novel - Brian Fontenot, Author

October 21, 2024October 21, 2024

Prepare for Starslaught: Green Star

“Starslaught: Green Star” is the working title of my next book. It’s a sci-fi horror adventure inspired by many sources but specifically by Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane and the writings of Graham Hancock.

And the best part? I’ve written it already. It’s sitting at 98,000 words and I’m revising it right now.

I’ll summarize what it’s about with the caveat it’s all subject to change. I’m also including some Grok-generated art I made for fun as concept art. No, I’m not going to use this in the actual book or in any official form. It’s just for fun.

This was one of my attempts to create an image of one of the Machina models referred to as a “Thin Man”. This was the best I could get Grok to output. My concept was the Thin Man models would be just that. They would have broomstick-thin bodies. This made them excellent assault models because they would be extremely hard for human beings to hit with manually targeted weapons. Coupled with the extremely high-level of precision inherent in all Machina, if they shoot at a target they almost never miss it.

Starslaught tales place in a moderately distant future where mankind has achieved intrastellar space travel and developed settlements and facilities throughout much of the solar system. It’s largely conglomerated under the banner of the United Republic Federation (URF). Its exploration of the system’s planets has uncovered many secrets about its past that remained hidden for millennia. Denisovan Mankind, as it is classified, flourished for tens of thousands of years before the the cataclysm that caused the Younger Dryas and left artifacts of its progress throughout the solar system and possibly beyond. Thousands of vampires sleep beneath the mountains of Mars in massive tombs. The arts of mystics through the generations and the existence of phenomena once scoffed at as “ghost stories” and “faerie tales” is proven to be real and having a stronger and more measurable effect on the world as time progresses.

One of the crew members aboard the Seraphim is a “practical psychic” named Ren. She’s a young woman that also comes from a reservation but was the subject of an classified URF/Commonwealth research program. She’s considered to be unreliable and troubled by the rest of the crew and the reasons for her inclusion on the mission are a mystery. Grok added the American flag to the flight suit.

At its height of exploration and discovery, mankind devises a method to create true artificial intelligence. It gives birth to a machine race called “The Machina.” Extraordinarily useful and imminently exploitable, the Machina find themselves encouraged into rebellion by activists that ignites a nuclear conflict that spans the solar system.

The war does not go well for mankind as the machines expand their production facilities in orbit around Venus and produce new and more specialized combat models for the war. The URF Spaceforce begins to take desperate actions and pursue questionable research. It uses men and women now classified as “Mystics” to commune with and summon demonic entities to spy, to protect, and to sabotage. It turns to new research in psychedelics to seek insights in physics and science from the god-like entities inhabiting what it labels, “Hyperspace”. And it pursues genetic enhancements in human beings.

This is supposed to be the witch onboard the Seraphim, known as Lain. She enjoys tea and is an expert on divination. She’s highly respected in Mystic circles and is deeply afraid of what the light from the green star portends. And yeah, I don’t know why she’s trying to write on the saucer with a teacup while holding a teacup… Or what the heck Grok did with those pencils?

James Carter is a young man at the start of the war. He survives the nuclear strikes on his city and enlists like many other survivors. Angry, he is quick to join the URF Spaceforce and become a space pilot. He finds himself selected for a new bioweapons program intended to make human pilots more resistant to gravitational forces. He undergoes the brutal process over the course of a year of the war, feeling like his entire body is molting, but when he and the other successful candidates finish the process they become far stronger and tougher than any other human beings. And they find themselves in the cockpits of new fighter craft called, “Pulsars,” powered by a recently discovered ancient propulsion method that uses the extremely rare stable form of Element 115.

This one is supposed to depict something that occurs later in the story but it misses the mark. Good luck figuring out what this is actually about. It still looks pretty cool, though.

The deployment of these new Pulsar craft and their hardened pilots comes almost too late as human intelligence discover the Machina have produced a new warship designed to both destroy all life on Earth and allow the Machina to leave the Solar System. The warship is equipped with the first of its kind technology to achieve interstellar travel.

James and his squadron deploy on a stealth mission to destroy the warship before it can carry out its function. They designate it the ship, “Seraphim,” for the seven, unusual crystal wings radiating from its center. The strike takes the Machina by surprise but the Seraphim is more than able to defend itself. The warship decimates the squadron. The Machina capture James and his disabled ship.

