Day off

Done with all school assignments, so I've decided to take a day off of narrative and work on background stuff. I'm going to flesh out aliens.

Why? I'm getting to the part where the racketeers are playing a bigger role before they croak. I need to know more than "person in an alien suit and what the alien suit looks like," which is the technique I have been mostly using. That won't fly with the science fiction crowd. The second reason is I think I've been giving the forensics a short shrift mainly to avoid the different biologies. While I don't want to stumble into hard science fiction, I do want to make sure everything gels. Third reason, the blue skinned people who I initially conceived of as filling the place that humans fill in most other science fiction space stories (Star Wars and Star Trek for example) need to be named. I'm tired of them not having a name. Fourth reason, I'm embarrassed by the section I just finished writing, where the aliens are barely described as well as not named.

So aliens. If the scheduled outage doesn't interfere, I may have something to put on Discipline Under Fire.

8:57 pm update: The paying job conspired to make me do most of this at home along with rereading Aliens and Alien Societies by Stanley Schmidt. The first bit is on planet building though not to the same level as World Building by Stephen L. Gillett. I decied to go with it because it has been onver a year since I read this book, and I take the reader to other worlds. Sketching worlds out now for later fleshing out might not be so bad.

So I what I spent a couple of hours tonight doing was combing the manuscript for alien races. I'm up to 16 named alien species plus three described that I don't think I've named yet. Man, I love my P'kins inserts! IF I managed to finish this thing and get a series published and they make me take them out; I'm so doing her guidebook for the series in her voice with her title.

Moving back to current problems, I copied what I had in manuscript to the new Aliens file, but haven't progressed further than that. And now Mustard is jumping in front of the monitor to tell me to get off the computer. Mez, what I'll probably end up doing is post the alien stuff as I finish a species to Discipline Under Fire and turn the comments on for that post so you can tell me where I'm being really unscientific. So I'm off to bed, with book in tow to at least finish the chapter and jot down the specifics that I will then translate to questions for the file.

Read Free!
The BookWorm

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