Corvette Draft One Complete

October 3, 2016October 3, 2016 KenMcConnell

Yesterday morning the house was quiet with everyone asleep, so I wrote the final two scenes in my latest novella, Corvette. It feels good to have that behind me. I was thinking it might stretch out to be a novel, but at under 50K words and about 215 pages, its a decent sized novella. Corvette is my attempt to write to a market and create a prequel to the Star Saga. The structure and tropes that I used are similar to what is selling right now in Military SF. I hope to have it out in ebook form early next year.

Right now my writing sprints are focused on the second draft of K’nat Trap. This is the novella that I wrote earlier in the year and its set a few years after Starstrikers, Book 4 of the Star Saga. Looking forward to making the changes my beta readers have suggested and tightening up the second draft. With any luck, it will be out before Corvette, sometime next year.

In other news, I’ve nearly completed the K’nat fighter model for use on the novella’s cover. Here are some shots of the model on my bench.

This is a 3rd Generation Votainion starfighter and appears in Starstrikers and K’nat Trap. It has a standard engine and two NexGen space/time drives that let it move through space and time for short duration.

It’s quite the challenge to paint and weather an all black fighter. The canopy in these shots is just primer gray. Eventually it will be painted.

Shadow Fighter Showdown

May 17, 2016 KenMcConnell

My latest scratch built starfighter model is the K’nat fighter or as they call it in STARSTRIKERS – the Shadow fighter. While I’m building my model from plastic and Renshape, my son is building his model in Blender. He’s much faster than I am. It’s going to be a race to see who’s fighter will make it to the cover of K’nat Trap, my next novella.

At this point, he’s winning.

Cover Reveal – The Rising

February 17, 2016February 18, 2016 KenMcConnell

This past weekend the cover for my next released novel, The Rising has been finalized. I thought I’d share with you some of the final little tweaks we did to it. Big thanks to my brother Byron McConnell for once again pulling all the elements together in Photoshop and making them shine!

The above version had five important design changes. The First was the yellow flame out the back of the top fighter. The second was the new explosion. The third was the canopy glass on the bottom fighter, and the fourth change was the motion blur added to the green fighter and the bottom fighter. The fifth design change was to punch up the brightness of the stars.

In the above version we changed the color of the top fighter’s exhaust back to blue, realizing that the yellow didn’t fit our stated blue and orange color guide and it conflicted with the yellow of the green fighter’s leading edge. The two lower models didn’t have motion blur and looked static to me. Also the canopy glass was not yet applied to the bottom fighter. The explosion in this version was not as dynamic as the first one either. The stars are not as bright in this version and it was determined that when you looked at the cover in smaller sizes, the stars faded away entirely.

For the final version of the cover we merged the best of the above versions into a single version. So now you have the blue flame of the top fighter, the more dynamic explosion and the motion blur of the middle and bottom fighters. The canopy glass on the bottom fighter is reflecting the explosion which makes it more realistic.

Here’s a quick look back at how the cover evolved over time from my original sketch.

My original sketch was inspired by model airplane box cover art from WWII which usually depicted aircraft dog fighting in dramatic fashion. I still had the series banner at the top the same way it appeared on the older coin covers.

Above we see a finished version of the initial sketch. We decided that the title should be on one line and that we didn’t need to keep the series banner.

So I did this format change to make the textual parts more clean. All of the books in the Star Saga would now conform to this template for the cover title, saga title and author name.

I added a third fighter in the foreground to help add interest and show the fighter who shot down the green fighter. Now the battle depicts the good guys winning the engagement. The bottom fighter was eventually swapped out for a better model of the Vicker’s Victory fighter. Actually, both Alliance fighters would eventually be the same newly created plastic version with more details.

You can see what was involved with building the two models used on this cover in the Model Builds section of this blog.

Vickers Victory Fighter

Kiv-3 Starfighter Large

Writing Bits and Pieces – Raising the Stakes

January 21, 2016 KenMcConnell

I’m currently writing the third act of my novella, K’nat Trap. While thinking about my story on the way home from work I realized that I had failed to account for some things during my last lunchtime writing session. For one, I had my hero return from a planet and didn’t any make mention that he’s basically lived in a bog without grooming for three days. Yeah, he’d stink and he’d have a few day’s growth of beard. I need to go back and add in those little details.

The second thing I noticed was that the good guys seemed to be getting off too easy in the big second act conflict. Turns out I had them handle lots of starfighters, but not the destroyer warships that launched them. So they are not out of the woods just yet. I think the second act needs to be drawn out a bit more. I’m going to lay the hurt on for a few more chapters to increase tension. I also have a nice little reversal going when the main plan falls short.

