I’ve been trying to get back into my Work In Progress, Tyrmia, but it has not been easy with all the work on getting Null_Pointer out the door and ready for launching. But now that NP is mostly finished, I have to get my head back into the Galaxy Collision universe and back to that lush green world known as Tyrmia.
I’m on Chapter 40 right now, in which our hero must take an airplane ride from the country to the capital city and thus enter a war zone. The level of technology is similar to WWI, in that the people have airplanes, but they are spindly, fragile machines that leak smoke and oil and lumber along at speeds that would make a jet fighter stall and fall out of the sky.
I love the planes of that period and the challenge for me is to conjure up images of that time in our own history in the mind of the reader, while also reinforcing that this is not Earth and these people are not humans. I did some brain storming with fellow writer and good friend, Bill Blohm about the action sequence and some motivations for the hero and the antagonist. All that is left for me to do now is write it.
I really need to get cranking on this first draft, if I expect to publish it next year. It takes me several drafts to get the story just right and then several more iterations of editing to make sure it makes sense and is not an outright embarrassment. All those drafts take time, but they can not proceed until I complete draft one.
A piece of art that has been an inspiration to me for this scene is shown below. The painting is called Pioneer Sky and it is by the artist Radojavor from Deviant Art. I’ve linked to this guy before, he’s one of my favorite artists.