Snippet Monday: Dream Stealing Planet

 

New year, new start. Having been repeatedly AWOL here I'm hoping that some new medication is going to help with the terrible brain fog that I've had for...well...years. Not just burn out, not just exhaustion, but a lack of hormones. I am officially a woman of a certain age. 😆 Anyway, a new year is a good time to kick off with some new prompts on the blog, starting with some snippets. So here's mine for my week to post - from one of my pandemic releases and seven years in the making. A sci-fi mystery with a hint of a love story therein, though the opening might not sound like it...

Mission day one. 

Two days from Caprelli and fourteen days before solstice.

Mel stared at the innocuous, dirty-white globe on the wide screen, her eyes burning. The planet was just a big ball of ice and rock, spinning in space. Not much to look at. Not much more to be seen down on the surface, especially with the tempestuous weather that rarely abated. And yet from the instant she’d learned about the mission to Vintro, it had obsessed her every waking moment until nothing else had existed.

And now it sat there, taunting her. The planet that had stolen all her dreams.

Vintro. The planet that had stolen all her dreams.

Melandria Solei has always dreamed of commanding a starship and exploring the universe. When her own dark-eyed older lover steals the position she's worked for, she never expects to go chasing after him in a stolen ship to a world colder than revenge...

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My Own Worst Enemy: Pantsing a Mystery #scifi

My writing style has always been chaotic. I don't write linearly, I don't plan, I don't even have a central theme in mind. I just write. Usually it's a handful of random scenes that may not even be the start and/or finish. These give me the bare bones of the story, which I then flesh out, which may involve swapping scenes around.

Bearing this in mind, a mystery running on a countdown to a fixed event may not be the best thing to attempt. However, my muse is as chaotic and capricious as my writing style. Back when I was trying to write some holiday themed stories while battling my own resistance to the concept of Christmas in Spaaaaaaace!, I switched to the idea of using astronomical events since so many were the basis for our pagan holidays that were later adopted by religion. Solstice on Vintro was meant to be a scifi romance...but it didn't work out that way. While it does have a love story at its heart, it's not what I would classify as a true romance. Instead, it became a mystery. Which was fine, except my writing method doesn't work particularly well when trying to build clues and deaths to a set finale. I'm not sure I could have made it much harder on myself!

So perhaps it's not surprising that completing the story has taken a mind-boggling seven years for a 30K novella. Yes, you read that right. SEVEN. YEARS. I have an email discussion with the cover artist dated 7th December 2013. That's what happens if you don't plan and don't write linearly and decide to write a damn mystery!

But if the pandemic had a bright side, finally completing this marathon of a story was part of it. After copious rereads with lists of what happens where and to who or what, it finally runs in a smooth chronological order.

But I'm never doing this again!

Vintro. The planet that had stolen all her dreams.

Melandria Solei has always dreamed of commanding a starship and exploring the universe. When her own dark-eyed older lover steals the position she's worked for, she never expects to go chasing after him in a stolen ship to a world colder than revenge...

Writing Update

The next side story in the Redemption series is due to release on the 20th of March this year, and the main book three is scheduled for edits in June. Eep! I still have a lot of unfinished pieces lying around that I'd like to get done, but although I'm currently off work again due to the pandemic, I am supposed to be working from home. So that's going to take priority...

Chook Update

While us humans are in lockdown, so are my girls due to avian influenza. So even though I'm home, the girls are confined to barracks. However, I am due to be having three new girls delivered in March/April - more bantams but this time a special breed that will lay eggs through the winter (unlike my current madams other than Pixie with her beautiful pale blue eggs), so I'm looking forward to that. Frankly, there's not much else to get excited about right now. Sigh.

Stay safe!

2021 - Looking Ahead #scifirom #amwriting

 

A Happy New Year to you! Not that it, apparently, has gotten off to that good a start. I must admit that on the 1st of January, I didn't foresee much to celebrate. After all, we'd just gone into yet another lockdown here in the UK and amidst a mass of uncertainty over a return to school (and so to work for me), which turned into last minute closure. Welcome to 2021 on Plague Island! 

And it's not just lockdown for us humans. We're also in the midst of an avian flu epidemic which has seen my poor girls lockdown and me scurrying to bring in bio-security for them too, with a wild bird proof run, no free-ranging, and a disinfectant footbath at their door. All in all, not the most fortuitous start to the new year. But 2020 did have some compensations...

Writing Update

2020 was many bad things for lots of people. But if it had a silver lining for me, it was managing to finish off and edit two novellas, one that released on the 21st December (Solstice on Vintro), the other due for release on the 20th March this year (Lost Serenity), thanks to the discovery that my muse is very much powered by a high level of boredom - the result of six months off work due to the pandemic. I also sent a short story to my editor, but that turned out rather problematic and is still sitting in my to be done pile, so no release date on that. I also committed to edits on book three of my main series in June...

Chook Update

Sadly, 2020 was not kind to my feathered friends. I rehomed two of my squawkier girls due to husband's anxiety. He felt much better but for quite some time it took the heart out of me and my interest in chooks. Then we lost our old matriarch Scoop - the last of our original three and forever the boss - to what I can only assume was old age. She was a majestic eight and a half years old. 

Then just before Christmas, I lost one of my three little madams - Nova. This was my first time losing a girl I had hatched myself, and at just a year and a half old and in good health (as far as I could tell). I was heartbroken. Especially as avian flu had just been called as a major incident and I'd just taken all my bio-security measures (for the first time in my nine years as a chicken keeper). Of course, I was worried she would be the first of them all, though I checked her over very carefully for any signs of the disease, and she'd shown no signs at all of being poorly. But three weeks on and the rest of my girls seem happy and healthy - after a struggle to get weight back on them after their moult, they are now quite rounded (but not fat!) and mystery girl Pixie is even laying her lovely pale blue eggs again. All seems well with my feathered fiends...

Despite government restrictions, Christmas didn't change for us - just the immediate family at home. And of course, there were geeky presents.

As for the rest of 2021, well...who knows?!