Post #136 August 27 2018

“Writing an Action-Adventure Series: Part II”

When I originally conceived Johnny Winger in Tales of the Quantum Corps and Nanotroopers, I very much had Tom Swift Jr. in mind.  By that I mean I wanted to do an action-adventure series with a strong emphasis on scientifically oriented action, with lots of gadgets and gizmos and with a military dimension as well.  Accessibility, consistency and escalation (easily remembered as ACE) are the main ingredients in your secret sauce, so make sure you have a generous portion of each when writing your action-adventure series.

Accessibility.  The first book in your series sets out your characters, their motivations and personalities, and makes the reader care what happens next. But what if your reader misses the first book and begins with the second? Are your characters still compelling if your reader only meets them in book two? And how much time should you spend fleshing out characters many readers will already know?

You don’t have to obsess over recapping what’s gone before. Only a few past events are going to be vital to what comes next, so try and identify what a new reader really needs to know. What went before might have been integral to the story in the first book, but resist the urge to frogmarch your new reader through everything they’ve missed.

If a reader is swept along by your story, they won’t care if there are some references they don’t understand. Take Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as an example: the students of a magical school are being picked off by a giant monster; no-one’s stopping to wonder what Harry’s life was like before he became a wizard. While your writing should make readers want to go back and find out how something happened, if you’ve made the consequences clear, they shouldn’t need to go back.

For things the new reader needs to know, consider introducing a new character who wasn’t around for the previous book’s events. Returning readers will be intrigued by a fresh face and new readers can catch up alongside the character. Terry Pratchett utilizes this device in his incredibly accessible Discworld series, establishing Sam Vimes’ bad temper with lines such as:

You know how you feel when you wake up if you’ve been [drinking] all night, Nobby? Well, he feels like that all the time. (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)

Readers are a clever, experienced bunch and they’ll infer a lot of backstory on their own as long as your series has consistency.

Consistency

Every world and character you create has its own set of internal rules, the consistent application of which allows readers to accept them as ‘real’. Readers are willing to trust the worlds you create and the characters you introduce as long as the facts and rules are consistently applied across each book in the series. Readers will accept flying, purple, singing horses before they buy a pathologically honest character lying for no other reason than to serve the plot.

Consistency applies to character behavior, story events and even themes. In Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series, the protagonist is a sociopathic serial killer who harnesses his urges to knock off other killers. The reader understands Dexter’s world to be just like our own but in the third book of the series, Dexter in the Dark, it’s revealed that Dexter’s urges are the influence of an ancient demon named Moloch. The inclusion of a mystical theme is jarring not because it’s unusual but because it’s incompatible with the world Lindsay created in the first two books.

Consistency becomes more difficult across multiple books, as the story takes the author to places they didn’t anticipate when they initially designed their world and characters. Many authors write themselves into situations which can only be resolved by contradicting already established facts, so make sure you recognize the rules that define your story and don’t lose sight of them as you continue with each book.

In Stephen King’s Misery, the terrifying Annie Wilkes rages about a chapter play which altered established events to resolve an impossible cliffhanger:

This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! (Stephen King, Misery)

Your own readers won’t be much more forgiving. Knowing why your rules apply will help consistency; if you know what your cynical character went through to make them so jaded you’re less likely to throw in a jarring moment of optimism.

Consistency most often goes out of the window when an author hasn’t planned their series’ escalation.

Escalation

Your story needs to evolve and develop from book to book. This might be in terms of how much your reader knows or cares about a character or in the importance of events that happen in the narrative. Just as you wouldn’t reveal everything about a character in the first chapter of a book, you can’t have your characters face their greatest obstacles in the first book of a series.

