davidgillon | Entries tagged with disruptive technology

Dad was released from hospital tonight and is happily ensconced back in his room at the care home. They've actually been talking about releasing him since weekend before last, but the microbiology department kept arguing for more tests to be really, absolutely, totally sure he was rid of the infections - we're talking belt, braces, piece of string and half-a-dozen safety pins. Monday his doctors finally told them no, he wasn't having an MRI because it just isn't practical to try and give him one (he won't stay still) and they were going to release him, but then found his potassium was low, so it's taken two days to get that back to normal. On the one hand it means he had an extra week of IV antibiotics to be really sure the bugs are gone, on the other it's been exhausting for the family. Fingers crossed for things getting back to normal.

Writing progress on Disruptive Technology ground to a halt while this was going on. I picked it up again in the last couple of days and hit 25kwords last night. The break was sort of useful as it let me come at the opening chapters again after a slight break, and I decided to somewhat rejig how my protagonist handles things. I think either way works, but this one is slightly better paced for easing the reader into her life. It was quite a small change, but ended up needing a lot of rewriting. This is an example of how my writing process works, I do too much planning to be a pure pantser, but I loop back on myself to rewrite stuff time after time as the writing process reveals deeper character motivations or plot points that need addressing. I don't think it would be too different if I was plotting it out in detail, though I'm currently trying to decide whether I've written myself into a corner where the only sensible options require my protagonist to brief the attorney general, and possibly the president, which is much higher up the tree of government than I'd planned, but with the degree of disruption I just imposed, it's looking awfully like it's necessary and realistic. I'd planned that disruption, but when you delve into the details of how it would play out, the reality starts to dictate where your story can go.

Seriously, WTF is My Government Doing?

A Brexit no deal scenario was voted down last night, which almost certainly means Parliament voting to request an extension to Article 50 later today. But meantime, three senior Tories, including IDS, who is a one time leader of the party, apparently flew to Poland to lobby the Polish government to oppose extending Article 50. So that's lobbying a foreign power to oppose the expressed will of Parliament. I'm going to need someone to explain to me how that isn't treason. And while IDS was in Poland, Farage was telling the EU parliament to do the same, and the seriously shady Arron Banks was apparently lobbying the Italian fascists of the Northern League to do the same. The story.

Recent Reading:

Thunderbird Falls, C E Murphy (Walker Papers Book 2, or 3)

Newbie shaman and beat cop Joanne Walker (aka Siobhan Walkingstick) has been slacking off on learning the metaphysical side of her new powers, but then she discovers a body in the University of Washington showers after a fencing lesson, and the case turns out to involve her more intimately than she could ever have imagined. The dead woman was the Mother of a coven, and they want Jo to take her place, which given no one knows Jo was a teenage mother pretty much confirms they're the real deal. The weather is still badly out of whack after Jo's defeat of Cernunnos in book one and the coven claim to have a way to fix that, by teaming up with an ancient spirit warrior. Jo wants advice on how to proceed, but Coyote is MIA, and then her partner/father figure Gary the seventy-something taxi driver has a heart attack that puts him in the hospital, so it's just as well someone had answered her 'please teach me' on the metaphysical version of craigslist. Well, probably.

I was quite impressed by this, it's rare for someone to have their protagonist screw up quite so emphatically, but Jo pulls through in the end, though Lake Washington may never be the same again. What's irritating, and hinted at by the 'Book 2, or 3' above, is that the narrative keeps referencing a story that happens between book 1 and this one, and apparently it's not published in the main series, but in a multi-author collection of novellas, which isn't linked from Murphy's author page on Amazon as far as I can see. I only found out about it by going and looking in her Wikipedia entry.

Coyote Dreams, C E Murphy (Walker Papers Book 3, or 4)

It's a fortnight on from the events of Thunderbird Falls, the day after the Fourth of July, and large chunks of Seattle PD appear to be having a duvet day. Jo would be happier having a duvet day, having gotten thoroughly blitzed at the North Precinct picnic, but she just woke up to find a strange man in her bed, and neither of them quite remember what happened last night. To make matters worse, she's rapidly joined for breakfast by Gary, and then by a six-year-old and her mother she promised a tour of the precinct, and forgot, plus her fencing coach Phoebe (on the phone), who is so pissed that Jo forgot her lesson that she is insisting on taking her clubbing later. To make the morning perfect, she then finds her boss at the door. Captain Michael Morrison's mission is more serious, Jo's friend Detective Billy Holliday is comatose in the hospital for unknown reasons, and never mind his strict adherence to logic, if one of his people is down then he wants the only healer in the department to see what she can do. To make things worse, Morrison's appearance completes the circle on why Jo ended up in bed with a strange man, because she saw Morrison hanging out with a strange woman at the picnic, which drove her UST for him into overdrive and led to her drinking most of a quart of whiskey. And it turns out that her one night stand, Mark Bragg, is Morrison's new girlfriend's brother (twin brother, it eventually turns out). So hey, double date from hell.

