So tonight or tomorrow I’ll be finishing up the part that I was working on last week – The Rescue of Princess Irena, Part 4. And afterwards it’s a trip down memory lane as I outline the existing parts and then try to come up with a rough idea of the next few parts.
I also have quite a few stories or parts of stories which I’ve started but not finished. A few notes here on each of these, as much for my benefit as for the bafflement and confusion of the readers.
Pegasus, Part 2
Dreana gets a tour of the Sapphire, the ship she will be commanding in the near future.
Sasha Gets Five Stars
Sasha and Rosalyn have a great night on the town, but what about the day after?
Star Trek: Voyager – “Companions”
Janeway gets early morning coffee. Seven has an interesting discovery to share.
Servant of the Siphen, Part 13
There are security concerns that need to be resolved. In particular, the recently-revealed Irena believes that one of the Orion crew is a telepath. Now how do you figure out who that might be?
No Way Home, Part 4
Having launched from the Orion in the shuttle, Caroline and Erica make their approach to the damaged dimensional portal. Erica gets to go on an EVA. They return to the Orion with their findings but… well, this is a problem – they can’t land.
I think I’m leaning towards the last one there, and I think it will be interesting to see how that situation is resolved. After I finish the other stuff I mentioned at the top there.
If you’ve arrived here from Facebook – hello and welcome! This is my first blog post going out to Facebook. I write stories under the pen name Martin Burne. Sci-fi, sci-fi with a dash of fantasy, and fantasy wrapped inside a sci-fi crispy coating. Romance? Check. Parental advisory? Oh hell yeah, although the stories I have are a lot tamer than when I started.
If you read on a tablet or phone, chances are that this site is tricky to navigate. I’m working on a Downloads page so that you can just get an EPUB file and read that at some kind of sane font size and layout. But alternatively check this out:
Other sites that carry my stories
Wattpad is the only other site carrying my stories for now. What you see on the above page are embedded first parts of the stories I’ve added there, which is most of the ones you can find here. You can also continue reading the story over on Wattpad if you enjoy it!
I’m considering lining up a publisher, but I’d like to actually have something close to finished before I start down that road. So for example, having the Nexus stories nicely linked up in a good-sized novel would be a start.
More important than that though, is finding more people who want to give my stories a chance. Or even just convincing some of you who are reading this!
Hmm, well I can say this. I don’t plan on killing off characters. I don’t like it when authors basically give up and rub out characters that they don’t feel like writing any more.
That may be a biased representation of what goes on in the book industry, but here’s a thing – killing off characters makes for some major spoilers for those who haven’t read that far yet. As a result, readers who like those characters are deterred from reading further when they accidentally (inevitably given the rise of social media) read a spoiler. I don’t see how that is a good thing.
So far I do have one character in a coma. It’s not a huge deal for you the readers because the part where she wasn’t in a coma hasn’t been written yet. It is, however, a huge deal for the characters. It messes with the previous dynamic that existed, and a couple of characters move up to temporarily fill vacated jobs.
Without so much as a single line of dialogue to her credit, Rebecca’s absence is notable in No Way Home. I liked what I did there.
Originally I had planned for an attempted but failed rescue of Rebecca before the Orion destroyed the ship she was being held on, but honestly I didn’t see the point in doing so. If SG-1 can sneak onto a Goa’uld ship and rescue Supreme Commander Thor from under the nose of Anubis, I’m damn sure my characters can pull off something equally audacious. Even if the result isn’t quite what they hoped for.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and have a good weekend, folks! 🙂
4 responses to “Choices, so many choices”
Hi Martin. Found you, of course, through our conversation over on Tess’s blog, and I thought I’d come over to have a look at what you’ve been working on. It looks like you have quite a few projects going on at once! I think this is probably a common dilemma for writers: we constantly have new ideas popping into our heads, and they look so juicy and attractive that it’s tempting to spin off and work on them immediately, at the expense of our current works in progress. And I don’t think there’s any right answer to whether or not that’s a good idea; some writers easily switch between multiple ongoing works without losing the thread, and some others not so much, needing more to stick with one thing until at least a first draft is done before picking up something new. If a particular style works for you, then that’s what you should go with! Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading through some of the stuff you’ve posted. 🙂
Thanks! I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
I guess that if I were to be strict, I would only work on No Way Home, Servant of the Siphen and The Maw of Despair – since they form part of a much longer narrative, it only matters that I write them, not what order. It may be that I’ll do that anyway, but having choices is nice. it takes the pressure off, I think
Like you said, if it works, then stick with it. The trick, I think, is to recognise when it’s not working, and adapt.
One of the things I’m actually looking forward to next year is getting back to doing some editing. It’s strange, a lot of writers seem to dread going in and painstakingly reworking the story, but I find it to be as enjoyable as coming up with a draft. If only I could write a bit quicker, I’d be swimming in edits. 😉
I hope you’re enjoying Tess’ new story, as well. I know I’m looking forward to what she comes up with!
“The Maw of Despair.” See, now, how can you not be fascinated with any story with a title like that? Sounds very H.P. Lovecrafty. Anyway, it makes sense to me, if they’re all part of a continuing narrative, to work on those. For me, I try to stick with one thing, but take notes on any ideas that I have on the side. However, if I get stuck, or ‘blocked,’ or start feeling unhappy with how things are going, then I’ll take a break from it and go work on a different project for a while, as a way of clearing my head. Often I find I come back to the original project refreshed and ready to get going again.
I can get mired in editing, especially revising, though. That’s where I start second-guessing myself a bunch, and I need to back off from that.
I found editing such a positive experience, despite it being quite wearing. Indeed, my last pass of editing, for Servant of the Siphen, took almost a month. I was happy to make the changes.
I had a good beta reader (Jen Leigh, look her up if you like) and I asked her questions about things I already wanted to change.
As a result, the edit was essentially a rewrite, but in doing so I retained a lot of lines that I liked, or reworked parts of the story to match the new ideas.
Also helpful in the process was dividing the story into parts, which meant that where I made cuts, I had a rough idea of how much material I needed to keep the story moving. It didn’t hurt that working on a part at a time helped me to take a break when I needed to. 🙂