And the snippet…

She paused in her progress to look out a massive viewing window at the shipbuilding cradle adjacent to this arm of Dock One. A helpful virtual sign informed her that she was now viewing Cradle C, and would she like an expanded schematic of the shipbuilding flow?

That wasn’t hard to ignore. What fascinated her enough to lead her to gawk like a tourist was the sheer scale.

The largest of the paired drive starships were the Marantha-class. She already knew this, though the interactive sign helpfully pointed out the fact once again, along with the information that they’d first entered service in 799 pm here at Pardine, and that the single most ambitious expansion to Dock One’s technical capabilities in its entire history was the enlargement of the shipbuilding cradles to accommodate such starships. Marantha-class hulls were almost two kilometers from the forward sensor array to the trailing booms of the normspace thruster groups.

Novotny tapped the interactive sign into dormancy, wishing spitefully that she had time to hack it down to a parts list.

But that wasn’t what mattered. Her was caught by the fact that Cradle C hosted the keel of a new Marantha-class ship. Work proceeded, flecks of drones and engineering pods clustered along the metal spine like dust flecks on a ruler.

Even the work tugs were little more than splinters, their twenty- and thirty-meter lengths reduced next to the emerging skeleton of what would someday be a great ship. An artefact so large that it forced the eye toward a vanishing point perspective.

The cradle around the embryonic starship was larger, of necessity, but not massive. The structure was mostly skeletal framing and curving towers where heavier equipment was situated. The bulk of Dock One was behind and beneath her, twelve booms, three other shipbuilding cradles, two repair-and-refit cradles just as capacious, and environmentally controlled cubage to permanently house the several hundred thousand human beings who were sworn or contracted to or otherwise affiliated with the Navisparliament. Not to mention those like her just passing through.

A government in its own right, running a distributed, artificial world in which human beings were an incidental element. How soon, she wondered, before they began building their own children without human engineers, with no quarters or controls aboard?

The Navisparliament thought big. With projects like this one taking up to two decades for completion, the shipminds’ population expansion was agonizingly slow by human standards. It was fascinating to see that effort in action.

Walking again, Novotny reflected on the nature of the place she found herself in. The angular structures, the long sightlines – these were relicts of the design language in use in the first centuries of Dock One’s existence. Somewhere deep in the core of the station – for habitat was too small and too limiting a term to describe Dock One – was Haruna Kishmangali’s original lab. His first shipbuilding cradle had been nothing but some static lines and umbilicals reaching out into orbit.

Not her destination this shift, however.

the_child

Except I didn’t. My backbrain really wanted to wait until today, when I’ll be at the Fireside Writers’ Group after work, and in the mode, as it were.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t get where I am today as a writer by ignoring my backbrain. I have no idea why it wanted this extra day off, but it did. Okay. An extra day’s not going to crimp my production schedule much. And really, I was practically vibrating with Writing Avoidance Fu.

This may or may not be related to the odd phenomenon where I feel nervous just before embarking on a substantial project. The first couple of days when I start a new novel, or a major revision (as now) are often picky, fussy moments for me. Which is peculiar, because there’s not that much in life that can make me nervous (outside of cancer stress). I mean, I can stroll onto a stage in front of almost 3,000 people, grab a mic and go without a second thought. Most of the usual social stressors roll right off me — flying on planes, going on first dates, and so forth.

As for writing, I’ve spent the past two decades making it my life. Almost nothing about writing incites nerves in me. Except starting big projects. (Well, and contract negotiations.)

So pre-flight nerves? Or some bit of buggery in the plumbing of my writing mind? Maybe there’s no difference. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because today, Sunspin

It also occurred to me while drafting this post that I’ve never revised an outline after the fact to match the finished manuscript. More to the point, I’ve never bothered to. I find myself wondering if revising the outline (or possibly even rewriting it from scratch) after the first draft and before the revision passes would be productive. Have you ever tried that?

Note this outline comes more recently in my career than Alternating Current, and it helped sell a novel in New York. Also as discussed above, this was not revised post-drafting to match the final product, so if you’re familiar with the finished book, you’ll seem some variances. Another interesting exercise would be to go through several writers’ outlines and look at their variances — it would tell you something about their individual processes, I think.

And the outline…

To Wind the Mainspring at the Heart of the World
by Jay Lake

God’s creation is running down, and Hethor Jonobie must recover the key to world and restore things to their intended order.

Earth is but a bauble of the Tetragrammaton, God the Watchmaker, who has hung it in His heaven to wind forever around the track of its orbit. This is a clockwork universe, where the sun is an immense lamp hung in the sky, and the planets ratchet along great brass trackways set with millions of gear teeth. Sponsored by the Divine Adversary, the machinations of William of Ghent have interfered with the workings of the world, and Earth’s mainspring is winding down.

Unfortunately, the key has been lost in the tides of history. The last winding of the mainspring of the world is an event lost in myth and tradition, believed only by the superstitious and the foolish. Hethor Jonobie, apprentice to a clockmaker, is visited by Gabriel, the Angel of Annunciation, and charged with restoring order.

Court wizards and priests alike have noticed increased vibrations in the motion of the Earth, though they dispute its cause, each wise man pursuing his own agenda. When Hethor brings his evidence to the Viceroy at Boston, he is laughed out of court and imprisoned before being pressed into service on an Imperial British Aeroship, the HIMS Bassett.

Britain, which contends with the Middle Kingdom for domination of the northern hemisphere, has recently begun sending expeditions over the Equatorial Wall to extend its domination southward. This is the range of impossibly high (150 miles) mountains girdling the Earth that supports the great brass cogs that mesh with the gears of Earth’s orbital track.