Things escalate as more and more of the department falls under the influence of the sleeping sickness, and worse, when Jo tries to contact Coyote, she finds him trapped by the same power, and maybe dead. With her Coyote unavailable casting about for help drags ger into what is almost a retconning of her teenage years. Apparently Coyote isn't a new factor in her life, he first appeared to her when she had her first period, but kept that memory for her sleeping mind, because waking-Jo was a little shit who couldn't be trusted with that kind of power. As if that wasn't enough extra pressure, junior-Jo was a little shit because she's a newly created soul, and hasn't had aeons of reincarnation to learn how to handle that kind of power. And she needs that kind of power because the Great Spirit has a job for her at some point in the future. So no pressure then, negotiate the rapids of your UST with your boss wanting to rip the face off his new girlfriend, figure out where the relationship with hellbitch's brother is going, save all your friends from the sleeping sickness, and prep for it by facing off with your teenage self in a way you're fairly certain is going to ruin her life.

I'm not sure whether this is a retconning so much as a uniquely unreliable narrator, but it's pretty well handled and it does make Jo's backstory make more sense. And the ultimate stakes bigger. On the downside there are still multiple references to the missing story.

Other Reading

Amazon is having a sale of Kindle military history stuff, and the chance to pick up books that normally go for c£30 for £1:20 was too much to resist. I ended up buying 8 books (so far), I'm not certain how much I saved, but probably comfortably over a hundred, possibly two. A couple are duplicates of books I already have in hardback, but they're books I reference a lot, so £1:20 for searchable text and access when I'm up in Durham is well worth it. Of the others, five were on my 'buy when you get a chance' list, and only one was an impulse purchase. I think that was quite restrained of me ;)

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: Flumped

Currently Writing

Things have been a bit complicated, with trying to both rewrite the first chapter of Graveyard Shift in different PoV for submission to Disabled People Destroy Fantasy as a short story, while keeping up my momentum on Disruptive Technology. In practise I stalled out on both, but then managed to restart myself. Graveyard Shift came together in two sessions, with a week in between them, and progress got much faster when I realized that switching PoV means switching a lot of things the story focuses on, because even if the characters are friends and partners, what they're immediately concerned with differs. That's currently in final editing, having been cut from 6800 words to 5750.

Disruptive Technology I set aside until I had a complete draft of Graveyard Shift, but I'm now back at it, with the manuscript standing at 23700 words. I had a breakthrough yesterday and realised what my mid-point of the novel has to be, which helps a lot with balance and structure. I was worried earlier in the week that it was getting too talky, so I took a look at what was going on and managed to shift some scenes around, which has helped. I may need to look at some police procedurals to see how they balance this kind of thing, where the investigation is just getting started and people are feeling their way without strong leads to follow. Unfortunately it's not the kind of investigation where you can wander quaint villages encountering interesting witnesses.

Things researched since last time: Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, C-RAM systems - that's Counter Rockets, Artillery and Mortars, who has them post Iraq/Afghanistan, how many major airports there are in the US, layout of LAX, flight times to LAX from both SeaTac and DC, where my characters could fly into if LAX is shut.

Currently Reading

I stalled on the Bujold novella, wanted something light and readable, so went back to C E Murphy's Urban Shaman/Walker Papers series, which I've previously read the first two of.

Urban Shaman, C E Murphy.

Joanne Walker is flying back into Seattle after spending the past three months with her dying, estranged mother. Looking out of the window on final approach, she sees a woman on the point of being attacked, so hares out of the airport, grabbing the first taxi she finds, and Gary, its driver, who's 73, bored, and built like a linebacker. They find the woman, Marie, hiding from her attacker, and take her to a diner to hear her story, at which point the Wild Hunt turn up outside, and Marie reveals 1) she's a banshee, and 2) Jo's about to die. This does in fact happen, though not without Jo managing to walk up the sword that's impaling her and stick a knife in Cernunnos, head of the Hunt. This is when things turn really strange, with Jo, who has been denying her half-Cherokee heritage since she was 18, meeting Coyote, and being talked through healing herself, using the metaphor that she's a car, as she's a mechanic.

