Research fun, part 2

Here’s more about the topics I researched while writing "Star Reacher".

The first image below shows Blood Falls, a formation of rust-colored ice that is emerging from the end of a glacier in Antartica. The microbes that give the ice its red color have traveled four kilometers to reach the glacier’s terminus, and they are part of an ancient ecosystem that has been trapped under the glacier for more than a million years. The red comes from iron, an end product of the microbes’ metabolism. They reproduce slowly–it’s estimated that a bacteria would divide once every 300 days.

In my story, there are algae that live in the very cold lakes of the planet Diamanta, and bloom only once every one hundred years. When they bloom, they exert a great deal of energy, resulting in enough heat to melt ice. My version is a good deal more fanciful than the Blood Falls bacteria, but there are some similarities–they have a slow metabolism, they live under the ice for long periods of time and then they finally burst forth in a way that can’t be ignored. I used these organisms as a metaphor for love. (Oh, go ahead and laugh if you want!)

Artic and Antarctic ice fish can survive in temperatures that are below the freezing point of pure water, which would freeze the blood of any regular fish. Their secret is that at some point, their ancestors lost the ability to produce hemoglobin. These fish have clear blood, without the large red blood cells which would, in other creatures, bunch up and become viscous in very cold temperatures. The ice fish still use oxygen, but it apparently is carried directly in their blood, or what’s left of it.

Ice fish don’t have any significant part to play in my story–I just thought they were cool!

Last but not least, in this story I give one of my characters a terribly painful back problem (because I’m mean and enjoy making my characters suffer) for which he eventually has to undergo spinal fusion, a surgical procedure where two vertebrae are combined into one. Surgeons take a bone graft from elsewhere in the body, and use metal screws to hold the vertebrae together, and eventually the bone graft grows and “fuses” the vertebrae together. 

And if that ain't romantic, I dunno what is!

Research fun, part 1

"Star Reacher" (formerly "Algae") takes place on a fictional planet called Diamanta, where it’s almost always cold. I imagine it being kind of like “planet Alaska” or “planet far-north Canada”. One of the main industries there is mining–specifically, iron mining. They mine the ore, process it, and then use a cannon-like device to shoot it up to an orbiting space station, where it’s turned into steel.

In this story, my main character is a diesel mechanic (and an aspiring artist) who has decided to leave the planet and move to the space station. He has set aside a vacation day to finish one last art project—a metal sculpture—but he’s unexpectedly called back to work for a repair job at one of the mines. As he and his coworker drive to the mine, in the dead of winter, across the surface of a frozen lake, they come to a spot where the ice has begun to inexplicably and rapidly melt.

I did a lot of research for this story. In fact, I’ve never had to do this much research for a story before! I thought it would be fun to show some of the things I’ve been reading and learning about.

Here’s the Ekati Diamond mine near Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It’s located in an area of permafrost and is only accessible by air, or via an ice road during the extremely cold winter months (as depicted in the TV show Ice Road Truckers). The mines in my story operate under similar harsh cold weather conditions. Work goes on round-the-clock in temperatures as low as -60°F (-51°C).

​A truck and excavator at a coal mine. Lately I’ve spent way too much time looking at pictures of mining equipment and heavy machinery. Whenever I pass a construction site, I’ll be looking over there going, “Ooh! What machines do they have?” I also get all excited about things like the most powerful diesel engine in the world and autonomous trucks that drive themselves.

An ice road over a frozen lake in the Northwest Territories. Pic from here. Ice roads are used in situations where building a real road would be too expensive or unfeasible, in very remote locations and/or in the presence of boggy land. The Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road that provides access to many mines in NWT is 353 miles (568 km) long and the speed limit is 25 km/h (16 mph). The road in my story is more like 200 miles long.

A cutaway view of the Stanford Torus, a type of space station. Pic from here. Other designs for space stations include sphere and cylinder shapes. Theoretically, many types of manufacturing could be done better in space, because of the ready availability of vaccuum, which is essential for many industrial processes but takes effort to create on a planet’s surface. For my story, I imagined that they would be able to produce higher quality steel there than on the surface of Diamanta—steel that would eventually be used to build things like spaceships.​

There are mermaids

In March 2011, I attended a three day workshop in Madison, WI (“The Fire in Fiction”) with superagent Donald Maass and bestselling author Nalo Hopkinson.

I first heard Mr. Maass speak at the Surrey Writers Convention in 2007. It was an hour-long workshop entitled “Three Types of Tension”; my first introduction to the phrase “tension on every page”, and to the colossal difference between (a) polishing the prose that already exists on the page, and (b) putting better, more awesome prose on that page; the kind of prose that fundamentally changes the power of your story. It was a giant eye-opener for me and the other members of my writing group (we attended Surrey together in a small herd). Seriously, you could see the light bulbs going on in our heads as we “got it”.