The Harry Potter series has a very direct escalation of obstacles:

• Troll and depowered evil wizard
• Huge, venomous monster with death glare
• Werewolf and army of soul stealing ghouls
• Dragons, mer-people and reborn supreme evil wizard
• Supreme evil wizard, army of evil wizards and army of soul stealing ghouls (again)
  If you’re telling a romantic story, then a character can meet their love interest, break-up, get married, have children, as long as events build. Planning your escalation is essential to a good series; if you just keep upping the stakes without thinking ahead, eventually you’ll have to subvert the series’ consistency to either present or overcome an unrealistically big obstacle. Harry Potter’s main villain is unable to touch the protagonist until the end of the fourth book. Building in advantages or allies that can be stripped away as the series progresses gives you lots of opportunities to escalate.
  As always, there are exceptions
  As is the case with all writing advice, there is always the addendum ‘…unless it works’. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire successfully trades accessibility for intricacy. The complex plot makes it impossible for Martin to continually reiterate the vast array of character relationships and motivations without slowing the story to a crawl.
  Of course, you don’t need to obey the ACE principles slavishly, but keeping them in mind when plotting your series will help avoid common problems and give you as many choices as possible as your series progresses.
  And that’s some good advice on writing an action-adventure series.
  The Word Shed will take a two-week hiatus to celebrate our nation’s Labor Day holiday (one last trip to the beach!) The next post to The Word Shed will come on September 10, 2018.
  See you then.
  Phil B.
   

Post #135 August 20 2018

‘Where the Hell Are We?  How Details of Setting and Sense of Place Can Help (or Hurt) a Story

Remember when Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, mutters to Toto: “Toto, somehow I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?”  Dorothy was actually identifying one of the most important attributes of a good story…a strong sense of place.

Writer’s Digest lists 12 elements of setting for writers to consider.  To wit:

1. Locale. This relates to broad categories such as a country, state, region, city, and town, as well as to more specific locales, such as a neighborhood, street, house or school. Other locales can include shorelines, islands, farms, rural areas, etc.
2. Time of year. The time of year is richly evocative and influential in fiction. Time of year includes the seasons, but also encompasses holidays, such as Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Halloween. Significant dates can also be used, such as the anniversary of a death of a character or real person, or the anniversary of a battle, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor.
3. Time of day. Scenes need to play out during various times or periods during a day or night, such as dawn or dusk. Readers have clear associations with different periods of the day, making an easy way to create a visual orientation in a scene.
4. Elapsed time. The minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months a story encompasses must be somehow accounted for or the reader will feel confused and the story will suffer from a lack of authenticity. While scenes unfold moment by moment, there is also time to account for between scenes, when a flashback is inserted, and when a character travels a long distance.
5. Mood and atmosphere. Characters and events are influenced by weather, temperature, lighting, and other tangible factors, which in turn influence the emotional timbre, mood, and atmosphere of a scene.
6. Climate. Climate is linked to the geography and topography of a place, and, as in our real world, can influence events and people. Ocean currents, prevailing winds and air masses, latitude, altitude, mountains, land masses, and large bodies of water all influence climate. It’s especially important when you write about a real setting to understand climatic influences. Harsh climates can make for grim lives, while tropical climates can create more carefree lifestyles.
7. Geography. This refers to specific aspects of water, landforms, ecosystems, and topography in your setting. Geography also includes climate, soil, plants, trees, rocks and minerals, and soils. Geography can create obvious influences in a story like a mountain a character must climb, a swift-running river he must cross, or a boreal forest he must traverse to reach safety. No matter where a story is set, whether it’s a mountain village in the Swiss Alps or an opulent resort on the Florida coast, the natural world with all its geographic variations and influences must permeate the story.
8. Man-made geography. There are few corners of the planet that have not been influenced by the hand of humankind. It is in our man-made influences that our creativity and the destructiveness of civilization can be seen. Readers want visual evidence in a story world, and man-made geography is easily included to provide it. With this in mind, make certain that your stories contain proof of the many footprints that people have left in its setting. Use the influences of humankind on geography to lend authenticity to stories set in a real or famous locale. These landmarks include dams, bridges, ports, towns and cities, monuments, burial grounds, cemeteries, and famous buildings. Consider too the influences of mankind using the land, and the effects of mines, deforestation, agriculture, irrigation, vineyards, cattle grazing, and coffee plantations.
9. Eras of historical importance. Important events, wars, or historical periods linked to the plot and theme might include the Civil war, World War II, medieval times, the Bubonic Plague, the gold rush in the 1800s, or the era of slavery in the South.
10. Social/political/cultural environment. Cultural, political, and social influences can range widely and affect characters in many ways. The social era of a story often influences characters’ values, social and family roles, and sensibilities.
11. Population. Some places are densely populated, such as Hong Kong, while others are lonely places with only a few hardy souls. Your stories need a specific, yet varied population that accurately reflects the place.
12. Ancestral influences. In many regions of the United States, the ancestral influences of European countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland are prominent. The cities and bayous of Louisiana are populated with distinctive groups influenced by their Native American, French-Canadian, and African American forebears. Ancestral influences can be depicted in cuisine, dialogue, values, attitudes, and general outlook.

