Note: this project started life as Lory Gato, Interstellar Gourmet. For the sake of completeness, the original project details are included below
Lory Gato - Taster Extraordinaire
Lory Gato is a commissioning agent for CEAD, Core-Earth Azimuth Developments. What that involves is a stressful life, hopping from star to star seeking out ever more piquant tastes. Why? because the teeming billions of Earth can't afford the fare to the exotic pleasure palaces of the galaxy. His mission? to boldly seek out places where no human tongue has tasted or nose has sniffed before. No matter how repulsive or quixotic those alien luxuries might be, he's got to test them and send some back home. Yep, not what your average Joe does, but it has to be done.
Genial, fun-loving star-traveller Lory comes to T'negi 36. Does he bite off more than he can chew when he meets lovely xeno-archaeologist, jiz Le'acia?
Lory Gato, Interstellar Gourmet
began life while I was waiting for a Science professional to conclude site testing. With an hour's spare time I ghosted out a star spanning civilisation run by a species known as the P'Nong. The P'Nong discover humanity pottering about in the Solar system and help them to the stars. The scenario plays out with humans getting into the the black books of the P'Nong.
Forty minutes and I have a 400 word outline. That was March 2014.
Come August 2014
I was ready to expand the piece. This was a well-known journey to me; a walk down memory lane to populate alien sights and sounds - my primary inspiration was the 'Andre Norton outsider', spiced up by a Raymond Chandler narration. December 2014 saw me take the story to 20,000 words. Feedback was good, the bad stuff was poised and the project as a whole felt right but I held off from completion; other things commanded my time.
July 2015 was when
I took the project to completion. The project morphed from its beginnings: Lory Gato, Interstellar Gourmet into The Tau Device. Events around the protagonist - Lory Gato - throw him further and further away from his comfort zone. The sticky part was deciding whether to show the action or just revert to plain old reported events. In the end I got the opportunity to throw in a couple of dream sequences with flashbacks to a very long time ago.
By November 2015
first draft stood at eighty-five thousand words. It was ready for editing and in due course I engaged Stephen Cashmore of SfEP (edit your own work at your peril).
Outcome
Afterthoughts: a simple a to b narrative gives a pretty good idea of how things will work out. This project was conceived as more than that - hence the storyline is tangential - something on which the intelligent reader can speculate. Hopefully he / she will find this more stimulating. Some factors only hinted at: galactic rotation (every 225 million years); dark matter - are threads for follow up works.
Afterthoughts 1 - Writing as a Process
Writing is by and large a solitary process. writing groups can be useful but unless you recognise their limitations, care is needed. Do they understand the genre, are they wedded to fixed plot formulae?
A story is a sculpture, the plots are contours. It isn't essential to describe everything in equal detail, the missing parts are implied. The process of creation is personal yet it is also possible make a meaningful comment about the process.
1) Discipline and planning.
If you do not do the work it will not be finished. Set a realistic target and stick to it. If you want to produce a 60k word draft in 3 months, do the maths. An average word count per day of 500 words will amount to around 45k words over 3 months. I have had the point put to me that writing isn't like that... well maybe a day, or even several days might see a dip in progress, but whether you're self-editing or pulled off the project, or have another excuse - in the long run, if you don't do the work, it will slow down.
2) Influences
Know what assists in the creative process. a random approach may work but unless you know how it will help, you risk being distracted,.
3) Content
It doesn't matter if your content plays off something already out there or is cheap and crappy (look around there's plenty of it) being organised is the key to completing projects. Be aware that if the wheel has been invented, there's no brownie points for reinventing it UNLESS YOU'RE PROVIDING SOMETHING UNIQUE - think hard before putting extra time into developing your totally original slant. Yes, you can call it art and yes, it feels good to do it well but you could be doing the next thing.
4) However…
I'm going to knock the previous point on its head. That little bit of the personal can make the difference if we're talking concept rather than final product. I deal in final product because I write. I've loads of concepts floating round in my head but there isn't the time to properly execute every one - I mentally assess which one feels right. Once I've decided, I make it as well as I can within the constraints of completing it to timescale. I produce between 600 and 1,000 words per day of passable draft quality.
Afterthoughts 2 - Themes to develop
The impulse to settle
There's a lot to go at and history provides all manner of models
Völkerwanderung (movement of people), the Great Slavic Migration, the Nomadic Pulse that led to Turkic expansion and the subsequent Mamluk empires¹, European empires and, still recent in memory, Manifest Destiny of the United States.
The challenge here was to explore how a weaker polity might make its way when it’s at the bottom of the pecking order and explicitly denied the opportunity to expend. What do you do when everything about you is long established and completely out punches you on the technology scales?
How things might work in space
A hybrid Dutch-English commercial-interest model that star spanning civilisations adhere to.
A lingua franca (incidentally this is called Pan) that becomes a trading standard – creating a de facto empire.
A ruleset for new species on the interstellar scene; a whole range of behaviours are prohibited - good behaviour status must be earned.
The novel is an exploration of difference in appearance, culture, outlook on life. An obvious route was beings with a non-standard chemistry - how would they develop if late to the stars?
Late to the stars
I thought about 'late to the stars'. It was a toss-up whether to go with a cosmogony in which star-spanning species had just got to the stars - ie in the last few million years - or work on a much older model. I opted for the latter as:
a) It seemed more realistic, and
b) There was a logical fit with some astronomical observations, all I needed to do was ease them in
This meant modifying my approach to stellar civilisations… it did, however, create two bonuses:
• A working mechanism to reset colonisable planets and systems
• A connection into archaeology (xeno-archaeology - alien races long gone) on borderline / uninhabitable planets.
Xeno-archaeology
Now all that was required was research into how such excavations would be handled. I work in an area of science that deals with matters such as airborne particulates, air pressure and other aspects of chemistry; as a result of this, plausible technobabble (terms for processes and devices) was to hand.
I wanted beings with body chemistries different enough to standard oxy-carbo-hydrate, that touching could trigger sparks, to spice up the planned cross species romance.
Given the prohibitive expense of star travel, the protagonist needed a logical reason to be out there – what better than an interstellar gourmet?
¹ Here I acknowledge the demand Hülagü (grandson of Genghis Khan and ruler of the Il-Khanate) made of the Mamuk empire. The Mamluk Empire was centred in Egypt, and in 1260, the Mongols, famous for arrogance and uncompromising ruthlessness, demanded they submit. Translations of that demand are on the net – the Mongol menace echoes down the centuries. (Ultimately this courtesy of assiduous historian Al Maqrizi, 1364–1442)