Haunted cities of crystal and gold are rumored to lie high in the mountains, as well as mythic animals and fabulous automata. These ruins have not been occupied in the memory of men, or even civilizations, though the Roman emperors were said to have held them for a time as fortresses.

On involuntary service aboard the Bassett, Hethor finds his way to the Equatorial Wall. He has not seen or heard fromBassett Gabriel since his first visitation, and since his disastrous foray at court, Hethor has declined to discuss his worries with anyone.

Simeon Malgus, the ship’s navigator, has seen promise in Hethor and is teaching him to use the quadrant, sextant, octant, pendulum clocks and other tools of the navigator’s art. With these tools, Hethor is able to verify the errors in the motions of the world, but Malgus discovers Hethor’s notes and bans him from the work.

They reach the Equatorial Wall, which lies in the permanent shadow of the Venusian Orbital track. [CHECK OPTICS OF THIS] Captain Smallwood, the Bassett‘s commanding officer, is unable to locate the expedition he is chartered to contact, and Malgus is lost, dead or imprisoned, when a shore party is attacked by winged savages who strongly resemble the archangel Gabriel. Malgus’ junior navigator is killed outright in the attack, and with the officer complement stretched thin, Captain Smallwood is forced to employ the disgraced Hethor as Malgus’ replacement.

Laboring over sketchy maps and notes, Hethor guides the Bassett to a great harbor-of-the-air, in a hidden valley high in the Equatorial Wall with a vertical wooden city. This city seems to be abandoned, but the shore party, this time with Hethor as a member under heavy guard, finds evidence that the prior expedition passed through.

Hethor also finds a golden tablet with kabalistic writing on it, in a chamber recently searched by ship’s Marines. The tablet is warm, and there are feathers scattered in the room. He smuggles the tablet back aboard the Bassett and attempts to decipher it, convinced that the tablet is another message from God.

Captain Smallwood sends the Marines along with a company of sailors up the trails toward the crest of the Equatorial Mountains. Even from here, the brass teeth of Earth’s gearing can be see glinting in the sky at dawn and dusk.

While the troops are gone, the Bassett is attacked again by the winged savages. This time, Hethor is captured by the savages, losing his partially translated tablet in the process.

While the savages bear Hethor high up the Equatorial Mountains, a terrible earthquake occurs below. He sees cliff faces the size of Ireland slip loose, a city of brass and crystal towers crashing to brilliant dust. They overfly a party of men cowering from the violence of the world, and Hethor tries to attract the attention of the party on the ground, only to see them crushed by tons of stone. Hethor knows this quake is another symptom of the running down of the Earth’s mainspring.

Finally he is set down next to a temple or palace built right up against the great brass wall of the Earth’s gears. It is an enormous colonnaded structure, with red lacquer pillars and green-tiled roof, resembling the fabled temples of the Middle Kingdom. Stout, hairy men in white robes tend the grounds — Neanderthals. The air is very thin and cold, paining Hethor’s lungs.

The winged savages depart immediately after depositing Hethor, and he is left to find his own way into the temple. Inside, he is met by a steel automaton, that ushers him into the presence of the Abbot of the Jade Temple. As Hethor arrives, the Abbot is in conference with Simeon Malgus, the Bassett‘s navigator.

Hethor is astonished to see Malgus, who is considerably less surprised to see his former protégé. Malgus reveals himself to be a double agent, working within the British Aeronavy on behalf of the southern world. He describes a paradise of men and animals living in harmony, free from the evils of industrialization and warfare. The hairy men in the garden are another race of men who live there, along with the fliers Hethor has encountered and others.

Hethor asks if the Angel Gabriel, who first told him of the dangers to the world, is one of the southern fliers. Malgus explains that the fliers, while manlike in appearance, are not capable of human speech. Whatever Hethor saw, angel or otherwise, it was not one of these creatures.

The Abbot explains that up here so close to the gears, they hear the voice of God every day when the track of the world thunders by in the sky. He invites Hethor to become part of their community and take part in the daily Sacrament of Listening, but Hethor asks to be set free. He admits to the Abbot and to Malgus that he is seeking the key necessary to rewind the mainspring of the world.

Malgus laughs at Hethor, but the Abbot silences him and explains that the Key Perilous is one of the seven Great Relics left behind by Christ before He was broken on the wheel-and-gear of Roman punishment. The Abbot does not know where it might be found, but he advises Hethor that in the pagan south, where Christ’s word has never found much favor, there are wise men who know where the Great Relics can be found. The Abbot offers Malgus’ services in guiding Hethor southward to meet with these sages.

Malgus clearly believes this to be a fool’s errand and would rather continue developing stratagems to combat British imperialism, but he is unwilling to defy the Abbot. He leads Hethor up to the very top of the brass way of Earth’s gears. They must wait until midnight and the thundering passage of the track before scrambling into the deep brass valley and making their way across. It is a perilous trip, and must be completed in less than twenty-four hours, as the next passage of the track will destroy anyone still within the gears.

Partway across, Hethor finds another kabalistic tablet, another message from God, which after some argument he takes with him. Delayed by the finding of the tablet, they are late coming to the other rim of the gear and nearly lose their lives in the thundering passage of the track. Hethor is in fact deafened, as far he knows permanently.

Climbing down from the other rim, they come to another copy of the Jade Temple. This one is deserted, except for furtive little figures scampering through the withered orchards, like the hairy men of the north face but much smaller — Australopithecines. Hethor looks down upon the lands of the southern Earth and is overwhelmed by vertigo, emphasizing his new deafness. He is so high up that he can see the blue-black of the aether surrounding Earth and the curve of the planet. He despairs of finding his way across this new half of the world he doesn’t know, to meet wise men whom he can no longer hear, to find an artifact he doesn’t understand because he cannot translate God’s words upon the kabalistic tablets.