Anybody writing science fiction or fantasy has to spend some time thinking about details of setting, since much sf is set in times and places (and planets) other than this one.  For example, my upcoming Time Jumpers series is set largely in a universe where time travel is commonplace, a thousand years in the future.  I’ve had to invent a whole new galactic-scale human civilization with lots of strange worlds, people, customs and technology.  I even decided to change the word ‘human’ to ‘Uman’, to encapsulate all the changes to humanity over the last thousand years.

I also decided in Time Jumpers that there wouldn’t be any aliens in the usual sf sense…just lots of different types of Umans. 

To provide a stable setting for this series, I wrote a short background on what I call the Uman Alliance (UA)…

The Uman Alliance (UA)

1. UA is an outgrowth of the old United Nations of Earth.
2. Story arc for Time Jumpers takes place in late 2700s and early 2800s.  (28^th and 29^th centuries). 
3. The term ‘Uman’ is an outgrowth of the word Human and encompasses both natural human beings and post or transhumans, like cyborgs and androids and other AI entities. The UA hosts no real ‘alien’ races, as none have been discovered as of 2814 AD. All UA member states are human settlements, in one form or another.
4. By this time, human beings and human-machine entities (cyborgs and androids) have created several dozen settlements among the nearer stars. 
5. A few of these settlements are Keaton’s World (star-sun Sturdivant 2180); Gibbons’ Grotto (same sun); Telitor (star-sun Delta Recursa); Poona-Peeona (star-sun Lalande 21185); Hapsh’m (star-sun Epsilon Eridani); Byrd’s Draconis (star-sun Ross 154); and Landfall 4 (star-sun Gliese 876).  There are sixteen human settlements in near-sun space, within about 25 lightyears of the home system. 
6. In the year 2775, fourteen of these settlements formed the Uman Alliance, after a constitutional convention on Keaton’s World.  The founding date was Midtober 5, 2775 (T-001).  The Articles of Alliance are the founding documents.  They read like an updated UN Charter.  Two settlements (Gavrilon and Nanjiang, both of star-sun 40 Omicron 2) both elected to remain outside UA but cooperate closely with the Alliance.
7. UA is organizationally a close analog of the UN.  There is a General Assembly, a Secretariat and a Secretary-General, a Security Council, an Economic Council, a Court of Justice, UA Health Organization and various associated agencies and units. 
8. The Security Council has a War Department known more formally as UNIFORCE (also UmanForce or UA Force).  Time Guard is part of the UA FORCE organization. 

 

Using setting properly (in such a way that the nuts and bolts don’t show) can enhance any story, from atmospherics to provoking the proverbial sense of wonder, something that science fiction writers do all the time.  The key is to keep the setting descriptions embedded in the context of the story and not to dump an encyclopedia of facts and maps on the reader. 

Some writers spend so much time on their setting and world-building that they feel it essential to drop all this into the story.  Sometimes, the setting is the story, like Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama.  But most of the time, a good, believable setting is just one part of the greater story, like plot and character and it should be woven together into a seamless whole. 

Spend time on your setting details but don’t do it at the expense of telling a good story. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 27 2018. 

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #134 August 13 2018

“Series Characters”

One of the most enjoyable aspects of popular fiction is surely reading about the exploits of continuing characters.  So many of our most beloved fictional characters are series characters: Sherlock Holmes (relentless investigator), Tom Swift Jr (boy genius), James Bond (suave secret agent). As a writer, however, there are some best practices that should be followed in developing what you hope will be a continuing character or characters. 

