And we’re back again!!!

Hey everyone,
Holiday is finally over and it’s back to the grindstone. The grindstone being work, of course, not the blog. Quick recap of the holidays: spent a week visiting in-laws then another week back in Shanghai relaxing. Did a little driving practice for my upcoming test, had dinner with the folks, all in all stayed busy. Managed to get another chapter done and finished the outline for the last two chapters so hopefully will get those done in a week or two and then it’s time for rewrites. Huzzah!!!

Research wise I read through all five books of Elizabeth Moon’s first Vatta series. I had never really read the whole thing before and I wanted to as I felt it was quite close to the kind of novel I writing thought mine is on a much smaller scale and it is not a five book series. I greatly enjoyed the series and there were a few scenes that looked a bit like mine though I had never read them but great minds and all that.

The first two books were the best in the series I feel whereas the last three tended to flounder a bit. There are only so many ways you can say: The ship went from this system to this system and they went shopping. I feel that the story could have been done in three books instead of five but I guess the publishers wanted a five book series. You can really start to feel the extra scenes getting thrown in the last book to stretch it out.

For example, there is a whole chapter in the fifth book about some random people in one of the systems. They get stuck on ships that the bad guy is trying to steal by remote control. The whole chapter details how they got stuck on the ships, who they are, the relations they have with each other. The next chapter is back at the main character’s point of view and you simply here that all the ships the previous chapter was about were destroyed and all on them were killed. It’s just one line explaining what happened to them and then the main characters go about their business.

This leaves the reader in a bit of a quandry. Where we supposed to care about these people? If so why was so little time devoted to their end which would have been the best part of the story when they were fighting the bad guy attacking their system?

It felt like something just tacked on to fill the pages. I feel the criteria on whether a scene fits a story is to take it out of the story and see if it has an effect. This is why many people did not like the whole Finn and Rose sub plot in the The Last Jedi. If you took it out it would have made no difference to the story. None of the other characters were affected at all by their actions. They didn’t rescue the Resistance or help Rey. They just went in a circle and ended up where they had been before.

But all in all it was a good series and enjoyable. There were a few more things that didn’t quite seem to hold up. The author tries to differentiate the different human societies from each other. This works when the difference is based on culture. One society is strict on politeness to the point of executing people who are too rude, one is based on religion. The ones that are a little harder to swallow are when some humans are made out to have evolved differently than others though it probably could have been explained by genetic tinkering but because it had to do with something mental instead of physical it was a bit harder to understand how that was supposed to have happened.

For my own writing I got a chapter done and the outline for the last two so hopefully those will go quick and then it will be time for rewrites. I shall keep you all posted on that and hopefully if you are following this you are planning to be an alpha reader of the finished draft.