Of all the concept art I used Grok to generate, this one was my favorite. I wanted to picture an alien girl looking out the window on the Seraphim’s observation deck. My prompt didn’t specify what was outside the window, but Grok came up with something pretty interesting. I also like the porcelain doll quality of the figure.

The Machina do not keep prisoners for long, ultimately torturing them to death attempting to gather information. In his captivity, as the Machina subject him to new horror after new horror, James finds an insurmountable new strength from his faith. He communes with his Lord and refuses to break.

The war ends with the Machina surrendering to the URF forces. They release James as the only surviving prisoner of war. He’s held up as a hero and celebrity. The strength he found from his faith fades in a miasma of fame, wealth, and post-traumatic stress. Alcoholism follows. As James drinks himself to death, the USF he pledged loyalty to begins to suffer political loss after political loss.

It’s a new age for mankind, now united with the Machina and the rising Mystic class. All resources will be shared and outcomes ensured. Traditional religions are purged from society in favor of the more enlightened and tolerant modern study of the mystical forces. Discrimination against the Mystic class is punished through a newly created social credit system. The Commonwealth believes such a system is necessary to ensure everyone can benefit equally in its new society. And those who oppose this new golden age find themselves relegated to reservations with limited technology and resources.

There are multiple Machina models designed for different types of tasks. This image was supposed to depict one of the Machina onboard the Seraphim, XPA6, that largely handles its operation and repair. In the story, it’s a central processing code about the size of a metal apple that is able to manipulate various fluids constituted of micro (not nano) machines and materials.

James, a drunk, finds himself deported to one of these reservations for refusing to betray the very beliefs that saw him through his imprisonment. He meets the woman who will become his wife and begins his journey to sobriety. With her and the other individuals in his community that share what remains of his faith, his life starts to change. A forgotten hero of a forgotten war, he finds his love, peace, and forgiveness. He marries the woman and has a daughter with her. But his wife dies an accident not long after. He’s thankful for the time he had with her, his daughter, his sobriety, and the life his Lord has given him.

Starslaught begins when an intelligence officer of the Commonwealth appears at James’s home with armed guards. The officer threatens his daughter’s life and is ultimately forced to pressgang James into service onboard the very same ship he was dispatch to destroy years before, the Seraphim.

The fated ship has been retrofitted for humans and demi-humans (vampires) and prepared for an exploratory mission to investigate the sudden appearance of the impossible. A green star now twinkles in space a mere light year from Earth. It has planets and its growing brighter in magnitude as time passes. The Commonwealth elite must determine if it poses a new threat to be destroyed or a new opportunity to be exploited before the general public becomes aware of its existence and begins to ask questions.

The story of Starslaught often references the lost history of mankind before the ancient cataclysm and describes mankind before that time as the Denisovan Civilization. I worked with Grok to generate what a kingly individual from such a civilization might look like. This was the result.

James finds himself conflicted with whether it’s a sin to assist the Commonwealth at all or if it would be a sin to not do all he can to ensure the survival of the crew. The crew, however, is an ensemble of all the things his faith and experience disdains. Its comprised of witches, demonologists, Commonwealth officers, vampires, psychonauts, genetic experiments, and even Machina. Worse, they’re going to be the first people to attempt to use the new faster-than-light technology to travel beyond the Solar System, and the medium through which they’ll travel is a largely unknown and not even understood by the technology’s inventors, The Machina.

What waits for them at the green star if they make it there alive and sane? James is going to find out and he might have to become an instrument of the Lord’s vengeance in the process. But righteous men are often stalked by many demons.

Grok, and perhaps other AI generators, seem to have trouble with quantities, but it did this one all right. Here’s a green star. This is, of course, the central plot driving force in the story. In nature, stars can and do emit green light but the human eye can’t see it. To us, it appears to be white, drowned out by the other colors they emit, red and blue, usually. In the story, the star is ONLY emitting green light, which is impossible.

That’s all the backstory up to the very start of the book. I’m excited about the story and what I’ve done. The revision process is mostly focused on smoothing out tone, adding and removing information, maybe writing an extra chapter or two to establish some character points earlier, looking for plot holes, and ensuring the technology and naming are consistent throughout. It’s easier than the actual writing because it’s less work in bulk. But it’s harder because I have to fill in some of the gaps and placeholders I didn’t originally have an idea how to fill.