1. Background and biographies.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  Write up a fairly detailed background bio on your proposed character.   Give him or her or it a history.  When I do this, I start from the day they’re born.  I describe what their childhood years were like, who their friends were, what they loved to do.  I particularly like to create some kind of formative experiences in their history that helped make them what you read about in the story later.  If you do this diligently and with enough detail (for me maybe 5-10 pages is enough), you’ll find it suggests plot points, story complications, relationships and other possibilities you can use in your series of stories. 
    
   Here’s some of what I wrote in my bio about Time Jumpers Captain Monthan Dringoth:

Dringoth imagines himself a military expert and seeks out experiences that have some hope of bringing recognition, glory and fame.  He comes from a family where the parents, Pyotr Dringoth and Natalya Dringoth, were famous in their fields of expertise.  Pyotr was a great explorer of backwater worlds and satellites in the outer system of Sturdivant 2180, which has some twenty planets and thousands of moons and satellites.  The only more famous person on Keaton’s World was General Oscar Keaton himself, who led the colony-founding expedition (“First Fall”) to Sturdivant’s fifth planet several hundred terr before Monthan Dringoth was born.  Pyotr Dringoth was best known as the discoverer of the great underground ice labyrinth called the Hollows, part of the icy satellite called Gibbons Grotto in the outer system of Sturdivant.  This dwarf planet is hollow inside with thousands of kilometers of caves, caverns, grottoes, mazes and warrens.  

Monthan’s mother, Natalya Dringoth, is a biochemist and neuro-engineer, perhaps best known as the discoverer/creator of scope, a mildly addictive compound that has become essential for preparing Umans (and other sentient beings) for mind uploading, a process known as The Switch. 

With two famous parents and some overachiever siblings, Monthan had to get out and left home for Frontier Guard at an early age, signing onto a freighter crew making the rounds of Sturdivant’s worlds.  Initially, a robotics’ mate, he worked his way up over a number of years into positions of command.  Ten terr after joining the Guard, he went through officer candidate school (OCS) (on Telitor, a nearby world of the star-sun Delta Recursa III). About five years after that, he was given command of small corvette called Lalande, which he skippered for another five terr, until a navigation error under his command caused the corvette to crash into a small asteroid in the Boru system.  Extensive damage to the ship led to an investigation and Dringoth was found to be negligent and at fault.  He was cashiered from Frontier Guard.

1. Give them a big problem. If your main character suffers from a fear of enclosed spaces, develop your plots to where they sometimes wind up in enclosed spaces…then let the character respond as your bio indicates they would.  In my upcoming serial Time Jumpers, one of the main characters is Monthan Dringoth, a jumpship captain (mentioned above).  Dringoth came from a family of famous parents and part of what motivates him is doing things and going places to get out from under the burden of their celebrity.  I have tried to develop story complications that put him in situations where he responds in a way calculated to be as different from his parents’ experience and what people expect as possible. 
2. Make notes on what happens.  This is an issue with serial stories.  When I mention James Bond, what comes to mind: vodka martinis shaken not stirred, hanging out with beautiful women, casual violence.  The author Ian Fleming undoubtedly had to keep some kind of notes on the little details, quirks and idiosyncracies of Bond, just to keep it all straight through a series of stories.  Consistency equals believability in series stories.  You can’t have your main character climbing buildings like Spiderman in one episode and being afraid of heights in another, at least not without good reason.  Take notes or develop in your bios how your main character dresses, eats, relates to others, and goes about solving problems, even how they part their hair could be important. 
3. Let yourself be surprised. Sometimes characters surprise us.  Some writers like to plot out every little detail and every minute response of their characters beforehand.  While I am kind of like that, there is room to allow the character to surprise you in how they react to a given situation.  If they surprise you as the author, they may well surprise the reader to.  As long as it’s believable, it’s okay.  Give your characters latitude to stretch and be a little unpredictable.  But be sure to lay the groundwork for this somewhere earlier in the story.  You can’t have a character acting so far out of character that it’s not believable.  That’s how you lose readers. 
4. Decide how much your characters will grow or change…beforehand.  Real people change and grow as they experience life and resolve life problems.  Their core personality stays the same but as they accumulate wisdom and hard knocks, they can and should evolve to become a little wiser and more knowledgeable about themselves and others around them.  Your characters should be this way too but you should plot out the basics of this growth ahead of time.  Remember that we do like series characters for their familiarity and predictability, but some change is expected, especially when confronted with new challenges.  I’m not sure how much change and growth I really witnessed in James Bond, but there are exceptions to every rule.  As a general rule, let your characters have room to grow, change and learn, while keeping track of the basic details.  Your readers will like that.
    