You can imagine how stoked I was when I found out about this March’s workshop (and the fact that it was being held in the Midwest, in roughly my neck o’ the woods). Writer buddy Enjae and I reserved our spots something like a year in advance… then waited in anticipation.

And the wait was definitely worth it. This was three days, 8 hours a day, of quality time. It was a really packed program. The first two days were the Fire in Fiction workshop, taught by Donald Maass. Here are some of the things we worked on.

• Protagonists. The three types of protagonists (regular joes, heroes, & dark/supernatural types). What is a “standout” character, and how do you turn your protagonist into one?
• Antagonists. We often think of antagonists as the “bad guy”, but an antagonist could also be the love interest in a romance. How do you avoid the trap of the “muahaha-type” villain, and make an awesome antagonist?
• Voice; how we experience the character, through POV. How do you bring out the character’s voice?
• Worldbuilding. Not the usual “go through and answer this list of 100 questions” type of worldbuilding–but how to get emotions into the description, through the eyes of your character.
• Turning points in scenes. How to make the character’s emotional journey stronger. Emotions & dialogue in scenes. How to go beyond stating the obvious. How to give “punch” to your big climax scene.
• Microtension. How to create tension on every page, scene by scene and line by line, via dialogue, action & exposition. How to keep your reader turning the pages.
• Theme. Not just the story’s premise or something to be tacked on later, but an expression of what matters most to you.

We did a lot of exercises. We asked a lot of questions. Not the usual character-sheet questions. Donald Maass type questions. The kind that are provocative, striking, even weird. The kind that will cause you to look at your character & story sideways, upside-down, backwards & inside-out. This was advanced stuff (to me, anyway), but not completely unfamiliar, and not too advanced for my writing brain to handle. Not at all. It made me realize that in fact, I have come a long way as a writer since 2007. Back then, I was not ready for all these concepts, not by a long shot. Just “tension on every page” was enough to blow my mind. I could have tried to pour more stuff in there, but it would have just rolled off. Maybe in another year or two I’m going to look back at 2011 with the same thought–well, not the *same* thought. I’ll never be that much of a newb again =D

So, the third day was the Master Class in Science Fiction/Fantasy, taught by Mr. Maass and Nalo Hopkinson. In preparation for this class, we had all read Ms. Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms, a spec fic book which not only appealed to genre readers, but was able to cross over to mainstream appeal. In other words, “out of category” fiction. Why would you want to do this? Simple; you want more people to read your books, right?

We dissected every aspect of the story, with the following questions in mind: How do you take a story that contains speculative elements, and make it interesting and accessible to readers outside the genre, not just genre fans? How do you make your story powerful and universal? Ms. Hopkinson took us through her creative process, from the first inkling of the story idea, the first draft, & beyond. We worked on a technique that she called “sensory mapping, or the ritual possession of your reader”; a way to let the reader live inside not just the character’s head, but also their body.

This was when I came up with a great light-bulb moment:

My character has an “extra” sense that most people don’t possess. The problem is that the way I’m telling the story, I’m assuming that he knows what it feels like *not* to have this sense. And then I’m explaining to the reader what the difference is. But really, my character’s way of perceiving the world is the only way he has ever known. To him, this sense is not “extra”, and therefore he can’t explain how “differently” he “sees” things.

This ties in to another important point discussed by Maass & Hopkinson: Science fiction/fantasy/genre writers love to create systems and explain them. And generally speaking, genre readers tend to like the explanation, while mainstream readers don’t care that much about the explanation. They want the human element, the emotions, the universality of the characters & story. Well, actually everybody wants that. A spec fic story that wants to broaden its appeal to non-genre fans, does not need to go into detailed explanations of its fantastic elements. It doesn’t mean that the writer doesn’t still need to know the system and do all their research. For example, for The New Moon’s Arms, Ms. Hopkinson researched the possible scientific basis for mermaids, things such as what physiological differences an aquatic humanoid would have compared to us land-dwellers. But in the story, it’s not all explained in detail. Sure, there are hints, but when it comes down to it… we accept that there are mermaids, and the focus of the story is much more on the (non-mermaid) main character’s emotional journey. The human element.

Which led me to a corollary light-bulb. My character actually *is* a mermaid. OK–not really. He’s a genetically engineered person with extrasensory abilities. I spend a lot of time explaining his strange origin & upbringing, and all the things he can do that normal people can’t, and how in many ways this makes him *not* a real human being. But really, I think every human, at some time or another, in some way, has felt alienated and isolated from the entire human race. I want to make the story more about that.

Anyway, the workshop came to a close all too soon. I had never been to something like this, where you literally work on writing all damn day, and did not anticipate how mentally exhausting it turned out to be. A whole weekend of light bulb moments and pushing our craft relentlessly to the next level! It actually kind of broke my brain… but in a good way.