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there is no sense wasting a good handwave
Jan. 26th, 2010 12:22 amI love writing. It is so full of weird moments of serendipity.
For example, a week or so ago while working on my still-untitled Star Trek: AOS fic, I realized I needed to insert a handwave that explained why the Red Cross was using 20th century methods to find the cause of the plague on Simplicity. Rather than rewrite the scenes wholesale, I invented a mineral compound common on that planet that gets into people's bones and distorts tricorder scans. So far, so good.
But! It turns out that I need a rationale for the pirates to try landing on the planet after they've been told about the horrible plague -- because first, they don't know it's caused by parasites, and therefore have no reason to think it won't be contagious cross-species, and secondly, there is no point in gathering a cargo of slaves if they'll all die within the week -- and it occurred to me that a mineral that distorts scanning technology? Would be the next best thing to an actual Romulan cloaking device.
Pirate fleet invasion motive is GO. *grin*
(9,175 words so far! Also, I have been taking my vague "and then some stuff happens" plot sketch and turning it into a proper scene-by-scene outline for the final sections, because those need to be a lot tighter than the earlier parts of the story. So that is good; I like having a firmer sense of where the story is going.)
For example, a week or so ago while working on my still-untitled Star Trek: AOS fic, I realized I needed to insert a handwave that explained why the Red Cross was using 20th century methods to find the cause of the plague on Simplicity. Rather than rewrite the scenes wholesale, I invented a mineral compound common on that planet that gets into people's bones and distorts tricorder scans. So far, so good.
But! It turns out that I need a rationale for the pirates to try landing on the planet after they've been told about the horrible plague -- because first, they don't know it's caused by parasites, and therefore have no reason to think it won't be contagious cross-species, and secondly, there is no point in gathering a cargo of slaves if they'll all die within the week -- and it occurred to me that a mineral that distorts scanning technology? Would be the next best thing to an actual Romulan cloaking device.
Pirate fleet invasion motive is GO. *grin*
(9,175 words so far! Also, I have been taking my vague "and then some stuff happens" plot sketch and turning it into a proper scene-by-scene outline for the final sections, because those need to be a lot tighter than the earlier parts of the story. So that is good; I like having a firmer sense of where the story is going.)