   Obviously, there are plenty of good and bad practices that could be followed in developing and sustaining series characters.  We’ll explore these more in upcoming posts.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 20, 2018.  In this post, I want to continue following the idea of serialized stories and see how your fictional setting can support the unique requirements of this fictional form.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.

 

 

Post #133 August 6 2018

“Excerpt from Time Jumpers”

As promised, here is a peek at the first episode of my new series Time Jumpers.  The episode is entitled “Marooned in Voidtime.”  It debuts February 1, 2019.

 

Chapter 1: “Storm Warnings”

“Time is an illusion.”

                                    Albert Einstein

Storm

Kinlok Island

Time Stream T-001 (2814 CE)

T-date: 001-01-22

 

It was foggy, misty, and wet when Cygnus finally touched down on the world that all the time jumpers called Storm.   The ship settled to a rattling landing on the edge of a rocky precipice, overlooking the ocean.  Ice and sleet flecked the portholes.  Wind gusts rocked the ship.  Back on E deck, Alicia Yang looked over at Acth:On’e and just shook her head.

“Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood, Toonie.”

The TM1 said nothing back, just focused on his console.

Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth’s voice crackled over the 1MC.  “Secure all vanes and planes.  Rudder amidships and locked.  Make sure the core’s safe.”

His second in command, Jump Commander Nathan Golich studied his board.  “Singularity core at ten percent, just ticking over.  Planes and vanes secure.”

After all the vibrations had subsided, Dringoth checked with the TS1, Evelyn M’Bela.

“How close to our target coordinates, Evelyn?”

M’Bela, sitting behind the two command consoles, studied her board and its plots and displays.  “Best I can make out, we’re within a few decades of the temporal focus, based on your maneuvers and our physical landing point is here—” she pointed to a map.  “Southeastern edge of this little rockpile of an island, about six hundred forty kilometers from the polar ice pack. Cygnus will auto-confirm once she takes sky sightings.”  M’Bela peered out the porthole at the ice fog enveloping the ship.  “If she can even take sightings in this crap.”

Dringoth pronounced himself satisfied.  “Okay, then, that’s it.” He got on the comm.  “First Time Displacement Battery, get your asses in gear.  We’ve got work to do.”

Cygnus had come to Storm with a critical mission, so said Time Guard and Battalion Ops.  The planet was nothing but ocean, save for a scattering of islands.  Scouted and mapped a decade ago by the Survey Service, Storm had been left alone until the enemy Coethi had begun to make a major move into this sector.  Storm may have been a dreary backwater of a place, but she was strategically located right in the face of the Coethi advance.  Newton’s Jaw itself was behind Storm and her star-sun Sigma-Albeth B, only a few light months away.  The great lens of gravimetric instability was likely the Coethi’s first target if their advance continued along this vector.  That and the small system around 40 Omicron 2—Gavrilon and Nanjiang, principally—non-Alliance worlds but Uman nonetheless.  The intel people at T2 had theorized that the Jaw would make a tempting target to the Coethi advance, owing to the fact that if a jumpship entered the zone, she could take shortcuts to whole bag of time streams, without having to risk popping into and out of voidtime.

Storm was right in the middle of a vast arc of space centered on Newton’s Jaw.  The dreary backwater was now a place of high, maybe even critical, strategic significance.  And it was 1^st TD’s job to install and operate the Time Twister on this rockpile.

