This weekend I completed the first draft of Chapter 3 of the sci-fi novel I'm writing. Word count for the entire story is now at 13,705 words.
I had to do some research on the CDC for this chapter to get some verisimilitude. I exchanged an e-mail with a woman in their Media News department and asked some detailed questions, so I'm probably on a watch list somewhere now. They take a while to answer e-mails (like, a week). I still haven't gotten answers to my questions, so I just bulled past that point and will go back and tweak it in the edit.
The next chapter will be about the same in length, at least according to my outline. That said, I discovered as I was writing that I needed to add more material to Chapter 3 to provide some bridging material and to up the sense of urgency. Looking at the material in in my notes for Chapter 4, I can already see that I'm going to have to break apart some of the scenes into separate pieces and re-write parts of the outline for a better story, rather than a series of information dumps.
This writing stuff takes time to do. It'd be much easier if I didn't have to keep going to work instead of staying home and writing. Pesky work.
There are other L5 facilities other than CDC (which got subsumed by DHS) that are more "scholarly" friendly - do a Google search about the latest redacted Bird-flu research for a good listing (I think the WSJ had the article).
ReplyDeleteAt least you weren't trying to get information about NEST - then you REALLY would be on someones list...
(ooops - guess you are now that I've posted this )
Also - based upon your first posting, I think you may be interested in reading a webcomic titled "Escape from Terra" (http://www.bigheadpress.com/eft)
ReplyDeleteIt starts out a little rough at first and has a very heavy-handed Heinlein-esque Libertarian/Self-sufficiency theme running through it, but there is also a lot of probable science backing up much of the technology in use.
Cheers,
Rhytch
Escape from Terra is indeed a very good webcomic. They have eased off on the social commentary from the first couple of story lines, which is good. Too much preaching makes for a less good story.
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