Malgus returns from a foray with two large backpacks that had been hidden in the temple. He straps one on, demanding with gestures that Hethor do the same. Hethor dons the pack as Malgus suddenly sprints through one of the orchards toward a sheer cliff dropping over the edge of the world. Panicked, Hethor follows Malgus to see him falling through the air, arms spread out in the x shape of the clockwork Christ.

Hethor realizes that Malgus is wearing a parachute, like the sailors had used to dive from the decks of the Bassett sometimes. He refuses to jump, but realizes he cannot cross the brass desert of Earth’s gears by himself.

The furtive hairy men settle the issue, slipping through the orchard to push Hethor toward the edge. He realizes that he cannot stand against them all, turns and jumps into the void, following Malgus down through miles of atmosphere above the southern Earth.

After surfing the air for over an hour, Hethor’s terror has turned to boredom. He has become separated from Malgus by miles, but can still see the navigator when Malgus finally opens his parachute. Hethor tries to open his own parachute and discovers that he does not know how. Terror quickly returns. He plunges past Malgus, deeper and deeper into the atmosphere, heading for a point somewhere just off the coast of Africa — a continent Hethor has never seen on a map.

Hethor rolls over, facing back toward the Equatorial Wall, and uses the golden tablet he has been carrying as a heliograph, flashing messages for help high up toward the wall. Just before he strikes the water, a pair of winged savages seize Hethor in mid-plunge and bear him upward. The golden tablet tumbles loose, falling into the sea — Hethor has a second time lost the words of God, though they have saved his life.

The winged savages bear Hethor to a massive earthen work fortress amid the jungles at the foot of the Equatorial Wall. Making the trip, he passes over beautiful meadows, vast herds of animals, bucolic villages in little clearings. This is the paradise that Malgus describes.

Landing on the fortress walls, Hethor is greeted by a European, William of Ghent. Ghent provides food and wine and gracious hospitality, eventually explaining in gestures and writing to Hethor that he has a plan to save the world. Hethor’s new-found deafness is becoming a terrible impediment to his success.

As the archangel Gabriel had warned Hethor about William of Ghent, Hethor attends with a concealed mistrust. William argues that Earth is in thrall to a mechanistic Divine plan, and that the only way to free the world from stagnation and achieve man’s ultimate destiny is to throw off the tyranny of the clockwork of God. “Let the mainspring of the world wind down,” writes William on a sand table, “and see what new sun will rise in place of this imperfect lamp the Creator has set in our skies.”

Hethor cannot yet decide whether it is more important to find the Key Perilous or try to stop William of Ghent directly, so he assents to William’s offer to join in the great work. William takes Hethor deep into tunnels beneath his fortress, to an enormous door much like a bank vault. This is the beginning of Hethor’s initiation into the true ways of the world.

William opens the vault door and shows Hethor onto a high balcony. They are just at the roof of a vast cavern, that goes on into darkness farther than Hethor can see. Spread out below him is a spinning field of brass, moving so fast it can barely be seen. Still communicating through signs and writing, William tells Hethor that this is the first of nine shells that lie within the Earth, powered by mainspring of the world, and these are what keep the Earth rotating on its track.

As they stand there, another earthquake happens. The brass plain below Hethor stutters almost to a halt. In the confusion of the moment, Hethor shoves William over the balcony and onto the brass plain, which then groans back into motion, bearing the other man away into the darkness of the world.

Hethor flees back to surface, getting lost upon the way and having several run-ins with William’s servants. Exiting the front gates of the fortress, he finds a third golden tablet on the path in front him. This, Hethor resolves, he will not lose.

It now only remains for him to find the Key Perilous and restore order to the world. Carrying the tablet, he walks into the tropical jungle, striking for the coast and figuring to eventually find the southern wise men, and though he does not care much for Simeon Malgus, he must find the navigator as well. As he fights his way through the jungle, Hethor finds that he can once again hear, but now there are rhythms he has never before known. Hethor realizes that he is hearing the ticking of clockwork of the world, and the brassy music of the spheres.

After days of struggle and attacks by wild beasts, Hethor arrives in a jungle village of Australopithecines, still carrying his tablet. Because he can now hear the music of the spheres, he hears the little hairy men click and whir when they move, as if they are but automata as well. Since these are the first people Hethor has encountered since his hearing changed, he isn’t sure if this is true of everyone.

The Australopithecines see Hethor’s tablet, and bow down to worship him. He has no language in common with them, but eventually convinces them that he needs a boat, and transport to the coast. He is taken down the river in a fleet of canoes, decked with flowers, the headman’s daughter Orilla in attendance on him.

Riding along, Hethor is finally able to again work on the translation of the tablet. Though his books and references were lost on the Bassett, Hethor finds he is more readily able to read the kabalistic signs — perhaps an extension of the same new power that changed his hearing.

Even translated, the tablet is cryptic. “The heart of God is the heart of the world,” it reads. “As man lives, so lives God. As God lives, so lives the world.” This is scandalously heretical, comparing man to God, and fairly nonsensical to boot.

Orilla and the Australopithecines bring Hethor to a megalithic city built of impossibly large standing stones. It sits at the mouth of a great river, the greatest Hethor has ever seen, with rings of walls within walls and high towers reaching toward the sky, topped with orrerys and great wheels of brass in imitation of God’s design of the cosmos.

The city is inhabited by impossible tall folk with skin the color of the darkest coffee — Hethor has never before seen such people. They are more alien to him than the hairy men. Every man seems to be a sorcerer, every woman a witch. Hethor hears the click music from each of them, just as he does from the hairy men. He walks the streets, trailed by his hairy followers, but no one will acknowledge him.

Hethor finally makes his way to an enormous square in the center of town to find Simeon Malgus there, chained to the top of a stone pillar. Hethor indicates his distress to the Australopithecines, who swarm up the pillar and free Malgus, though they are not strong enough to carry him down, so Malgus falls and is mortally injured.

Dying, Malgus tells Hethor that he is a fool to believe in anything. There is no God, only an uncaring mechanistic universe, no divine plan for the world. The gears and trackways of the heavens are just a grand illusion, one that William of Ghent will dispel with his powers. As Malgus finally expires, a small brass spring pops from his mouth.

Hethor leaves Malgus’ body at the base of the pillar, realizes that he will get no help from the Jade Abbot’s wise men of the south, and decides that he must find the mainspring of the world for himself. Being a one-time clockmaker’s apprentice, Hethor knows perfectly well the mainspring must be in line with the poles. He heads for the harbor, and with his loyal Australopithecines, battles to steal an airship from the city of the proud sorcerers.

Bound for the South Pole, Hethor’s airship is shadowed by the winged savages, but they do not approach too close. In the passage, he and Orilla become lovers, Hethor losing his virginity. Between nights of passion and days of worry, Hethor studies the message of the tablet, and realizes that even the wind sounds like clockwork to him now. Another earthquake happens below him, sending titanic waves crashing into the African coast Hethor is following.

Hethor arrives over the Antarctic continent to see great, towering cities of ice below him. He does not dare touch down, preferring to push onward. Earthquakes continue below him, and the days are getting longer out of proportion to the change of seasons — Earth’s rotation is in fact slowing. The moon has vanished from the sky as well, interrupted in its motions so that even the tides have been lost. He can only imagine the chaos back in America and Europe.

Flying across the southern ice cap, the airship is finally attacked by the winged savages. They bring it down, killing most of Hethor’s Australopithecine crew and injuring him. He loses the last tablet in the wreck, but the message about the heart of God is graven in his own memory.

Ill-prepared for the conditions, crippled by the wreck, attended by Orilla and a last few of his servants, Hethor treks southward across the ice. They are all close to dying when Hethor sits down and prays to the Archangel Gabriel to save them. He reaches for a voice that matches the clicking music he now hears, straining above the howling wind and the freezing pain of his body to send his voice toward Gabriel and God.

As he prays, the physical world becomes less substantial, everything around Hethor waving to clockwork. He reaches out, touching that clockwork, and resets some of the local escapement gears. Coming out of his trance, Hethor finds himself in a field of brilliant poppies, howling snow still a quarter mile away. A sunlit path of flowers stretches before him, southbound to the pole.

In extremis, Hethor has become a sorcerer in his own right.

Hethor and his party finally reach the South Pole. A titanic brass shaft towering a mile or more erupts from the ground, now surrounded by blooming flowers, though it has frost on its side further up. Great balancing weights whirl around the shaft, which is supported by a four-footed frame grounded in the ice and snow around them. Hethor approaches the shaft, finds a spiral metal stair that descends into the Earth winding around the course of the shaft.

He turns to bid farewell to the Australopithecines. They cannot follow him into the dangerous depths of the Earth. Key Perilous or not, Hethor must find the mainspring of the world and set things right.

The hairy men make a camp to await his return, all but Orilla, who insists on accompanying Hethor. After arguing fruitlessly, he relents. They rest a while, then descend into the whirling depths of the clockwork Earth.

The stairs spiral through layers of rock, brass and crystal, past veins of gold and silver and enormous gearwork. Partway down, Hethor and Orilla are attacked by automatons like those he had met at the Equatorial Wall — servants of William of Ghent.

Still injured, Hethor cannot fight them physically, but he uses his newfound powers in a terrific battle on the stairs. Orilla is injured as well, so that when the fighting is over, Hethor must carry her on his back like a child.

He limps onward, only to meet the Archangel Gabriel again. Gabriel urges Hethor to turn back, tells him that without the Key Perilous, there is no hope of winding the mainspring. Orilla whispers in Hethor’s ear, in her language of which he has learned a little, warning him that Gabriel is playing him false. Hethor pushes the Archangel aside with his magical powers, only to have Gabriel explode in a cloud of wheels and gears, slashing Hethor’s skin in dozens of places.

Bleeding, still carrying Orilla, Hethor stumbles forward until he meets the third guardian of the stairs. This time it is William of Ghent, bruised, battered, and a man at the height of the powers Hethor has only begun to discover.

William is both angry and sorrowful, treating with Hethor as if he were a wayward child. God, William explains, has abandoned His creation and man must free himself to find his own way.

Hethor counters with message from the tablet — The heart of God is the heart of the world. As man lives, so lives God. As God lives, so lives the world.” How can God have vanished when man lives on in the world?

William argues that Creation is a fraud, the horofixion of Christ on the Roman gear-and-wheel is a fraud, and that Hethor is a fool who stands in the way of progress.
They finally come to blows, both physical and metaphysical, and Hethor is quickly bested. William of Ghent stands over him, ready to plunge a brass rod into Hethor’s heart, when Orilla attacks him from behind. The two of them plunge over the railing of the steps to fall screaming down the shaft leading to heart of the world.

Heartsick and wounded, Hethor picks himself up. He doesn’t know about the key anymore, he doesn’t know about God, Gabriel was a fraud, but he goes onward to find the body of his beloved Orilla, in hopes that his new powers can work a miracle and save her.

After a hellish descent through fire, ice and brass, Hethor finally arrives at heart of the world. The shaft around which he has been winding plunges into a vast coiled spring, that must be a thousand miles wide, Hethor realizes as he stands on a catwalk at the foot of the spiral stairs. Even if he did have the Key Perilous, how would he wind such a monstrous thing?

He finds no trace of William of Ghent, but Orilla’s body lies on the spring just below the catwalk. It is a great metal coil edge-up to him, and the bands are loosening even as he looks down. Orilla’s body will still plunge between the bands to be lost in black depths of the spring. Hethor prepares to drop down to her when William calls to him from further down the catwalk.

“You will not pass me,” William says. “I am the guardian of the winding shaft.”

Hethor sees that William, injured in his fall, has become a horror of flesh and metal. He only recognizes William by the voice, and the pale eyes that blaze with a fierce hatred. William again challenges Hethor, inviting him to battle.

Hethor’s anger flares, and he again summons his powers. But then he looks down at Orilla, lying dead upon the widening spring, and thinks on the words of the tablet. “As man lives, so lives God,” he tells William. “I will fight you no more. I follow my heart.”

Hethor drops from the catwalk to the surface of the spring. He balances on the narrow edges even as they spread apart, while William attacks from above, hurling gobbets of flesh and metal fragments. Hethor picks up his beloved, cradles her tiny body in his arms, then is driven to his knees by William’s attack. The spring yawns wider before him, a metal-lined crevasse into which he could simply tip forward and die with Orilla.

“The heart of God is the heart of the world,” Hethor tells himself. “As man lives, so lives God. As God lives, so lives the world. I choose to live the way I will.”

He reaches into his powers to restore life to Orilla. William has begun to fling sorcerous bolts along with junk and offal, but Hethor takes the blows. He pours his own heart into his beloved, trying to restart the clockwork hum that powers her and restore her broken body.

In a rattle of gears, God touches Hethor then, very briefly, and Orilla is restored. The mainspring of the world snaps shut onto itself, trapping Hethor’s right leg as he slips with the motion. The pain is excruciating, but his beloved is whole.

On the catwalk above, William of Ghent bursts into flames, becoming a creature of fractals and random motion — the Divine Adversary in person, the opposite of the orderliness of God’s world. Hethor smiles at the Adversary and opens up his own heart, plunging his hand into his own chest to pull out a small crystal key.

“The Key Perilous,” Hethor tells the Adversary. “Love is the heart of God.”

Bleeding, broken, trapped, he collapses into a blessed darkness while the Adversary crackles in flame and Orilla sobs out her own heart’s pain.

#

Hethor awakens to see the jeweled Earth hanging before him, the great brass gear around her equator sparkling in the sunlight. The flickering lamps of the stars are clearly visible, and when he looks around, he realizes that he is on the Moon — he is surrounded by silver forests of bamboo and lakes of quicksilver, pale deer darting through the brush while albino swans wing overhead.

The Archangel Gabriel is seated on a gray boulder nearby, the real Archangel, not the winged savage Hethor defeated on the stairs. Gabriel asks Hethor if he is ready to be with God. Hethor says no, he has a life and love on Earth. Gabriel warns Hethor that if he returns, he will be a powerless cripple.

“Send me back to Orilla,” Hethor says, and finds himself in Orilla’s jungle village.

Though Orilla’s people tell time by the clattering gears in the sky, Hethor sets to making clocks, and takes his new wife as his apprentice. He hangs the wheel-and-gear of the horofixion in his little hut, but without the usual Christ figure. Enough people have died for enough sins, Hethor tells himself. It is time to get on with, well, time.

Hethor knows that the mainspring at the heart of the world ticks on, though he can no longer hear the clicking music of the spheres.

# # #

jackwilliambell

Note that this is a rather old outline, from a time before I’d sold any novels, and I’ve never tried to market or write this book, other than a couple of short stories drawn from the backstory. Enjoy this for what it is, an early-career Jay Lake idea that never made it into production, and a mediocre example of the art of outlining.

And the outline…

The Story

Nikola Tesla has escaped from the afterlife into the present day, aided by Harry Houdini and a sixteenth century Scottish priest, Oliver St. Clair. From his hidden volcano base in Venezuela, a superannuated Guglielmo Marconi emerges to challenge Tesla.

Tesla and Marconi fight a series of increasingly destructive battles using their respective secretly-developed superweapons. Armed with the Spear of Longinus, a powerful Christian artifact, Houdini and Derryn Corph (a former servant of the Welsh god of the dead) join forces to defeat the titans of invention as the two great and vengeful men wreak havoc over New York City with coruscating death rays.

The Supporting Characters

Oliver St. Clair is the last rector of Rosslyn Chapel, secret refuge of the Knights Templar after their dissolution in 1312 and home to their greatest treasures — the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus, that pierced Christ’s side while He was on the cross.

In 1592, the Scottish presbytery forces St. Clair to break the altars. He takes the Spear and flees into exile in Wales. In 1600, the deposed Welsh god Hagfan tricks St. Clair into surrendering the Spear. St. Clair is slain and sent to Annuvin, the Welsh afterlife, a dank world devoid of souls due to the Christianization of Wales.

Hagfan is the Welsh god thrown down by the god Arawn in the fifth century. He has remained in Wales ever since, with his few loyal servants such as Derryn Corph and the Koblynau — Welsh goblins. Seeking a return to power, he secures the Spear of Longinus, but as a Christian artifact it does him no good.

Hagfan takes the Spear and emigrates to America with Welsh miners in the nineteenth century. Tesla begins his experiments in broadcast power at Colorado Springs in 1899, attracting the god’s attention. Hagfan meets Tesla, bargaining for a corporeal form for Derryn Corph and greater power for himself in exchange for the spear. Tesla builds Derryn Corph into a steam-powered wooden bird, then betrays Hagfan, slaying him and taking the Spear. In dying, Hagfan transfers his aspect to Tesla.

Heroes and Villains

Derryn Corph (Welsh for ‘corpse bird’) is Hagfan’s loyal servant of yore. Traditionally a psychopomp, guiding the souls of the dead to Annuvin, she has become his lieutenant.