This is what happens when you go off-outline and have to blaze a new path through the plot. This is good news for this story though, it’s coming up a bit short on word count right now. Nothing a new battle won’t fix.

Writing Bits and Pieces, Going Rogue

January 15, 2016January 14, 2016 KenMcConnell

What happens when you spend all that time making an outline and then toss it aside when you’re in the heat of a first draft? You go Rogue. It happens with just about every book I’ve ever written. At some point, I make a change and the next thing I know I’m going off outline. Swinging the machete and clearing a new path. Most of the time I circle back and find the trail again. With my latest Work In Progress I may have ventured too far from the path as set forth in the outline.

I scrapped many scenes in a few chapters and then ditched an entire chapter. At this point, I’m having to completely wing the final act. I mean the story is pretty much the same, it’s the way things happen that has changed. Just enough turmoil to make staying on the outline impossible. But that’s OK.

Novel outlines are not like blueprints for buildings. If you suddenly decide to knock out a wall here and add a new room there, it’s not going to cause the builder any headaches. You just press on and make sure your story has a proper resolution. After you’ve written a few novels, like at least five or six, you begin to develop a second sense about what needs to happen and can often pants your way out of the sticks and back to camp without being on the established path. Can I use any more metaphors here?

So you can see I have about 20 thousand words on this novella. I might have another 10 to 15 thousand left to write. It’s much shorter than a regular novel.

Writing Bits and Pieces – Removing a Character

January 13, 2016 KenMcConnell

This week I had to rewrite a scene or two and remove a character and replace him with another. I don’t want to risk any spoilers, so I’ll be discussing this particular writing problem in slightly vague detail. In re-reading what I had written it became clear that a certain character should not be in the story. The scenes that I had written worked fine, in fact I loved having the cameo by this character from another novel of mine. But it reduced tension in this key Second Act scene and made the hero’s journey seem too easy.

I wanted the hero to have to face a new problem and didn’t want to give him anything familiar to lean on. I wanted the hero to have to trust a new character in a situation that was uncomfortable to him. That was hard to get across when he was interacting with an old friend instead of being faced with a somewhat threatening individual.

It was a hard couple of scenes to have to cut up and redo. I really liked them the way I had them. But they didn’t serve the story so they had to go. Usually I find this sort of deep cut editing in the second draft, but this one was found and handled in the first draft. Hopefully that will be one less thing to change down the line. I’ll still need to go in and tweak these scenes a bit, but at least now I have some tension right where I need it. Yet another reason to be familiar with story structure.

Writing Bits and Pieces – Second Act Conflict

January 11, 2016January 8, 2016 KenMcConnell

The above scene from my WIP is a perfect example of a Second Act hurdle that your main characters must face and eventually overcome. I’ve raised the stakes a bit and made Kiloe’s fighter completely disappear right when he was supposed to be picked up by Tamia. It was a relatively simple mission, made more difficult by my First Act problems that were eventually solved by Kiloe and his partner, Tamia. The reader was all set to have them reunited and the mission be a success. But it’s only the second act. You just know things are going go awry or what would the rest of the book be about?

Indeed.

In the Second Act, the hero is given an even more difficult problem to deal with. Something that will force him or her to work harder than before to survive and overcome. It’s up to the writer to ensure that this second act builds drama and suspense by putting the hero in ever deeper water until he either learns to swim or drowns. Sometimes writers call this chasing your hero up a tree and then setting the tree on fire. Now how are you going to get out alive? Easy, giant Eagles will come to my rescue.

I know what’s going to happen next. I know about the surprise guest appearance, I know about the harrowing fight that’s coming and I know who wins in the end.

Novel Bits and Pieces – Re-Reading Before Writing

January 8, 2016 KenMcConnell

This is my first week back from break and I often feel out of touch with my WIP. So I take some time to re-read what I have already written to get back into the ebb and flow of the story. Sometimes I find glaring errors that I need to fix before moving on. Sometimes I just marvel at how well the story is moving, or cringe in horror if it’s not going anywhere. I’d rather catch plotting errors earlier rather than later.

All this week my daily lunch hour writing sessions have been spent reading what I have already written for K’nat Trap. Above is a screen capture from my Plume Creator from chapter 8. The writing’s not that amazing, but I reintroduce the stakes involved so the reader knows the hero has to get moving. I’m not so much examining the writing at this point, just making sure it makes sense and things are moving. I know the story is wavering a bit from the outline and that will take some adjustments. But this happens all the way through the first draft for me. I write strong for days and then wander back and forth as I try to find the correct path forward in the high grass.

