National Novel Writing Month '26: Project Concept.

This year's idea is a sci-fi novel set several centuries in the future, about 300 years after World War III and a century after the other novel I'm working on.

It's science fiction with a bit of mystery and some political-thriller vibes.

Basically, an alien ambassador dies, a second is forced into stasis, and the human ambassador is suspected of involvement.

The political environment is the Asian Hegemony.

After World War III, the surviving Asian governments and populations develop a political superstructure for coordinating resources and mutual defense, wrapped around a system intended to promote and protect the survival of their individual cultures.

That eventually leads to efforts to explore and establish human colonies in deep space, which are successful. Then a century-long galactic anomaly cuts those colonies off from Earth.

The Asian Hegemony survives and thrives—mostly—but also spawns a couple of other human super-civilizations and several parallel civilizations of its own.

The original foothold of the Hegemony colonists was a planet called Borealis Nova, which remains a major diplomatic center as well as an important source of ship maintenance and construction in the region.

The aliens have their own physiology, so they're not exactly "humans with random bits glued to their foreheads," and some of those biological differences will be part of the plot.

One of the protagonists is also a human-feline hybrid, developed over the centuries for various reasons. This particular one comes from a Japanese-derived culture and works as a protocol aide to the human ambassador.

She ends up working with a detective inspector on his last investigation as they try to figure out what actually happened. The legal system is a bit more like Japan than the West, though, so the working presumption is generally that the authorities probably know what they're doing.

Overall, my goal is to actually finish the thing in November—and keep it from getting completely out of hand in terms of length.

National Novel Writing Month '26: Day One

 I've completed a NaNoWriMo twice.  

Today, I started a new one with a story in the same universe as the novel(s) I've been working on, but a whole new region, no overlapping characters, no "Forevermen", and the only "copy" being a sister ship to one in the other novel.

I was planning on taking it easy, but I ended up signing up to the new nano2.org sight.

Well, unlike the old site, this one doesn't recount when you paste an updated draft in it; it adds the "new" to the old.

So, I tried updating it with the first part I wrote--about 1700 words--and then thought I could just paste the updated version with about 2000 words and it would update the 1700 to 2000.

Nope, it added the two for 3756 total.

Couldn't get it to reset or delete.

Didn't want to feel like a fraud.

So, I sat down and wrote more.

I'm now at 3953 words.

 I have a prologue and most of a first chapter.  I have most of the ending minus an epilogue I know I want.  I have a couple of other scenes I know I want in the story, and now I get to play connect the dots.

Sick and writing...

 Respiratory symptoms for days and just messing around with games mostly.

The one real scene I did write is one for the 3rd intended book of the series when I'm almost done with the rough draft of book one...

Still, it's a conversation I think the characters in question would have and it's funny because I kinda' got emotional about it.

Two very long-lived individuals talk personal history around a fire on a terraformed planet while trying to figure out how to leave.

I'll share this little bit:

Scotty shook his head. “You’re not the hero type, Doc.”

“I feel driven to save lives,” she said.

“Nope,” Scotty said. “You’re driven not to lose lives.”

Doc fixed on him with an icy glare.

“I’ve seen you with a gun in your hand too often to be a ‘saving lives’ kind of hero, Doc.  You can make moral and ethical judgments like that on the fly, drunk of your ass, and you have zero-point-zero reservations about killing someone if there a risk to your patients.” Scotty met her glare with smiling eyes. “You may not like it, but you can kill as well as save,” he said in soft tones.

“I–I–” Doc stuttered, looking away.

“You can’t stand losing people, Doc. You make it personal and you have the skills and toolkit to succeed in some of the worst situations imaginable.”

Doc sniffled, tears coming down her cheeks.

“That made it easy to pick sides in this mess and to say yes when you asked for help.”

National Novel Writing Month

 Considering it.

Did it at least once.

My mistake?

I did it on a free wiki site... that became un-free.

It was a bit of an apocalyptic tale.

The plot, I mean.

I liked writing on a wiki because I hot linked all my character and location information and used the "Talk" page for my notes on chapters and the like.

However, I lost access to the story because I didn't log in during the time I could have downloaded it free.

For this year, I was considering a side-work to the novel(s) I'm working on, using the same world, but different characters and such.

The working concept is a smartcat--a hybrid human/cat with human intelligence and bipedality plus size--working in a diplomatic role tries to find out why her boss--the chief diplomat--is being held.  She finds a recently retired investigator to help and they find a multi-layer conspiracy.

So goes the concept.

Writing: Closing in on finishing my rough draft.

