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Author Topic: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 24: Aftermath, *finished*)  (Read 14786 times)

JanusTwoface

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A Sea of Stars (Chapter 24: Aftermath, *finished*)
« on: August 28, 2012, 08:53:38 am »

Over a year ago now, I decided that I want to write. Not the little things that I'd been writing up until that point, but full novels. Twelve months and more than a million words later, I think that it’s about time to start actually posting them so people can read. After all, it doesn't do me much good just to keep them to myself. First up, I have A Sea of Stars, my try at science fiction. I've edited it somewhat, but it’ll probably still be rough at times. Feel free to leave comment either here or there about either content or grammar.

The goal is to post one chapter each morning on Tuesdays and Fridays. The entire thing should be available by the end of October.

Each post is going to be available first on my blog under Writing > Novels > A Sea of Stars. If RSS is more your thing, you can get one for just A Sea of Stars or including any future novels (at this point, I've finished two and am partway through two more). Alternatively, I’ll do my best to keep up an index here as well as in this post.

It should be an interesting time.



Table of Contents
Ch. 1 - Liftoff (forum post)
Ch. 2 - Borealis (forum post)
Ch. 3 - Inspection
Ch. 4 - Troubleshooting
Ch. 5 - Confession
Ch. 6 - Greetings
Ch. 7 - Impact
Ch. 8 - Counterpoint
Ch. 9 - Lies
Ch. 10 - Memories
Ch. 11 - Surprises
Ch. 12 - Eve
Ch. 13 - Missing
Ch. 14 - Madeline
Ch. 15 - Artifact
Ch. 16 - Collision
Ch. 17 - Darkness
Ch. 18 - Daedalus
Ch. 19 - Traitor
Ch. 20 - Spacewalk
Ch. 21 - Triage
Ch. 22 - Reboot
Ch. 23 - Trust
Ch. 24 - Aftermath



Edit: The first two chapters are available here on the forum, but I'm probably not going to post the rest here as it takes more time than I expected to format them nicely for both (and I'm too OCDish to just not format them). You can still read them on my blog with the links above and comment here, I'll respond to either.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2012, 10:57:34 am by JanusTwoface »
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JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #1 on: August 28, 2012, 08:54:24 am »

Spoiler: Ch. 1 - Liftoff (click to show/hide)

Edit 2012.08.31: a few minor grammatical changes
« Last Edit: August 31, 2012, 12:59:37 am by JanusTwoface »
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ansontan2000

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #2 on: August 28, 2012, 08:56:01 am »

I'll be watching this closely...
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AlStar

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #3 on: August 28, 2012, 02:06:33 pm »

Any reason you're not looking at publishing (either in dead tree or eBook format) instead of posting here/on your blog?

It sounds like you've put rather a lot of work into this (a million words?! That's several orders of magnitude longer then any single story I've written thus far!) it seems silly not to try and monetize that.

JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #4 on: August 28, 2012, 02:22:13 pm »

I'll be watching this closely...
I'll do my best not to disappoint then. :)

Any reason you're not looking at publishing (either in dead tree or eBook format) instead of posting here/on your blog?
I've considered that and at some point I probably will (via ebooks, probably on Amazon). Right now though, I'm still working on editing. The goal is to keep ahead of my posting schedule which is the main reason I'm doing two chapters per week rather than just dumping the entire thing. Perhaps if I finish ahead of time, I'll offer the option to buy the complete ebook from Amazon for anyone that's too impatient to wait otherwise.

It sounds like you've put rather a lot of work into this (a million words?! That's several orders of magnitude longer then any single story I've written thus far!) it seems silly not to try and monetize that.
As a disclaimer, the million words contains not only this but also another complete novel (also not yet edited which I'll likely serialize next), one that's about half done, and another that I've just started, along with a multitude of short stories, poetry, and other random writings. A Sea of Stars is "only" about 100,000 of those. (Although there's about 25k words part of the way through that I ended up scrapping completely when I decided to go another way with the story. Let me tell you, that's not a fun thing to do...)

My goal when I started last year was to write 2000 words per day, no matter what. They didn't have to be good words or even particular focused, I just had to write. I've kept it up pretty well for the most part, which makes it somewhat easier to hit that 1 million mark. :)
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LAAT501legion

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #5 on: August 28, 2012, 03:00:45 pm »

I you are planing to post it online, I suggest you get it copyrighted, I have seen a lot of bad stuff happen to artistic work posted online.
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JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #6 on: August 28, 2012, 03:24:11 pm »

I you are planing to post it online, I suggest you get it copyrighted, I have seen a lot of bad stuff happen to artistic work posted online.
Technically, under US law I gained the copyright as soon as I first published the work (and I have a year's worth of dated backup logs to prove it) although officially filing probably wouldn't hurt. It's on my list of things to look into.