After Tesla embodies her and slays the god, she flees back to Pennsylvania, where she hides in the Alleghenies with the Koblynau until Tesla’s return from Annuvin. She takes to the air with the aid of some ordinary mortals and eventually joins forces with Houdini to defeat both Tesla and Marconi.

Guglielmo Marconi, Italian engineering genius and supposed inventor of radio actually misappropriated Tesla’s wireless patents. In 1937, he fakes his own death to secretly battle the rise of European facism.

Ensconced in his secret volcano base in Venezuela, Marconi goes on to develop functional immortality, antigravity — also stolen from Tesla — and numerous beam weapons, single-handedly driving the UFO craze in the second half of the twentieth century. All the while, Marconi maintains his connections with world governments, supplying research and exotic weaponry at need.

When Tesla reappears, Marconi is forced to engage him in an effort to protect the old Italian’s own secrets. Their fight quickly becomes personal due to Tesla’s old grudge, and is eventually the ruin of Marconi.

Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss) is history’s greatest magician. During an underwater escape in the Hudson River, he goes awry and is trapped beneath the ice. His mother’s voice guides Houdini to the hole in the surface. Later, he learns that she had died that day.

Houdini spends the rest of his life searching for a medium with true powers so he can once more talk to his mother, debunking those he discovers to be frauds. Even his pointless and untimely death in 1926 at the hands of a Canadian athlete does not interrupt this quest. Houdini merely uses his amazing powers of escape to travel through the various afterlives, still searching for his mother.

Houdini finally stumbles on Tesla sitting in Annuvin, alone except for Oliver St. Clair and the Spear of Longinus, which Tesla brought with him into death. Houdini is able to use the Spear as a key to unlock the gates of Annuvin. He finally escapes death, bringing Tesla and St. Clair with him.

Once in the world of the living, Tesla seeks Derryn Corph, intending to set the stage for his new triumphant return. He and Houdini quarrel, driving Houdini and St. Clair to escape with the Spear and ultimately ensuring Tesla’s downfall.

Nikola Tesla is the Serbian-American engineering genius who invented alternating current and radio. In life he was cheated of millions by Edison and Westinghouse both, before leaving the world of power generation behind to pursue his dream of broadcast and the World System, a sort of early 1900′s version of the Internet.

He meets and slays Hagfan while on that project. Possession by the aspect of the god unhinges Tesla, who returns to New York to fritter away his life on exotic secret projects and money-making schemes. In his secret underground laboratory on Long Island, Tesla builds endless prototypes of aerial transports, death rays and the like, but never brings the plans to fruition.

Obsessed by the Spear of Longinus, Tesla finally dies, an old man friend only to the pigeons. To his great surprise, his soul descends to Annuvin, home of Hagfan, where the Spear has no power. He meets Oliver St. Clair, whom Tesla quickly bullies into submission.

They are eventually freed by Houdini, enabling Tesla to embark on his ascending rampage of vengeance and conquest until finally defeated the courage and fortitude of Derryn Corph and Harry Houdini.

Summary

This story roams across time, through Wales, Venezuela and across the United States, to a mythic clash of modern titans of engineering. In the end, simple virtues and strong hearts, along with a strong dose of luck, prevail over scientific genius and butter grudges.

Oliver St. Clair is the reader’s view into the story and the characters, constantly questioning from the perspective of an educated man of his century, but Derryn Corph is the true hero who rises above her limitations and risks everything to save a rationalist modern world that does not even accept her existence.

Alternating Current is an exciting tale of life, death and world-spanning pride set against humble courage.

kellymccullough

What I’d meant to talk about was a fairly narrow (if possibly widespread) issue of allowing a new idea to distract you from an existing one while in the middle of a writing project, specifically a novel-length project. This is a common enough symptom of muddle-in-the-middle, wherein about a third to halfway through the writing process, the manuscript feels tedious, pedestrian and boring. Your subconscious is looking for excuses to bolt at that point. Many if not most writers go through that experience. The point I was after was not to let the new shiny pull you off the current project. That’s bad discipline, and as you can neither revise nor sell an incomplete manuscript, it’s bad for your career.

kellymccullough pointed out quite rightly that one can write oneself into a corner with respect to craft issues, lacking perhaps the right tools to do proper justice to an idea. Forcing yourself to keep working on a manuscript you’re not ready to finish can be self-defeating as well. Knowing the difference between distraction and an intractable writing problem is of course a challenge.

I myself have dealt with this. As I said to Kelly in comments:

And to be clear, I have one major unfinished novel that’s been on my desk for the better part of the last decade, for exactly the reason you describe. (It’s Original Destiny, Manifest Sin.) At that time, I didn’t have the professional tools to finish what I started back around 2004. But I didn’t abandon that novel because I had a better idea — which, you’ll note, is specifically the issue I address in the post — I set it aside until my professional development as a writer let me come back to it. And ODMS is the next novel on my writing schedule after I wrap the Sunspin cycle.

Original Destiny, Manifest Sin was simply beyond me at the time that I began writing the book. That’s perhaps the strongest novel idea I’ve ever had, but needed me to be a stronger writer to address it. As I’ve observed elsewhere, I realize a while back that in some important senses, the entire Sunspin project is a warm-up for returning to ODMS. This has to do with my control of structure and character in a highly multithreaded storytelling environment.

Likewise, back to my original point about stopping work, there are life crises that represent a legitimate and even necessary halt to writing. This was discussed by valarltd and cathshaffer. My own cancer treatments have done this to me. I cannot write for several weeks after general anesthetic, nor can I write after the first two or three months of chemotherapy. My right brain goes into vapor lock in a big way. In ordinary life, I’ve never been blocked for longer than a weekend in the past decade. If I get stalled on a project, I shift gears and write a short story or some such to clear my head. Then I keep going. But not with cancer. I don’t have those choices. Likewise the serious illness or death of a family member can throw you off. Not finishing a manuscript under those circumstances isn’t a failure of discipline, it’s a recognition of the pressure of life crisis.

