained.