I hit a wall with my current novel’s outline last week and fell into a depressive episode for a few days. It seemed unsurprising – when I’m writing at a good clip I’m perhaps hypomanic. When my baby was having a scream day, I cheerfully bounced and debugged her, typing in between squalling. The tiny pores of reality released a joyful fragrance at every point I occupied. When things are that good it doesn’t feel like a betrayal when the bill comes due. I was miserable but unsurprised for a few days. Waiting it out, exercising a bit, trying to get good sleep.
The novel is a lesbian romance novel with mild BDSM. A catgirl owned by a monarch on a colony planet (Junasso) discovers he is about to start nuclear war. He hopes to be the last one standing. On his disarmed flagship are a hundred thousand people – about half of whom he intends to murder as the war starts. Unwilling to let them die, the catgirl – Sorossa – steals the ship with a friend and starts the 2 month jump to Earth. She is unable to restock on food, and not all of the people will make it. When they become aware of this, the ship becomes a warzone. Trapped in the pilot’s compartment, she starts killing them to keep order.
Sorossa and her friend fall out over the killing. Sickened by the violence unfolding when the pilots fail to follow through on their threats, she kills her friend to take control, leaving the body to decompose in the outer chamber of the pilot suite. Keeping peace is not a role to which she is suited. She finds relief when she makes radio contact with another ship on the quick but isolated route.
The ship is single-handed by a woman who is, in fact, very good at establishing order. The catgirl has been engineered to have an owner-shaped hole in her soul – her friend whom she murdered had been well on her way to becoming that person, and she finds herself latching onto this woman, sight unseen.
When they reach Earth, the woman – Apollonia – is arrested, and not the catgirl. She is the child of a tycoon that Earth’s government would love to have more leverage over, and Earth – which has banned the presence of slaves (and therefore of animal-human splices, who are all slaves under Earth law) – is uneasy about the optics of arresting a catgirl. It sure seems like someone should be arrested considering all the bodies that are getting carted out.
Sorossa, by the way, lied to her passengers when she set out, and claimed to be acting under her monarch’s orders. Initially it was to keep people calm but there was a great deal of shame to her decision as well. She does not correct this lie upon landing. And no one but his inner circle knows that he was the one who started nuclear war. The consequence is that one of his ministers is deputized by Earth to return with Earth troops to establish order. When Sorossa realizes this, she admits the truth – that she betrayed her master and the man they’re sending back to take control was complicit in breaking the nuclear taboo – but the gears of bureaucracy have already engaged and the decision cannot be turned back. But they need her presence to succeed in retaking the colony planet, and the catgirl names her terms: that her handler be Apollonia.
Apollonia is her father’s favorite of his five children, but she does not want to inherit. She would have to enter an ugly competition with them, and their resentment would be lifelong. More importantly, Earth has calcified and stagnant and the only profit lies in rent-seeking. Jones Act type bullshit. She doesn’t want to win at an industry that shouldn’t exist and dropped out of the race years ago to become a courier (of some importance). She likes seeing the rest of the universe, and her siblings aren’t threatened by someone who’s off-planet.
The central kink of Apollonia’s character is that she is shaped like someone who would have been a pretty great conqueror and warlord in premodern times, in a world with no place for such people. Until she has to quell a war-torn planet, that is. She goes back with the minister, the catgirl, and Earth troops, and neatly – Cortez style – identifies and gathers other opponents of the monarch, snowballing her forces, and eventually ending up on top.
The central kink of the romance is that Apollonia is afraid of going too far, and Sorossa is demonstrably willing to betray and murder unworthy owners.
And the central kink of Sorossa’s character is… well, making a cute, very stressed anime girl commit atrocities.
Where am I stuck? Where does my broad outline refuse to turn into a specific outline of scenes where specific events and decisions happen?
(Man, this is so embarrassing to analyze. I was too embarrassed to do it in my writing Discord. But maybe I can do it on my website, which I like to pretend no one reads.)
That one’s easy. It’s the reconquest of the planet.
- She goes back with the minister and the catgirl… is there all? I sense there are more characters – who should appear and develop en route to Earth, since the catgirl is definitely communicating with some individuals she deputizes to keep order in their sectors – and there sure is a void in this second arc of reconquest where such characters should appear.
- I’m not good at or interested in writing military conquest sequence, but it’s where Apollonia starts fulfilling her character promise and I can’t skip it. The events fail to materialize.
- What is the nature of Earth’s interest in retaking Junasso, which lies a long way away?
On this last one: an obvious answer is shutting down genetic hybrid production, which Earth is against for semi-religious reasons. But it seems like there ought to be an economic/military motivation as well. (I’m always faintly incredulous when states do expensive ideological things with no economic upside even though this demonstrably happens a lot.) I initially had an even more transhumanist superpower in opposition to Earth – at the very end of a mostly-linear stellar road, in the middle of which Junasso was a buffer state. Earth’s aim in retaking Junasso would be to control this buffer state, or even destroy the gate between Junasso and the other superpower. They don’t want to coexist with a branch of humanity whose members are “uploaded” before puberty into more stable but “deformed” looking clones whose bodies were engineered for longevity and whose skulls were engineered for digital interfacing.
When I ran this by a more experienced writer, he said the presence of the other superpower was introducing more work than it subtracted and he was right. But then the reconquest arc becomes less clear to me. So does Apollonia’s motivation in going against Earth and taking control of the planet herself. I want her to like power. But I don’t want that to be enough – she should have a principled ethical reason to take control. If that reason is preventing humanity from cleaving, I can write that. She wants all the different branches to coexist – as long as possible, anyway. I find that noble. Without something as good, I don’t want to write her.
I first came up with Sorossa’s story 3 years ago. I added a lot to it the past month. I’m okay with a cycle of developing an outline, getting blocked, falling into a depression for a few days that makes it clear I need a long break from the project, and coming back a few years to do it all over again. As long as things sometimes get finished.
But will they?
Where am I going?
I viscerally feel like no one else is writing the stories I most want to write. So if I want them to exist, it’s on me.
Despair.