Dringoth gathered the entire crew in the wardroom on B deck.

“We’ll do the job the way we trained.  Acth, you and Golich will break out the skimmer and get going on the foundation and the main structure.  Yang and M’Bela, unship all the chronotron pods and bag ‘em up.  Once the structure’s solid, you’ll be installing those.  URME, you and me will stay with the ship for the time being.  I want an all-sector scan up and operating at all times.  Get with Alicia on that.  The Bugs are nearby, I can feel it.  They may be somewhere out there in voidtime, just waiting to pounce.”

URME 101—the Unit Reserve Memory Entity—nodded and said, “Yes, sir.   Copy that.”  The head of the para-human swarm entity nodded, just slightly out of phase.  Everybody saw it—after days and days underway, they were used to it by now—and when Dringoth frowned at the roughness of the configuration—Yang straight away jumped in and said, “I’ve already got a patch for that config, Skipper.  I can download it tonight…better tracking, for sure.”

“Do that,” Dringoth growled.  “Every time URME shakes his head, I get dizzy.”

The crew moved out, donned their hypersuits and, one by one, cycled through Cygnus’ lockout on F deck.

The first order of business was to set up some kind of defensible perimeter around the ship, out to a distance of several hundred meters.  This was done by Alicia Yang, the Defense and Protective Systems tech.

Yang plopped down through thin ice into the shallow lake they had landed in and was immediately brushed by a large lizard-like creature undulating its way across the surface.  “Cyclops doesn’t even have a name for it.”  She adjusted her headgear slightly to get more annotation in her eyepiece.  “Some kind of sauropsid reptile…probably can move at high speed land or water.”

The rest of the team followed Yang across the shallow lake, sloshing their way up a low bank to drier ground.  The DPS1 extracted a small capsule from her web belt and thumbed its control stud on top.  Instantly, a fine mist issued from the capsule, flickering slightly over their heads.  Yang waved it about her head in a circle.

“Launching ANAD sensorbots now,” she announced. 

The mist dispersed and vanished from view.  But now, 1^st TD had eyes and ears to probe their surroundings and warn them of approaching danger.

The Survey Service had named this little rockpile Kinlok Island.  It was nothing but a big claw and tooth-shaped spit of rock and hills, barren except for a few forlorn and very prickly trees, and small swipe of beach along the southwest coast.  Rough surf, driven by gale-force winds, smashed and hissed against the promontory below the ship.  Spray and ice chips were everywhere, stinging faces not yet covered by hypersuit helmets.

“At least it’s breathable,” muttered Golich, twisting a handle to release the skimmer.  The sled dropped down on its cradle, slid off onto the ground and began automatically unfolding into operating position.  “Grab those bags and we’ll load up.”

“Smells like Telitorian eggs…that somebody left out too long.”  Acth:On’e opened a small compartment alongside one of Cygnus’ landing gear and scooped up an armful of small containers.  Each one contained a small replicant swarm, complete with master bot, configged when opened to begin assembling the seabed footings, foundations, support cables and upper dome of the Twister.  Two kilometers in diameter when fully replicated and outfitted, the Twister would resemble an inverted dish, with its surface studded by small polyps, the chronotron pods.  Controls and processor gear stood at the apex of the dish, in a small housing that looked like puckered lips. 

Golich sniffed, checking the skimmer for seaworthiness.  “Oh, well, ours not to reason why—”

They slid the skimmer down a nearby slope, loaded her up and set off through heavy chop and spray for a position marked on their eyepieces, several kilometers out to sea.  The Survey Service had identified the coordinates as just above a small trench in the seabed, some three hundred meters below.  It would make for a good solid ground for the Twister’s foundations.

Acth:On’e was content to let Golich do the steering, while he counted down the distance to the drop site.  “How long do we have to stay here?” he wondered out loud.  “Smells like a sewer I once fell into on Telitor when I was a boy.  It was outside Kasala, just before my V3.  I had that memory wiped in the upload.”

