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The following is me rambling to myself so don't worry if I seem to go off on some bizarre tangent mid-paragraph.
So I managed to scrape together some more mecha. I use the term "mecha" loosely because these aren't machines. Well, too be fair, they have cybernetic components but are predominantly organic. They have more in common with Evas then Gundams. Now as much as I'd love to create one with variable forms ala Valkyries that's stretching plausibility far beyond it's rational capacities. Not to mention the transformation sequence would be awfully squicky.
I already have enough squick-worthy material thank you very much. It's easy to assign even more to my mind minions if I try. No tentacle rape ducks in this novel! Let me tell you I'm not looking forward to writing the first scene where humans interact with my giant monstrosities. I'm turning over the possibilities in my head as I type this and I still can't think of a way to make it seem non-gross. Maybe I should just do a quick cut and not reveal that aspect until a bit later. Hmm, that might be a good idea.
Actually I think that's what I'll do. Then I can have Ryan, sobbing and shaking with the terror of witnessing said event, recount it to the authorities as they try to put the What The Fuck Just Happened? pieces together. Oooh, the suspense! I jest of course.
Now like I said at the beginning I made some more mechs. Ugh, still have to use that word "mech" don't I? Can't very well reveal their proper name until it's time for the official concept write-up in September. Their name is also the name of the novel. Anyway there are now 10 types of mechs with 16 individual units. Individual? That actually made me chuckle under my breath. I'll get to that another day. Now there are 16 units so far. Of those 16, 3 are unable to function properly at the beginning so we're down to 13 mechs. Each one of those needs it's own pilot. With the way plot ideas have been coming a significant portion will end up going through multiple pilots. So far I've only got 12 pilot names and short blurbs and three more that are just first names.
That's including the giant mess that I'll talk about later. So the cast is looking to be pretty big. To be fair, however, this is a multi-front conflict so there have to be enough characters to go around. I wrote a few paragraphs of basic world set-up last night and really need to hammer out who's in charge of what, how they view the mecha, what they plan to do, and how they intend to go about that. That's just for the human side. I haven't even touched on the aliens.
Should they be Card Carrying Villains? That seems a bit weak but I don't want to spend too much character development time on them when my main focus is going to be the human -> mech relationships. They are an alien species after all and they don't even bother trying to communicate with the humans unless they absolutely have to. They are a smart species, otherwise they wouldn't be capable of space travel, but the backstory requires a delay between them hitting their first target and then the others. By delay I mean almost 70 years. Here comes the big technical dilemma. Obviously they came from another galaxy and I've already set up that humans travel to a third galaxy via a wormhole gate so do I give the aliens the same technology and just try to handwave why it took so long for them to figure out how the human gate works? I could probably do it by throwing out that the gate was disassembled by the humans purposely so the aliens couldn't use it and they had to reconstruct the thing and hunt down the fleeing human ships still in the galaxy for jump coordinates. If I don't give the aliens wormhole technology I have to invent some other method of space travel.
/shrug I could just go the Star Trek route and give them warp capacity and a penchant for roaming from galaxy to galaxy.
Ultimately the aliens show up as a catalyst to get the ball rolling and provide a recurring source of fight scenes. Is that terrible? Probably. They're not a particularly friendly species. Heaven help a member of any other sentient species they get their claws on.
Sooo, to wander back over to human character development going insane seems like a favorite passtime for my characters thus far. Late last night I was thinking about and realized that a lot of the female characters go bonkers. Hmm, don't want to give a false appearance that I'm picking on the girls. (Honestly, I'm not! They just happened to get the random "go crazy" tickets.) It's still early in planning.
Anyway I've got to get back to work now so let's get back to watching a video marathon and brainstorming.
So I managed to scrape together some more mecha. I use the term "mecha" loosely because these aren't machines. Well, too be fair, they have cybernetic components but are predominantly organic. They have more in common with Evas then Gundams. Now as much as I'd love to create one with variable forms ala Valkyries that's stretching plausibility far beyond it's rational capacities. Not to mention the transformation sequence would be awfully squicky.
I already have enough squick-worthy material thank you very much. It's easy to assign even more to my mind minions if I try. No tentacle rape ducks in this novel! Let me tell you I'm not looking forward to writing the first scene where humans interact with my giant monstrosities. I'm turning over the possibilities in my head as I type this and I still can't think of a way to make it seem non-gross. Maybe I should just do a quick cut and not reveal that aspect until a bit later. Hmm, that might be a good idea.
Actually I think that's what I'll do. Then I can have Ryan, sobbing and shaking with the terror of witnessing said event, recount it to the authorities as they try to put the What The Fuck Just Happened? pieces together. Oooh, the suspense! I jest of course.
Now like I said at the beginning I made some more mechs. Ugh, still have to use that word "mech" don't I? Can't very well reveal their proper name until it's time for the official concept write-up in September. Their name is also the name of the novel. Anyway there are now 10 types of mechs with 16 individual units. Individual? That actually made me chuckle under my breath. I'll get to that another day. Now there are 16 units so far. Of those 16, 3 are unable to function properly at the beginning so we're down to 13 mechs. Each one of those needs it's own pilot. With the way plot ideas have been coming a significant portion will end up going through multiple pilots. So far I've only got 12 pilot names and short blurbs and three more that are just first names.
That's including the giant mess that I'll talk about later. So the cast is looking to be pretty big. To be fair, however, this is a multi-front conflict so there have to be enough characters to go around. I wrote a few paragraphs of basic world set-up last night and really need to hammer out who's in charge of what, how they view the mecha, what they plan to do, and how they intend to go about that. That's just for the human side. I haven't even touched on the aliens.
Should they be Card Carrying Villains? That seems a bit weak but I don't want to spend too much character development time on them when my main focus is going to be the human -> mech relationships. They are an alien species after all and they don't even bother trying to communicate with the humans unless they absolutely have to. They are a smart species, otherwise they wouldn't be capable of space travel, but the backstory requires a delay between them hitting their first target and then the others. By delay I mean almost 70 years. Here comes the big technical dilemma. Obviously they came from another galaxy and I've already set up that humans travel to a third galaxy via a wormhole gate so do I give the aliens the same technology and just try to handwave why it took so long for them to figure out how the human gate works? I could probably do it by throwing out that the gate was disassembled by the humans purposely so the aliens couldn't use it and they had to reconstruct the thing and hunt down the fleeing human ships still in the galaxy for jump coordinates. If I don't give the aliens wormhole technology I have to invent some other method of space travel.
/shrug I could just go the Star Trek route and give them warp capacity and a penchant for roaming from galaxy to galaxy.
Ultimately the aliens show up as a catalyst to get the ball rolling and provide a recurring source of fight scenes. Is that terrible? Probably. They're not a particularly friendly species. Heaven help a member of any other sentient species they get their claws on.
Sooo, to wander back over to human character development going insane seems like a favorite passtime for my characters thus far. Late last night I was thinking about and realized that a lot of the female characters go bonkers. Hmm, don't want to give a false appearance that I'm picking on the girls. (Honestly, I'm not! They just happened to get the random "go crazy" tickets.) It's still early in planning.
Anyway I've got to get back to work now so let's get back to watching a video marathon and brainstorming.
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