 

About 12 spots I’ve identified as places needing work (I highlight them yellow) and only 20 “TK’s”* left.

 

Then will be the epic slog at revision now that I’ll know what’s going where.

 

I have something like 2 years or more of archived drafts.  There’s stuff I thought would be there that isn’t.  Stuff I added along the way. A lot of changes.

 

I know I probably have a lot of excess “A did B then C” chains I can write differently.  There’s a lot of atmospherics, especially smells and tastes I need to add.

However, knowing what happens where and who does it is key for me.

I also have been rather austere with many of the descriptions of people and places.

So, that will be an effort to bring out in revision as well.

Writing: Sci-Fi Technology

 Almost at 200,000 words.  Currently—according to MS Word’s Wordcount—at 199,838 words.

 

Finally sat down and worked most of the way through a fight scene with (mostly) swords.

 

So, no lightsabers, so why swords?

 

Guns are common.  Different types of guns are common in this sci-fi world.

 

However, they are extensions of modern technology and modern tech already has a problem with overpenetration in civilian structures.

 

Just imagine how you’d need to build to stop future tech in a city or on a spacecraft….

 

So, I’ve gone three directions.

 

One is weapons following the inverse-square law of power.  So, powerful point blank, rapid decrease in power over a short distance.  Directional stunners, for example, or—to a lesser degree—what I call “boarding guns” which are high mass, low velocity weapons usually used to fire things like shot, flechettes, and low velocity payload items. 

 

A second is your low energy beam weapons with “triggered” effects.  Some overlap with the first group.

 

The last set are melee weapons because you know exactly how far your effective range is.

 

Now, shields do exist—a technology tied to gravity and inertially linked plating in this fictional universe because I’m entitled to speculate some “ubertechs”—but their primary effect is against light, fast projectiles including light and particle beams…

 

So, no Dune-shields and while a heavy slow blade can penetrate, it’s probably going to not be the same ever again and not have much of a precise edge on the other side.

 

So, people have and carry compact, extendable blades called “flickblades” and not everyone is Zorro or Inigo Montoya or Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.

 

Now, hopefully I can write something believable although—to be honest—my only “fencing” training was bayonet training a couple decades ago so sword fights will be brutal, hurt on both sides, and people that get solidly hit will probably leave bleeding—at least—if they leave at all.

Necro-Blogging

Oh, wait, I have a blog?

Oh, yeah.  THAT blog.

I seem to be writing a science fiction novel.

I like writing dialogue.  I'm loving worldbuilding.  I keep developing odd aliens and--to be honest--most aliens are not exactly compatible with humans.

Why should they be?

I mean, imagine sharing a dorm room with a dolphin.

In spite of being from the same planet and being an air-breathing mammal, imagine the difficulties in day-to-day life sharing a living space.

One of you is going to be miserable.  

Not just that, dolphins can function 24-7 by letting one hemisphere of their brain sleep at a time. They also have, let's call it, "an alternative morality," different senses in some situations, a tendency to excrete wherever they happen to be at the time, and some challenges operating human technology.

And that's a species from the same planet.

So, aliens will exist, there will be a few interactions, but the ideas of "humans with odd body colors and bits glued to their foreheads" and "snake women with breasts" are not my thing.

I like stories that make sense to me.

So, the rough draft is probably way too much detail, too much backstory involved, intricate plotlines considered--as much as possible--from both sides.

The challenge will be paring it down in the edit to have it make sense, stay detailed enough, but not drag on.

In the meantime, I keep doing side notes on worldbuilding including histories of planets, systems, people, and tech that might show up in a sequel/prequel if the first one works out.

As far as AI goes...

I hate AI text.

I'm using the hell out of AI images that I won't publish for two reasons.

One, I like having a touchpoint for physical descriptions I can work off.

By generating an image, I can go back and redescribe that element without having to use the same words, and there's an honest narrative there.

Second, I like to take descriptions I make, plug it into several AI image generators and see what "garbage in-garbage out" AI generation comes up with.

When it comes up with something that looks like what I'm after, I know I'm in the ballpark.

If it isn't, I know there's a difference between the image I have in my head and what I'm communicating on the page.  It tells me to revise what I have on the page.

Now, I'll also use AI for stuff like "Give me a list of 20 Latin/French descriptor words for planets that don't appear in other major works," and "Explain how commas work in quotes again?" because I had always thought of quotation marks like I did parentheses and brackets in math...

What's inside is its own thing; what's outside is its own thing.

Which, of course, is not correct.

Overall, though, I don't use AI writing or text and--if it's AI art--I'll either not share it or tell you exactly what it is.

Wish me luck!