Because this is a novella and not a full length novel, I may need to pare down some characters and maintain focus on just a few. There was at least one subplot that I can’t remember where it was going. I hope today’s reading offers some clues, otherwise I may need to edit that one out. See how important it is to re-read before you dive back in?

Novel Bits and Pieces: Theme

January 6, 2016 KenMcConnell

I used to just write my novels and never worry about crafting a message. I mean, they were just supposed to be fun reads, I wasn’t trying to change the world or examine my navel. But after reading Larry Brooks’s Story Physics and Story Engineering, I started to look at my written creations differently. I started to break them down into manageable chunks and pick apart their insides as I tried to figure out how they worked. Or more appropriately in my case, didn’t work. I mean let’s face it, I’ve written ten novels and not one of them has been a best seller. Not even close. So I had to be doing something wrong.

I’ve slowly come around to understanding theme and now I won’t start without knowing what my novel’s theme is. Once you know your one or two word theme, you can have it in the back of your mind when you’re plotting your story. It may even cause you to restructure events or change character motivations to stay on theme. While you’re writing your novel your theme gestates in the background of your subconsciousness waiting to be inserted into action or dialog as needed. Often times you don’t even know you’re doing it until the first draft is over and then you go looking for where the story reinforces your theme. Then you see that your brain was doing more than just putting words on the page, it was secretly making those words bring out your theme.

This all results in a narrative that feels right when the reader consumes your book. She probably won’t be aware of it, but when she puts it down after finishing it, she’ll have this warm glow inside. At least that’s how I like to think a good novel affects it’s reader. Of course both of my readers are males and I’m hoping they decide to go out and buy the next book in the series. Or at least stare lovingly at the awesome starships on the cover, which in turn might lead them to buy another shiny cover.

For my current WIP – K’nat Trap, I have established that the theme is simply Trust. The extent to which characters trust each other, determines how successful they will be in the story. It’s not just the main characters either. I carry the theme down into the minor roles too. It’s a novella, so there are less characters with arcs as in a typical novel, but even the bit characters have to learn to trust. Or they don’t learn and suffer the consequences.

My wife always gets mad at me and the boys when she reaches over to put something she’s been cooking into our mouths. She always gets mad when we insist on knowing what it is or looking at it first. Her argument is that she wouldn’t ever give us something that wasn’t good. So we should just trust her and eat whatever she hands us in the steaming spoon. She’s never given me something nasty tasting so you’d think I would have learned that by now. Still, I have to look at it before I eat it.

There are many forms of trust in life and the more ways I can work examples of trust into the story helps solidify my theme.

Triak Starfighter Build, Part 5

January 2, 2016 KenMcConnell

Weathering

This is one of my favorite steps in modeling. I love making a model look like it just came out of the real world where it has lived a long and hard life. Weathering sounds like it should only be for machines that live inside an atmosphere, but all machines get worn and used, even in space. So it really refers to damage, chipping of paint, fading of paint, grease and oil leaks and sometimes dirt and grime.

All of my models have that George Lucas look of being in a well-used universe. Because my models are also built specifically for my book covers, sometimes I don’t put unit marking on them or anything too unique, so that they can be copy and pasted into many fighters for cover art. But with this particular model, I decided to get individual. Which meant I could do unit badges and make unique mods like the starboard engine nacelle being removed.

In this wide shot you see the whole model as it stands now. Decals are applied and paint chipping has occurred on the painted areas and we have some dusting with artist’s charcoal.

I applied a light wash to the stern details but I will be going back over this area with more grime and oil as it looks too clean for my tastes.

The paint chipping was achieved by – wait for it, actually chipping the paint. I used my finger nail and a hobby knife.

I think the nose art is from a WWII airplane kit. I just have a stack of decals and pick and chose from it randomly.

You can see the chipping details around the black area behind the pilot. Panels get chipped by ground crew constantly removing them and handling them with dirty fingers.

I think this engine art decal was from a Japanese F-1 kit.

I painted the blaster tips a darker gray since I had to do some gap filling on them post primer. I also made some of the raised panels different shades of gray.

Below we see a more extensive wash of black for the back details.

More wash applied to the intakes and exterior.

Oily stains on the bottom are a bit of a trademark for me.

Another look at the bottom details. Even if I don’t model landing gear, I include the landing gear doors.

And here she is, complete. I don’t have any Votainion Empire symbols on it or any of my models, actually. That’s because I don’t have the ability to make my own decals. Easier to let graphic artists apply them in post.

20160102_093634

This might be the last model I work on until winter releases it’s icy grip on my garage. Right now the temps are in the teens and my garage is just too cold to be in, even with an electric heater at my feet.