Golich shrugged, squinting through the sleet.  “Wish I could do that.  Wipe bad crap from my head.  As to how long we’re here, that’s up to the Captain.  Battalion says get the Twister up and operating and then sit tight.  T2 thinks the Bugs will make a move pretty soon.”

Acth:On’e called bingo when his eyepiece said they had reached the coordinates.  “Right here.  Mark and anchor.  Isn’t this gadget the Mark I version?  Untested and all?  How do we even know it’ll work like they say?”

“Hey, Toonie…when you’re in the Guard, jolts like you and me don’t get to actually know anything.  We just do things, like whatever the brass says.  Get buttoned up.  We’ve still got to go down there and find the right spot.”

The two of them sealed their hypersuits, buddy-checked all fittings and seals and dropped overboard into the freezing water.

Once completed, the Time Twister itself would be moored to the seabed with stout anchors and surmounted with hemispherical caps, which were the chronotron pods.  Fully operational, the entire apparatus would be linked by thick ganglia of cables to the island itself, for power and command and control.  A hut, still to be erected, where most of the controls were located also housed tracking instruments. 

Many skimmer trips would be needed to tow sections of the Twister’s outer casing, the vast dish-shaped structure that rode along the surface like a breaching whale, partially exposed to the icy air and partially submerged.  It was upon this huge dish that the chronotron pods would be mounted.  And before that could happen, the dish would have to be made fast to her foundation, itself to be buried in the muck and ooze at the bottom of the trench. 

Much work remained to be done.

After some discussion and perusing of survey results, the crew had decided to use a shallow valley just beyond the surf line of the island as a staging place for pods, foundation and main structure elements, and all the mooring, tensioning and cabling that held the entire assembly together.

On their descent, just to satisfy his curiosity and keep Acth:On’e from pestering him with doubts, Nathan Golich pressed a button on his wristpad.  Moments later, a sultry voice from Training began a theoretical explanation of this huge contraption they were assembling….

“…The Time Twister contains a naked singularity at the core of its field.  Over fifty terr ago, Uman engineers learned how to use existing stars and their extreme gravitational fields to compress matter enough to create such a singularity.  The distorted space-time field around this singularity core of the Twister is known as a twist field. 

“Uman engineers developed a way of creating, maneuvering and regulating the effects of the twist field.  This is done through a screening field and a series of buffers, known as twist buffers, or just T-buffers.

“Like a nuclear power plant with its core always on, but regulated by control rods, the Twister is also always on.  The singularity engine at the core, once created and activated, can’t be turned off.  But it can be regulated through a series of T-buffers.  These moderate the twist field…”

A chime sounded in Golich’s helmet.  The seabed came up fast and Acth:On’e said, “We’re here, Commander.  The index point.”

Golich took a deep breath.  “Let’s get cracking and get the hell out of here.  I don’t like the looks of some of these creatures around here.”

 

So that’s the excerpt from Episode 1.  I hope this intrigues you enough to take a look at this new series called Time Jumpers when it debuts next year. 

Here are a few more words about this series….

1. Time Jumpers is a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.
2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 words in length.
3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.
4. There will be 12 episodes.  The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.
5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc. 
6. The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.  
7. Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on approximately the schedule below:
    
   Episode #        Title                                                                 Approximate Upload Date

1.             ‘Marooned in Voidtime’                                 February 1, 2019        
2.             ‘Keaton’s World’                                            March 1, 2019
3.             ‘A Small Navigation Error’                             April 15, 2019
4.             ‘Cygnus Rift’                                                  May 3, 2019
5.             ‘The Time Guard’                                           May 31, 2019
6.             ‘First Light Corridor                                       June 28, 2019
7.             ‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’     August 2, 2019
8.             ‘Operation Galactic Hammer’                        August 30, 2019
9.             ‘Byrd’s Draconis’                                           September 27, 2019               
10.             ‘First Jump Squadron’                                    November 1, 2019
11.             ‘Planck Time’                                                  November 29, 2019
12.             ‘The Time Twister’                                          January 3, 2020
     
     
    The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 13, 2018.  See you then.
     
    Phil B.