My point being to clarify yesterday’s post — sometimes there are reasons to abandon a project. Simply falling in love with another idea is very rarely one of them. Discipline is still important, critical even, but as I’ve often said, there is no canonical writing advice except “write more”. “Finish what you start” is pretty high up on the list, but it’s still context dependent.

I have to say people, finish what you start. There’s always a shinier idea somewhere ready to come along and grab you by the shoulder. That’s the nature of our imaginations, and it’s a normal part of writing avoidance.

Look at me, now, with a 600,000 word project on my desk of which I’ve written 200,000 words only to be interrupted by chemotherapy. How could I possibly manage such a project if every neat idea I had in the mean time interrupted me?

Furthermore, if you don’t finish what you start, you’ve got nothing to sell. Six or eight or ten unfinished novels are worth less than one finished novel. Heck, an infinite number of unfinished novels are worth less than one finished novel. If you don’t have the discipline to follow through an idea when the middle gets muddled and draggy and boring (and they all do that when you’re in the middle of writing a novel), you don’t have the discipline to be an author.

I’ve written through parenting crisis, emotional disasters, mental stress and distress including anxiety and depression, busy times at work, illness, you name it. In the eleven years since I became a pro, chemotherapy and surgery are the only things that have been able to stop me cold, and believe me, if I could find a way around that, I would. There are no excuses except the ones you make up for yourself. Even with chemotherapy and surgery these past two years, I’ve managed about 250,000 words of first draft each year.

If you want to be an author, finish the project. Then write the next project. Being a pro is that simple, and it’s that hard.

What is it that stops you from writing?

I’ve never written a sequel or a continuation of a series, so this is new territory for me.

My response to this was:

I have been quite surprised by the change in my technique and internal thought processes brought about by writing second and third books in series (or at least in continuity). You will be too, I am confident.

This has got me thinking about those second and third books. Last year while I was drafting Kalimpura, the third book in the Green cycle, I made a passing observation on this topic [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]:

This is the second time I’ve written a third book in series. (Pinion being the other, of course.) As I believe I observed while writing Pinion, it’s a rather different experience that writing a standalone or initial book. So much of the worldbuilding, characterization and discovery is in place. I have to touch on bits of it so a reader who’s starting with this book won’t be lost, but I have it internalized. That means that writing this book is a different experience for me. I am far more focused on plot and inter-character dynamics because that other stuff is already in place and not crying for attention. And much as I had this experience with Pinion, I think it’s likely to make a somewhat different kind of book.

Now if I could only figure out how to deliberately leverage this phenomenon in future projects.

Well, since then I’ve outlined all three volumes of Sunspin in one go, deliberately designing them to work as a three-book project. Which is, or should be, me attempting to deliberately leverage this phenomenon in a future project.

In a nutshell, I think it does come down to what I said before. After a first book has been written, much of the worldbuilding, characterization and discovery are in place. Unless the plot of the second book is “our heroes sail over the horizon to discover new, alien worlds”, it’s probably operating from much the same geography, culture and politics as the first book did. That means one’s focus as a writer actually narrows rather than broadens. We don’t have to do everything in the punch list for book 2 (or 3, or 23). There’s still a bit of obligatory effort to bring new readers up to speed, but mostly we can assume that anyone reading book 2 knows what the Castle of Inordinate Doom is, and what happened to the Lord of Bright Shadows in book 1. That means we don’t have to set all that stuff up again.

Fine. So far, so obvious. But what does this do the writing process, to address Greg’s not-quite-a-question?

I think first of all we have to make different kinds of promises to the reader. Book 1, any book 1, is in part saying, “Hey, look at me!” They usually begin with something sharp and memorable, a clash of cymbals to grab the readers’ attention and say, “Hey, I’m worth the next few hours or days of your free time.” Book 2 is saying, “Welcome back, old friend.” Reader trust already exists, at least in principle, and while it needs to be sustained, it doesn’t need to be re-established from scratch. That allows a lot more room to maneuver in building the opening scenes, which can serve different purposes in a book 2 than in a book 1.

Likewise how the characters are introduced and what is done with them. Subtlety and depth come to the forefront, in favor of the broad strokes often used to establish a brand-new protagonist. A book 2 character has a shared history with the reader, an account balance of well-established words and deeds and emotions that can be drawn on. They enter the stage differently.

Finally, as alluded to above, the need not to explain so much is powerful. The tapestry is already woven from book 1. We can assume so much more, and only introduced those things which are changing, as well as those things to either elucidate or camouflage the changes. It shifts the art and craft of world building significantly, allow tighter focus on selected elements, given what can be assumed the reader has brought forward from book 1.

Emphasis and focus can make book 2 as different from book 1 as book 1 was from some discovery short story that originally introduced the character and setting. It’s a softer, subtler art. The character and plot loom larger in the writer’s mind, written as they are across the established setting and tone.

Greg, does this make it any easier?

Back? Good. Did you notice my comment on Richard’s post? Here it is again, in case you missed it:

One comment I make about the connection (or lack thereof) between short fiction and novels is that they’re like cabinet making and framing carpentry. Related in some obvious ways — wood, saws, hammers, whatnot — but very different arts requiring very different skills. Some transference of skill is possible, but there are people who are cabinet makers, there are people who are framing carpenters, and there are certain people (myself included) who can do both. One does not, however, inherently or readily lead to the other.

The question is usually framed as something on the order of, “Do I have to publish short stories in order to break in as a novelist?” It’s usually asked by an aspiring writer of some crusty old novelist (well, crusty if we haven’t showered recently), usually at a convention, perhaps during a panel session, perhaps in the bar. I think Richard’s post does a terrific job of answering the question, but I want to pick at my cabinet making versus framing carpentry metaphor again.