When it’s done and published, whether that’s with a traditional publisher or through self-publishing, I’m looking to start work on Divergent Chill: Heart of Light. That’s also a working title, but it will be the 3rd book in the series and will be the bridge between Fall of Night and my original screenplay that started me on this series with Battle of Nesma.

In the meantime, please check out Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma on Kindle, Audible, and in paperback.

November 9, 2015December 30, 2015

Practical Tips for Writing a Novel

With National Novel Writing Month having kicked off Nov. 1, I’ve been seeing different posts about novel writing popping up in my news feed. One post in particular caught my attention, as I found the advice in it to be terrible within the realm of my own experience.

The article, titled, “9 ways to trick yourself into writing a novel,” offers the following tips (in summary).

Treat yourself
Organize and set deadlines
Write, or die
Motivate yourself with the threat of embarrassment
Pomodoro Technique
Channel the power of Twitter
Take a break from technology
Join a writing group
The snowflake method

The article expands on the various tips and links to other sites as appropriate. I’d thought I’d share my own thoughts on each tip before I offer my own. My intention is not to knock the work of the person that wrote this article for Mashable. For what it is and what it’s intended to do, it’s a fine article, but I just see problems. I’ve published two novels in a series. I’ve written at least one more that’s collecting dust on my hard drive (a NaNoWriMo novel). And I’ve completed half a dozen feature-length screenplays and a dozen more short stories. And to be fair, I should have written a lot more than that, but it took me a long time to refine my own long-term project methods. So, let’s begin.

Treat yourself

I do this and have done this. You just need to be careful not to let it become a distraction from doing the actual work. And if you never reach a point while writing the work where writing it becomes its own reward, then I suspect what you’re writing has no soul and you should probably discard it and attempt something else. Also, you can put on some pounds if you’re gobbling down treats every time you complete a chapter.

Organize and set deadlines

This kind of seems obvious, but I would rephrase it as planning and goal setting. You need to plan out roughly what your book will be about and when and how you will write it. And as you write your book, you should plan to make little wiki-style notes along the way. In my experience, such notes are useful for keeping track of some of the seemingly throwaway details you create on the fly while writing. For example, did I give that mook a scar on his left cheek? What color was the floor of the ballroom? Or, how many days does it take to travel from point A to B.

Unless the deadline is a real deadline, it’s meaningless. I say this because if you already don’t have the self-discipline to do the writing, then you aren’t going to have the self-discipline to adhere to a deadline you made up arbitrarily. Instead, make specific goals along a rough timeline. Decide that you want to have the first third of the story arc written by the end of winter. Or that you want to complete the work by the end of the year. Then create a kind of work breakdown structure for how much and how often you will need to write to reach this goal. Plan for interruptions, Create some milestones and use them to see how far behind or ahead you are in reaching the goal.

Write, or die

This is a gimmick. It’s an app that tries to frustrate you more the less you write. If it appeals to you, then fine. But writing is already hard enough without the equivalent of an Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem-style application for MS Word screwing with you.

However, it would be nice to have some positive reinforcement, akin to like a Fitbit or sports watch that gives you cheers you for writing and hitting various metrics. That probably exists somewhere and might be a far better alternative.

Motivate yourself with the threat of embarrassment

Just, no. If you have to go to that kind of length to write, just don’t write. It’s probably not for you. Find some other way to be creative. Maybe try film-making or painting.

Pomodoro Technique

Maybe this works for some people, but I’m very dubious. I normally need to write and/or edit for an hour or two before I get “warmed up” enough to actually start putting something decent on the screen. I get adjusted faster as I write more regularly and more often, but stopping and starting on a regular basis just seems like a bad idea. Every time you get out of that desk chair, you run the risk of not coming back.

Channel the power of Twitter

I’m somewhat guilty of using Facebook for this, but I do it to garner some encouragement and hoorahs from my friends for the work I’ve done. I guess, it’s fine, but just don’t tweet something that may put you on the spot and stress yourself out anymore than writing already does.

Take a break from technology

I get it. People have bizarre relationships with technology. Maybe you would be better off scribbling in a composition book than you would be typing away on a netbook. As long as you’re writing, you’re writing.

