Filling in the Gaps

While I have been world building, it has been messing with things already in place, ugh!

That opening scene that I mentioned finally working out . . . it didn’t fit with the new parameters for the city. So, after agonizing over how to make it right, I changed the city parameters AGAIN.

This question will probably be most relevant to SF writers: when do you call in the experts? By experts, I mean anyone that has vast knowledge and experience in a field.

The writer wants to be detailed enough in a scene for the reader to feel the experience but not be overwhelmed with a vast info dump. Our life experiences usually cover most things we need to know for a scene to feel real. However, there are still many things that crop up that we will never have had the opportunity to experience. Shooting a firearm is one that many writers come across and you are more likely to have more than one person in your audience that will know if you get it wrong.

Now, where this turns to a mostly SF audience is when you need a doctorate in physics or geology or meteorology. Because we build worlds that can be on the fringes of what our current science understands, it is a fine line to know when we can wing-it and just decide that is how our world is going to behave and when we should really pose an idea to an expert and see what they think should happen to achieve the effect you want.

After the many changes to my environment, I am on the fence about whether I need to hunt up an expert or not.

Planet

I will be revisiting this topic every now and then as I continue to build this world.

Building a world evolves over time. Various things I create in the world sometimes have to be changed because I create something in a subplot that cannot exist in the current world. I am creating things right now that will become short stories, and they are changing the political and environmental structure that I thought I was going to use.

There will be some changes to the blog site while I experiment with how I can set up a section for the novel so that new followers will have a place to go for everything related to it. I am trying out adding a page as the go to for this novel. The title of the page will change until I settle on a final title, so keep that in mind if you follow it and it disappears from the site. Also, I am going to figure out how to have updates (only when it is specific to the novel), and then a sidebar that makes it easier for readers to find specific items. Again, this will be trial and error so things may come and go for a while.

I am also considering whether or not to put my outline, in part or whole, up on the site. There are several points to this consideration. 1) Do I want to share all of the details? 2) I could limit the outline to major points and not include specific details. 3) My outlines are very fluid and change many times during the actual writing so if I posted drafts one through three it could show some of my process while not providing all of the details to the story. 4) Would the sharing of the outline hinder the chance of publication down the road?

There are some key elements of my world that do not seem to work with the environmental out comes that I had planned. So, I have suspended, but not thrown out, a dome that was going to protect the citizens. I am not sure how to segregate various parts of the planet unless each city has its own dome, and I am not certain that is the effect I want.