In a sense, that metaphor is obvious to the point of crude. Writing short stories and writing novels are both crafts that require mastery of character, setting, plot, style, usage and so forth. Those tools, while not identically deployed, are sufficiently similar as to be almost interchangeable, at least up to a point. A hammer is, in a sense, a hammer, after all. But the creative wood we work in each pursuit is a different grade, cut to different tolerances, and used to very different ends. And its the uses of those wood that influence the uses of those tools.

Take character arc. A novel is a journey, almost always. If nothing else, there’s hundreds of pages for the reader to pass through. Hundreds of pages for a character to emerge, be established, develop or elucidate their stakes, try and fail in hopefully spectacular ways, and eventually seek a resolution and a validation. There’s room to breathe, room for expansion and digression, room for the character to grow and change in unexpected ways, influenced by other characters, by the plot, by their own inner demons.

If a novel is a journey, a short story is a quick stopover. Grand events are almost always off the page in a short story, present in the backstory or by implication, or perhaps briefly glimpsed in the course of the story. The characters arrive all but fully formed, fleshed out from the moment they hit the page. They don’t have time or room to develop a full arc. Short stories typically focus on a single or very limited set of plot elements, and the characters’ responses to them. The character arrives extant, encounters the situation, resolves it perhaps with a moment of enlightenment or epiphany, and moves on past the ending to some other, hidden part of their life.

The writerly tools and skills required to propel and motivate a character through that novelistic arc are very different from the tools and skills required to march a character through a short story arc. The sheer scope of things places different demands on the characters and the author alike.

The same distinction applies to plot, setting and all the other bones and bits from which we assemble story in all its manifold forms. All of which is to say, Parks is right. If you have what it takes to be a good short story writer, write good short stories. Use those tools well. If you have what it takes to be a good novelist, write good novels. Use those tools well.

I suppose where the question still applies as an open issue is a newer writer feeling their way into the craft who wonders which way to go. Assuming you have roughly equivalent talents in both directions and your quandary is over which way to jump, it becomes a question of personal preference and career direction. That’s a huge discussion of its own, in its own right, a topic I’ll address at another time.

Your thoughts? Questions? Comments? Better metaphors?

A challenge of written SF nowadays is describing setting to a reading audience conditioned to visual marvels in television and movies.

There was a fairly interesting thread of comments on Facebook in response to this, including a fascinating digression on Herman Melville.

I’ve been thinking since about what this means for fiction writers. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Changes in media or technology change reader expectations, because they change reader experiences. Movies, radio, television: all three must have really altered reader experiences. Sometimes they change writers as well — for example, the introduction of the typewriter apparently had significant effects on sentence structure in novels. Not to mention what the changes in revision process from longhand to typescript must have been.

As for special effects, I’m sure this is at least partially observer bias on my part, given my age, but it seems to me that the modern era of special effects began with Star Wars in 1977, and it’s only been amped up ever since. The visual influence of movies from Bladerunner to Gattaca has been pervasive. A writer cannot help but be subject to the audience expectation that’s been set in the visual media.

Personally, I often run to set-piece descriptions of new settings, and can be guilty of ornate overdetailing in close scenes. I’m not sure those are the correct responses. As a writer, I cannot compete with ILM, and there’s small point in even trying to do so. As a writer, it’s my job to build a word picture than can translate into the reader’s own sense of wonder, whatever their influences are. That my readers and I largely share a cultural grammar of film and television should just be a tool in my toolbox.

But it’s still a challenge to wow someone who’s seen Fifth Element with baroque marquetry, or to impress a fan of Alien with a dank, gothic starship on the page. The greatest sin would be to create a cheap imitation.

It still amuses me that now, ten years after that first sale and twenty-one years after I got serious about trying to be an author, some people still seem to think I was some sort of overnight success. That’s a long damned night. I am who I am today in my writing life and in the field because of years of toiling alone in complete obscurity, then slowly engaging and emerging into the company of writers as I earned my place with my efforts.

Do I have talent? In all honesty, I rather think I do. But talent wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere without all those years of perseverance.

Do I have an easy, extroverted personality that helps me fit in and get along with damned near everybody who bothers to try to get along with me? Well, yes, but that’s an artefact of my middle age and has nothing to do with the millions of words of first draft I’ve written. I was for many years young, socially awkward and unpublished.

Do I have good connections in the field? Yes, now after twenty-one years of effort, countless hours at conventions and workshops, and many publications in most of our major and independent markets. I didn’t get published because I know people. I know people because I got published. A lot of times over the years.

Everything I’ve earned, my publications, my public persona in the field, my network of friends and associates: it all comes down to perseverance. Writing. Constantly. Last year, with six months of chemotherapy and a round of liver surgery slowing me down, not to mention a full-time job I never took off from during my illness and a teen-aged daughter in the house, I still wrote a quarter million words of first draft, and roughly that much again in blogging. Which wouldn’t be a bad total for a full-time writer working with no major distractions. This year’s numbers will be fairly similar, under fairly similar circumstances. That’s what keeps earning me my place at the table. Not talent, or being fun at parties and a dab hand with a microphone, or knowing a bunch of writers and editors. Writing.

Writing.

If you want to see your work published, be on panels, emcee the Hugos, get to know your writing heroes, all the fun stuff that goes with being a working writer, then, well, write. And write more. I’ve been doing it for two decades, and am still just as serious and hard-working as I was back at the beginning. More serious and hard-working, frankly. 1990 me would have been appalled at the prospect of writing an entire 250,000 words in year. 2011 me is appalled at writing only 250,000 words in a year.

Write more. Keep writing. Everything else flows from that.