And she's not just a mechanic, she's a mechanic for Seattle PD. Or at least she was until she went AWOL for three months. And as Precinct Captain Michael Morrison delights in pointing out, he hired her replacement 10 weeks ago. But that doesn't mean she's out of a job, because a blatantly contrived set of circumstances mean she was sent through Police Academy when she took the mechanic's job, so Morrison is busting her from being a mechanic to being a police officer. HQ won't let him sack her directly, because she's good for their diversity stats, but he's convinced she'll quit.

Unfortunately for his plans (and their mutual sexual tension), Jo doesn't have much quit in her, so the first thing she does is hook up with Gary and head over to Marie's. Only to find her dead, latest victim of a serial killer stalking Seattle. The last thing the thoroughly rational Morrison wants to accept is that there's a supernatural serial killer on the loose, but Jo's death and revival was caught on CCTV, and his best hope of stopping an escalating murder spree may be his least qualified patrol officer, who's equally unqualified as the shaman people now keep insisting she obviously is.

It's thoroughly enjoyable, Jo's a strong, flawed character and Gary's a delight, but there are a few areas where the author seems to be pressing a little heavily on the scales of probability, particularly the whoops, now you're a cop, here's your badge thing. The feel of Seattle is also a bit iffy, strong at the end, but absent a lot in the middle.

(Incidentally the first time I read this I ended up having to rename a character in Graveyard Shift because Jo's birth name was actually Siobhan, and I had a character called Siobhan Murphy, based out of SPD's North Precinct, just like Jo is in the Walker Papers, which was taking annoying coincidence a bit far).

Next Up: Thunderbird Falls (Walker Papers Book 2), C E Murphy

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Duplicated

1500 words on Sunday that turned out to be deep character background/potential YA* rather than actually the book I'm supposed to be writing. About 1500 words yesterday, actually in the Disruptive Technology narrative - expanding the opening scenes in which my innocent protagonist gets pulled into a Homeland Security investigation because of her specialist knowledge - which with today's couple of hundred takes us up to 11,000 words. But today seems to be mostly turning into a research day.

Googled so far:

King County Sheriff's Office Air Support Unit, and then an image search for cabin pictures of Guardian 2, the actual helicopter they're in. I didn't really get a lot of success with that last, but it's a Huey, and seating plans are easily googleable.

King County Child Protective Services - character background. Need to go back to that as I didn't get what I wanted.

Cis-platin related Ototoxicity - character background again.

Airfields in Seattle - I know the big ones, via work initially, but I'll need a private field at a couple of points.

And then I had to dig into Google Earth and look for a road suitable for the ambush site they're flying out to examine. Which turned out to be a real pain. I need several things out of the site - somewhere the ambush will work, which requires an open area, and who knew Washington state was so full of trees, somewhere the ambushees can evade the ambush, and all of it on terrain my protagonist will find difficult (because that lets me get a bunch of yes, I'm an amputee, get over it exposition in the first chapter). I found three places along US-12 east of Mount Rainier that would almost work, and for each of them I had to go down into Streetview to look at actual images of the terrain (amongst other things, you need Streetview to tell if the road is totally walled in with guardrails, which nixes going cross-country to escape). I did find one place they could probably evade across a weir, but getting my protagonist across that when she turns up to look around would be a pain in the ass. Then I went literally around the corner from that one, and realised that while my first draft has the access problem being the slope going downhill, the slope going uphill is just as much an issue, and if the road is sticking to the valley bottom, I really should look at that. And not only is there a handy-dandy ridge for the ambushed folks to get out of sight behind, and far enough from the road for my purposes, but there's a bluff overlooking everything that is a perfect spot to launch the ambush from. Mission accomplished, rewrite tomorrow.

* It's an idea I had at Christmas, but which didn't get written down, as opposed to the ones that did and spawned this whole project.

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: Virtual US-12

New novel project officially started, by which I mean I took the short story I wrote over the holidays and shoved a chapter break in at all the scene breaks, plus added about a half dozen additional chapter titles that are clearly needed in order to make the story play out over a longer period.

It is the barest bones of a novel, but it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Now I just need to string those bones with the sinews of story.