The BLAND Corporation

-"This is all your fault."- "Gubarev ... shut up," she says, her voice muffled by the gas mask. Alone, in full hazmat suit, peering over a table where pieces that were once Hendrix slosh in crystalizing intestinal sludge, she doesn't need anyone else's mental excreta. Even if the suspicion there may be some truth to his words eats away at her nerves. Indeed, how did this happen? The sample she took from NECA sits safely inside a freezer. The med/bio lab, now under Dezaki's watch, shows no sign of damage. Ballard, in the physics lab where the two alien boxes are stored, also reported nothing suspicious yet. It's only here, in the communications room, that ... something ... took root. Next to Hendrix, what's left of the ship's radiotransmitter- their link to Earth- lies broken, myriad transparent spikes having torn it apart. A hole and ripped wires in the wall where the transmitter used to be, a clue of the desperate measures to contain t...

{parts 1 and 2 } The torches on their helmets waver in NECA’s night. A second later and their shine resumes upon the metal surface of the airlock. Ballard shrugs. “I’m afraid there’s still some electromagnetic leakage.” “That thing better not fry my microcomms,” Hendrix says. “They’re too small for the wavelengths in the pulse,” Ballard replies. “Indeed, I believe that they will-” he presses a button on a device the size and shape of a wristwatch “- be just fine.” Another second of uncertain torchlight as the alien keybox sends a new pulse towards NECA. The airlock opening widens a bit more, now large enough to fit two people. Good enough, they’ll only climb in one at a time anyway. She goes first, to find some spots to anchor a rope to help them climb back up again. Hendrix follows, setting a couple more devices like the one Ballard used to control the box- little communication relays to keep them in touch with the ship. There is no need for her to babysit him ...

Author note: the text, as it appears on the WaD site (but without notes). Part 1 is here . Sunlight reflects off her gold coated visor. A tether links her to the ship, balanced in pseudo-stationary orbit between the hub and torus. Seventy kilometers below, on NECA’s surface, noon gives way to dusk. It will be thirteen minutes till next midday. Away from the Sun, frozen specks of light break the monotony of vacuum, luminous dots so distant they might as well be within reach. Beyond certain scales, the mind ceases comprehension. More real to her is NECA, its net of tubing wrapped around the gently spinning torus, its swirl of pipes that revealed an entrance. Her target two kilometers above, the hub seventy below, she floats alone, in emptiness, with no support. There is no fear, only inertia and gravity, and she is their plaything. She fires the thrusters on her suit, to remind physical law she has some say in the proceedings. –”How are we doing doctor Evans?”– captain Ch...

 Author note: the text of my first submission for the writing course over at WriteAboutDragons, in all its warty glory. I got three reviews of it- they were all kinder than my own, but one did point out similar troubles of (character) description. Anyways, I'll be combing this later. Onwards with the text ... -:-:- A mechanical buzz summons her back to life. Hard to discern its source, either the timer, or blood resuming flow through long dormant veins. Aching head otherwise empty, she can’t remember any dream. Such a waste of three months of sleep, but the view outside the ship more than makes up for it. She rises on uncertain feet, muscles yet to adjust to the mock gravity of her spinning ship, sense of balance yet to be restored. Thoughts register- they’ve made it, alive- then vanish, muted by the sight of their destination. She’s one of the first, and maybe among the only, human beings to ever lay eyes on an alien craft. Enormous; even though still one hundred miles away...

First lecture is now online, the online writing course has officially started. Yay! So, what's so great about this? We'll have lectures each week, but we could have watched them on youtube. That however's not the point. Writing is not spectating. The idea is to have, each week, 1000-2000 words of a fiction piece, to submit to the other attendees for critique. Also, by the end of the course each attendee must have written a story of at least 30K words. There are about 10 course weeks. Right about now, the arithmetically minded notice a problem. 10 weeks, each with at most a 2000 word submission, translates to a 20K text. And indeed, Sanderson says, expect not to be able to show the complete story to the writing group during the course. But I'd really like to. Fortunately, one of my bad habits comes to the rescue. It appears my first drafts are very sketchy; they rush from event to event, pausing little for description, say. Reviewers are likely to pick up on th...

Ya know the saying. And it appears that I'll have to apply it, which is annoying. I didn't submit writing to the course only to jerk it in self-reviews. But it looks like the only critical eyes that story got so far are my own, so I'll log my impressions. The good- there's a lot of potential for stuff to go wrong in the characters' worlds. Are those suspended animation capsules really all that reliable? What if at least some of the crew (like Gubarev, or the obsessive-compulsive Dezaki) really are losing it? The bit about what NECA wants to do hints at some suspense, and adds more stakes to the mission. So does Hendrix' comment that really everyone is in it for their own countries, which hints that, if the aliens turn out to be all dead, it will be a scramble for each nation to get as much as it can for itself alone. So the premise, on its own, seems ok. The less-good to bad: There's a lot of jump cutting. First scene, they look at NECA, the alien ob...

So I was writing part one of RwN, aiming to send it to that online course. There are several scenes in that part, between which I jump cut (more on that later). In this one particular scene, I have my protag training on a treadmill; see, she's not an astronaut and a bit self conscious about that. Her husband comes in to be flirty, so that I establish these two characters care for each other, and I also use this chance to drop in why my protag is here at all. She's a biologist who's discovered some pretty weird, previously unknown/unrecognizable life on Earth; so, basically, she has more experience of xenobiology than anyone, and she has been to various hard to get to places like deep seas and caves; she's quite physically fit already. And also not the only non-astronaut on board the ship; the other is one doctor who worked to develop the suspended animation. Maybe I should put the text (in its partial state, which is all it got) here, but I am a bit embarrassed to d...

With some fits and hiccups normal for a first go, the writing course at writeaboutdragons is going to start this coming Monday. Bit delayed, but that's expected, and what matters ultimately is getting some motivation to churn out text at a reliable rate. Which would be a first for me. Took me a long while to get the first instalment of Rendezvous with NECA uploaded, and further parts will not come easier, that's for sure. Speaking of which, while I did not do a detail outline, I did look more into what the story will turn out to be. And decided to abandon- or rather, shift- my initial direction. Let's see what happens. I have a good idea of the ending, and the beginning. Turns out I often do underpants gnome style plotting. The middle will be a problem. One of the characters in particular. Not all is peachy/hopeful though. One of the things with the course is that, supposedly, it allows people to get crits and tips from the other students. The site however is absolutely...