This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
some general comments:
And on exposition - First decide who you are writing for. Greg Egan writes for quite a different audience compared to Watts. If you are going for a niche audience like Egan then you're going to need to find beta readers who are part of that audience.
If you are writing for a more general audience like Watts then I don't like a lot of this exposition. If you study the way Watts provides info, it is relevant to the narrative, and expressed in a way that allows a non-expert to understand it. This is part of the skill of this type of science fiction writing, taking some obscure speculative science concept and presenting it in a way that is comprehensible and evocative, such that it is a crucial part of the story and the audience is actually interested in how it works for that reason.
A couple of examples - I don't understand why you tell us the orbital parameters of planet nine when introducing it. Even if the semi-major axis is somehow crucial to the story later on, readers are not going to remember that. Also, being more evocative with the detail that you do provide - "semi-major axis of 545 AU" vs, for example, "the Sun hung as one pinprick amongst thousands; Planet Nine was brushing the apex of its orbit, over five hundred times further from its parent than Earth." Sometimes I felt like I was reading an excerpt from a scientific paper, not prose.
Second example, the cortical modems, which are cool, but when you introduce them we get a bunch of jargon about how they work before you actually show us their effects in prose. In my opinion this should always be the other way around. Show us what it does, and then the audience thinks, oh, this is cool, I wonder how it works, then you can bust out the exposition (woven into the narrative in a comprehensible and evocative way, of course, rather than all dumped at once).
All just my two cents of course.
More options
Context Copy link