I wrote only three scenes since my last update, but about 4000 words, which is not bad when you often get only 500 words in a given morning. It’s because the scenes are taking longer to get through. I don’t think it’s a pacing problem at all.
On this novella, the last beyond a serial I plan to release late next year, I’m really getting into the settings. It starts on an airless rock in a sequence I’ll need to rewrite to account for gravity, or lack thereof. There’s the crash I talked about last week on Demeter, which could be the setting for a fictional version of Ice Road Truckers. My two protags, Tomle and Mitsuko, compare their respective homeworlds – Etrusca, Earth-like and Romanized vs. Bonaparte, being terraformed as life has not quite spread across its entire surface. As of Sunday, they were on Metis, the female-dominated world named for the original Greek goddess of wisdom.
It was fun describing the Metisian capital’s giant statue of the goddess. One character notes that, in Greek myth, Zeus swallowed Metis and later gave birth to Athena. The group then sees the planet’s answer to that myth, mainly the 80-foot tall statue Metis erupting from the belly of a smaller and rather uncomfortable Zeus.
The story changes this week. Tomle and Mitsuko are on their way to Gilead, or as you know it, Hanar. The Compact finally becomes aware that Gilead not only is occupied by Gelt, but the humans there are not particularly thrilled with the Compact. So we finally get to see Tishla as a leader from the Compact’s point of view. We also find out what happened to JT and Suicide after the events of Second Wave.
Only, when this is finished, it’ll be the end of the Compact Universe for the foreseeable future. Which is too bad. The rewrite of The Amortals has finally revealed the central conflict in the series. Hopefully, I get to continue it later on.