More specifically, since it's being published on my blog, it's actually going to fall under the same Creative Commons license as the rest of my content: . That means that anyone is technically free to share the work, so long as if they do so it's under an equally permissive license, they link back to the original source (me), and they don't make any money off of it.

It may be a bit strange, but it turns out I'm not the only one that's done something like this. We'll see how it goes.
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Sirus

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #7 on: August 28, 2012, 03:31:11 pm »

Watching Reading this.
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AlStar

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #8 on: August 28, 2012, 04:00:06 pm »

A Sea of Stars is "only" about 100,000 of those.

Ah, well, only a single order of magnitude larger then. I'm afraid I'm no longer impressed.  :P

Otherwise, sounds like good stuff. I wish I could get myself to consistantly write (something other than forum posts) every day. I'd blame my job, but I didn't manage too well during the year I was unemployed either. Curse you Steam for your insane sale prices on games!

JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #9 on: August 31, 2012, 09:32:44 am »

Spoiler: Ch. 2 - Borealis (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: September 11, 2012, 01:07:53 pm by JanusTwoface »
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TSTwizby

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #10 on: August 31, 2012, 11:11:36 pm »

You said you don't mind criticism, so I'm here to criticize! Feel free to take it to heart or ignore it completely as you wish.

edit: Sorry, for some reason when I was looking at this the second chapter wasn't appearing, so this will only take into account the first chapter's events. I'll take a look at the rest later.

First off, I'm liking what I'm reading so far. You do a good job of balancing dialogue and description, and the description is neither too purple nor too beige. There's a bit of weirdness sometimes when you're trying to avoid using 'said' ("You can't smoke here," Lillian cried), but apart from that your dialogue is mostly sensible and natural sounding. The only large-scale problem I have is with your characterization of Lillian. It gets more consistent towards the end of the chapter, but sometimes it's hard to tell if she's supposed to be fourteen or eight. I can't really speak much as to the father or Mr. 'Smith', but their characters, such as they are, seem fairly well defined.

Now to get into the specifics. Take these with a grain of salt, as I am being intentionally over-judgmental and probably letting my own preferences slip in.

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JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #11 on: September 01, 2012, 12:00:41 am »

You said you don't mind criticism, so I'm here to criticize! Feel free to take it to heart or ignore it completely as you wish.
No, I meant exactly what I said. Thanks a lot for the critism. A couple of people have read it, but mostly their comments have been about grammar (which still needs some work), so content on actual content is much appreciated. Feel free to keep doing exactly this as long as you want, I'll definitely read it.

At some point, at least a few of these will likely lead to tweaks in what's posted here. If I do and it's minor, I'll make sure to leave a note at the bottom of each chapter's post about what changed. If it's more major, I may make a separate post about it.

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JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 3: Inspection, updated T/F)
« Reply #12 on: September 04, 2012, 12:01:11 pm »

Chapter 3: Inspection is up.

Does anyone mind if I just link chapters? I realize that it's not quite as easy as just reading it here, but it's also quite a bit easier on me not having to format both.

I'll still respond here in full to any comments of course.

:)
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Novels: A Sea of Stars, Confession

JanusTwoface

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Re: A Sea of Stars (Chapter 3: Inspection, updated T/F)
« Reply #13 on: September 07, 2012, 11:51:07 am »

Chapter 4: Troubleshooting.

On a semi-related note, I got a nice lesson for how important backups are yesterday. My desktop's hard drive finally died after struggling along for months. Luckily, I have everything important duplicated on Dropbox and/or Crashplan for just such an occasion, but it was still a nerve wracking few hours trying to get everything back the way it was.
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Novels: A Sea of Stars, Confession

TSTwizby

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Re: A Sea of Stars (a novel, updated Tuesdays and Fridays)
« Reply #14 on: September 11, 2012, 03:16:09 am »

Sorry it took me so long to get to this, I've been busy. Ish.

Your comments on my comments make sense now, and so does the comment about the Mars gate, though I'm sad that we probably won't be seeing the MIBs again. The transition was nice, leaving tension while giving us a fair idea of what's going on, and this chapter gives just a little bit more information, without spelling anything out. The descriptions seemed a bit more mechanical here, though that might just be because you're writing in a bit of a different style, from older!Lillian's point of view rather than child!Lillian's. Which is a nice touch, especially if it reflects changes in personality (which it's a bit too soon to see).

This chapter wasn't quite as interesting as the first, but it's not really supposed to be, so that's okay. Also a bit heavier on the exposition, but that is likewise normal. Nothing particularly stood out as high/low points of this chapter aside from the transitioning as I mentioned above, though your phrasing is a bit awkward sometimes. The dynamics between Lillian and Madeline seem well done, but are not yet well formed enough for me to really critique. Lillian's characterization is a tiny bit shaky, while Lillian's is fairly solid, but again it's a little too soon to say.


I'll get to chapters 3 and 4 later. Must sleep now.
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