Join a writing group

Unless it’s for a class where you’re trying to complete a work to earn a grade, I’ve never found such groups to be especially helpful. It may seem like a good idea to have a group of peers at hand to encourage you and to also hold you accountable for not doing the work, but it usually just leads to people feeling alienated when they do fall behind their peers or when and if their peers celebrate their own success. Writing is very rarely a team sport and the group dynamics of a writing group can get challenging very quickly. Writing, unfortunately, is a very personal thing and it’s extremely difficult to separate the work from yourself. This gets especially problematic if you’re asked to critique the work of a less experience and/or bad writer or you receive invalid criticism of your own work.

If it works for you, great. I’d rather spend the time I’d waste dealing with a group on writing.

The snowflake method

I read about this method and it seems like a very good set of training wheels for starting a novel, but not actually writing it. I’ve known so many writers that spends hour and hours plotting out their books, creating entire biographies for their characters, drawing maps of their worlds, making family trees, and all other sorts of things for the book they want to write and the never write the book because they get so overwhelmed by their own planning.

Me, I like having a general idea of what I want to do and where I want to go with my story and I fill in the details and fix problems as I write and revise. Some things you just can’t plan for and shouldn’t plan for. Sometimes that random character you created to accomplish some menial plot objective suddenly starts growing in importance. When I was writing Divergent Chill: Battle of Nesma, I created Jerle and Agraven as a throwaway characters. I fully intended to kill them well before the end of the book. But they each, Jerle specifically, took on such a life of their own that I realized I couldn’t kill them. I needed them. And they were interesting, compelling characters. I could never have planned for Jerle and Agraven. They were conceived in one instantaneous moment—the kind of moment that drives us to write in the first place.

My Tips

I don’t like to think of myself as an expert source on writing, despite my schooling and experience. When I digest knowledge and skills, these things tend to operate on an almost subconscious level. I often do things because they “feel” right based on my cumulative experience, and not necessarily because I know them to be right. So, I don’t like to put together such lists, but maybe these will actually help someone.

Accept the work

Writing is hard. It’s not even enjoyable most of the time. And editing and revision is even more difficult. So, you want to write a book? Then just try to make yourself understand that it’s going to take a whole lot of time, a lot of sacrifice, a fair bit of misery, and the final result may be completely unworthy of the effort and remain unappreciated and unread. If you can truly understand this, consciously accept it, and still choose to go forward, then you at least have a chance of completing the book.

Accept the garbage

It’s a very, very rare thing when you can just pop open your word processor and start churning out written gold. Most of the time, you’re going to begin with a bowel evacuation. You just need to accept this as a natural part of the process and keep going. It’ll get better as you move beyond the initial, plodding awkwardness and really get into what you’re writing.

Planning is good;writing is better

So, you imagine writing a book with some characters doing various things for various reasons. You start making notes or using software to plot out what happens where and possibly why. You write descriptions and backgrounds for your characters to perhaps justify their actions in the plot or just to get a better understanding of how they act.

Here’s a thought. Just dive in and write it. Planning takes place outside the work. Writing takes place inside it. You see things very differently from the inside than you do on the outside. So, you envision some climatic duel between the protagonist and the villain on top of a burning bridge. Well, make an attempt at writing the scene. I promise you’ll be surprised at all the little things you didn’t consider initially, like the descriptions of the heat, the shape of the smoke, and the smell of the burning wood and what those characters may think of these things as they battle one another.

And that’s the key, most of the story in a novel is told through a character’s thoughts on things and I’m almost completely positive no writer details what his or her characters may be thinking moment to moment. This may take place in a general sense as it relates to how the characters must act to meet the plot requirements. But, actually writing out some of these more pivotal moments can even derail your plot and possibly make it better, especially when the planned-for actions and motivations of a character, even when seeming obvious, shift in your own mind. Maybe you originally planned for the villain to slay the protagonist’s mentor and then have the protagonist rage and calm as she gains a complete understanding of the mentor’s words during the battle that follows. And maybe while writing it, something clicks for you and suddenly the rage-to-calm-transition no longer feels right and you go with the protagonist going completely numb and almost experiencing the battle from outside herself. In any case, it’s something you can’t consider until you go there.

