September was a better month’s writing for me. I managed to add 8,700 words into draft one, bringing it to a total of 66,200 words ink on paper, But before I start slapping myself on the back too hard, I have to remind myself I’m only about 25% through draft one, giving me just on 193,300 words to go. Any progress is good, and much as I hate to admit it, the writer’s myth of the 50,000 word doldrums seemed to carry some truth for me (at least this time).
You’ll notice with the graphic there’s a bit of a change. Yes, characters are still there but there’s a new, central picture. No more of the generic, galactic background, this one’s real – or at least as real as it can get, and it’s part of a mounting pile of necessary side distractions that seem to call for my time.
A core component of Diaspora, and the three volumes that will complete the hexalogy, are the destination planets that the central characters will find themselves on. When doing the background research I did enough to ensure that the assumptions and premises I was making will stand up to (at least a cursory) examination, but I was never quite able to get a graphic to go with it to ease the visual side of my brain. There were three major stumbling blocks. One was the fact that, for the Hipparcos Catalogue of stars I was using, the stellar coordinates are primarily given in RA and DEC; number two was that the old X-Y-Z axis charting programmes I used to use are either discontinued or can’t handle the volume of data I wanted to run through them; and thirdly that to convert RA and DEC into Cartesian coordinates (that work with X-Y-Z) involved a bit of mathematics that, despite my best efforts, kept returning ridiculously incorrect data.
Thankfully I stumbled across a medical imaging programme that could handle the 32,500 data points I needed, together with the complete Hipparcos Catalogue that lists Cartesian Coordinates for the stars, so I was set. All I had to do was plug in the data for the locations of all stars within 400 light-years of Earth, grab a tall cup of coffee, and wait for the system. What you see is the output from that, a bubble 400 light-years across plotting all the stars accurately, with the three, core stars there in bright (and severely oversized) yellow. The one closest to the middle is Sol, our sun; the one seemingly on top of it is just on 11.9 light-years away; and the one at the front edge is some 378 light years beyond that. Why do I need three? You’ll see once you start reading, so until then you just have to take it on faith that I do.
Given that the layout of this blog is a little on the tight side, I’ve reproduced the original plot (without all the bells and whistles) below.
It seemed like a crazy length to go to, just to confirm visually what I had settled on using some basic mathematics and star-charts, but in the end the confirmation’s needed for my own peace of mind and for the inevitability that, once I’m deeper into the writing/editing process in the final few volumes, I’ll have all but forgotten the whys and wherefores of all this and have only the assurance that (for whatever reasons) it’s correct. It makes me all the more in awe of the hard-core, hard-scifi writers out there keeping heads full of technical detail and linkages churning around.
The release date for Diathesis, part one of the hexalogy, has been shunted back to April 2025. For purely commercial reasons, Christmas remains an overcrowded market and any release in that period can be easily swamped unless the publisher’s established, large, has deep pockets, and is pushing a well-known author. Again, another lesson in commercial realities for yours truly, and another reason to repeat the old prayer, ‘Lord give me patience, NOW!’
If everything goes well, and you know there’s next to no chance of that, by years’ end Diaspora will be at 100,000 words, or about 45% complete. But there’s a bit of sleight of hand here. What I am writing in Diaspora is, in fact, the trilogy draft for Descent; in the hexalogy draft of Descent what I am actually writing is books three and four, consecutively, so by December I’ll be just in 20,000 words short of draft one of book three, and 100,000 word short of draft one for book four.
Until next time, take the time to write, no matter what’s going on.