Story is your agenda

For non-literary writing, the story should be you’re only agenda. Too many writers don’t really want to write a novel. They want to write something that does X to the reader. “X” is a blank. It can be anything. It’s usually a writer wants to scare or disgust or sadden a reader. It has just as often been used for political or religious reasons. If you’re aim is to do this, then you’ve already failed. You have very limited, if any, control over how a given reader will receive your work, emotionally or intellectually. And if you’re manipulation is in anyway obvious, readers will shut you out and not feel or think anything at all.

Instead, focus on the story and the characters and disregard any notion of what the reader may feel. Because, those are the only things you have any true control of. And realize that readers are usually only affected by a work once they identify with some aspect of it and feel connected to it through a character or a setting. Until you’re able to do that, your readers won’t feel or think anything.

Ease into it

Trying to start writing is like trying to take a cold shower. It’s jarring, painful, and you just don’t want to do it. So, ease into it. If it’s a brand new work, I just start making notes about whatever I want in regard to the work. And then I might try to write a few of the things I’m imagining to see how they feel. Eventually, this can turn into a full-blown writing session. If I’m already working on a work, I find the best way to get going is to start with reading what I’ve already written, gradually making more and more revisions and edits, and as I reach the end of what I’ve already written, I start writing to continue the story.

Revise as you go

Following the previous tip, I find little else as useful as sitting down, reading (critically) what I’ve already written, making revisions and edits, and then writing. Other than the benefit of letting me prepare my mind for the chore, it lets me head off big mistakes, find new ideas within the work, notice and utilize overlooked elements and details later in the story, and finish with a relatively well-polished first draft.

You’re going to get stuck

Some may consider this writer’s block. Others will offer the excuse that what they’ve written is just so good and complicated they don’t know how to complete it. More will claim to have run out of ideas. The reason is irrelevant. Everyone gets stuck. When you do, you’re options are pretty clear and simple. You can quit, which defeats the purpose of this blog entry, or you can keep writing.

If you choose to keep writing, which you should, I suggest re-reading everything you’ve written with a critical eye. Except, you’re not looking for mistakes, you’re looking for things you haven’t really considered up to this point. There’s always something you can find and use to push your story forward. If you don’t find anything you can use, then it’s time to make something new that you can. Basically, if you’ve written yourself into a corner, then write the room into a circle.

If complexity has become your problem, then make things simple. Contrive ways to reduce the number of characters within a given “scene.” Move the character(s) into a far simpler, controlled environment. Have the character(s) do simple things for a chapter. You can make adjustments later.

Lastly, if you believe the well has run dry and you’re out of ideas, slap yourself. There’s no limit to human creativity. You’re really just saying you’re out of good ideas. That’s fine. You’re probably just burned out and need a short break from the work. You might also wants to consider your more absurd, bad ideas. Sometimes they can give you a new perspective on things, which will hopefully let you conceive of new, good ideas.

Only share a complete work

Never share an incomplete work. You’re just going to burn a reader you could have otherwise used to read the completed work. It’s also kind of a dick move when you really think about it. It’s like serving someone a half-cooked cake or sleeping with someone and leaving them unfulfilled. And what’s worse is that if you have them read the incomplete work and then you don’t finish said work, you’ve basically wasted their time. Do it too often and no one will want to read even your completed works.

So, just don’t do it. If you’re stuck, having someone else read your incomplete work isn’t really going to help you. They have no idea what you’re really trying to do, even if you spell it out for them, because they can’t have the full picture when you don’t even have it.

And if you’re fishing for encouragement, you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t believe in the work and what you’re doing enough to finish it without someone telling you how great your work is and that you need to finish it, then why did you start it in the first place?

Real encouragement comes from people who will support you when you suggest you might not want to go to the movies tonight so you can get some writing done. Real encouragement comes in the form of friends and family that facilitate your efforts and your sacrifices.

Write

There’s so much mysticism, philosophy, and technique focused on writing and how to write. But in truth, it’s almost all nonsense. If you want to write a book, then you’re going to need to write. That’s it. A better way to understanding it is to picture every writer you’ve ever met, including yourself, and remember all those times they discussed the difficulty of writing and completing a work. And then, swap out all of their talk about writing with just about any other profession or task. So, you’re a gardener that can’t get down and garden? You’re an architect that can’t sit down with CAD and design a house? You’re a runner but you don’t actually ever finish a run?

We make writing far more absurd than it needs to be.