Pico, Day 11

[elmey.livejournal.com]

Here's today's post for your snippets, comments, thoughts.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

Too wiped today to do much, just two sentences. I'm going to have to ponder the "explain what the hell happened" bit before I write it.

Noah's Ghost, Personal Log, Mission Day: 12 - continued

We ran ran until we reached the ship, and Ruby had us out of there before we could catch our breath. The next thing I knew, I was pulling myself off the floor, and we were half a galaxy and a couple of centuries away from that system.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Ruby seems to be a better driver than the Doctor! ;))

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I am very keen to know who Ruby is -- Romana?

[saki101.livejournal.com]

...we were half a galaxy and a couple of centuries away...

Such a pleasing phrase, this.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

I think you've got an extra 'ran' there, or are missing a comma between the two 'rans'.

Ruby seems pretty competent!

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling, but you've come up with a great bridging sentence in spite of everything.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I never like trying to make what just happened make sense... :)

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Still progress! Very sensible of Ruby.

A Matter of Time

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Despite the big flat cleaning that Mum found proper to schedule a mere two days before we'd go off on our holidays, I managed to finish Chapter 5! And I already have great plans for Chapter 6, though that will require ungodly amounts of research (again). Anyway, I've reached my goal and am happy with it. Oh, and if you take a look at my icon, you'll now what Captain Jonathan "Jack" Archer (as he was called in the original script: Jack! No kidding!) would look like. In this crossover AU he's actually a descendant of Jack Harkness, through a woman Jack married in the late 19th or early 20th century. Which is canon, I swear! The marriage, not the descendant, of course. Okay, I'll stop babbling.

Excerpt:
Had Archer taken the time to learn a little more about Vulcans instead of being mad at them all his adult life, he would know that cramped quarters aren’t something they are really uncomfortable with. Their current deeps space vessels may be huge, elegant monstrosities, but just a century earlier their explorers travelled in tiny scout ships with a crew of eight or ten at most, where privacy was an unknown concept. Only time-honoured Vulcan discipline made it possible to spend years in those tiny metal boxes without murdering each other – and the fact that the crew usually consisted of bonded couples.

But that is something humans won’t know until the 23rd century when a Vulcan-human hybrid named Spock – the first such fusion that happens the natural way, albeit with the considerable support of comparative genetics and advanced medical technology – reveals to his commanding officer, a certain James T. Kirk, how the very first contact between Vulcans and humans really happened.

At the moment, however, Ianto is the only one aboard who knows these facts (with the possible exception of T’Pol), so he finds one cannot blame Captain Archer for his preconceptions.

Re: A Matter of Time

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Kudos on making such great progress despite the demands of non-writing life. I'm enjoying the little snippet of Vulcan world-building here.

RE: A Matter of Time

[saki101.livejournal.com]

Double kudos for writing with that kind of disruption going on!!

Are you going to write the very first human-Vulcan contact story or only teasingly allude to it?

RE: A Matter of Time

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

An interesting bit of backstory, and I like the wry tone.

RE: A Matter of Time

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Great worldbuilding indeed.

RE: A Matter of Time

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Even I've heard of Spock... nice bit of in-universe backstory :)

RE: A Matter of Time

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Great progress!

Very interesting snippet! It is very interesting to see more details on Vulcan society, and very intriguing.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

A few more sentences edited into Linda's point of view while I was over at Mum and Dad's, but mostly I seem to have been busy with other things today (and I still haven't tidied up the first two book reviews, nevermind knuckling down to write the next two). The adults are wandering around in the odds (not entirely happy with Linda's first response here, but maybe inspiration will strike overnight):

Edward halted, and placed a hand on Linda's arm. "Some officers keep their families entirely in the dark about what the job entails, and don't see relationships formed in the course of operations as infidelity. I could never live like that, and I couldn't live with someone who thought that way. It wouldn't be fair on Roo."

"I know." Edward had asked Linda to sign the Official Secrets Act as soon as it became clear she wasn't going back to her old Force, but he'd never talked to her since about his former government work, or any of his past colleagues other than Raymond. "You think Christophe has a family somewhere?"

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating! While Roo's looking into the family's history in the Civil War, there's a whole much-more-recent family history unfolding for the reader. Good work!

[saki101.livejournal.com]

This is intriguing. Is Linda more than Edward's friend?

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

Well done - POV translations are tedious. I like the way these two understand each other.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

The plot definitely thickens, in just a few lines...

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Bits and pieces more of looking at maps and names etc. Sometime hopefully I'll make progress in actually writing words....

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Research & thinking always generates words eventually. Though you might not want to spend as long developing the universe as JRRT...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I'm still editing the long chapter I was stuck on last night. Saki suggested splitting it, and I ended up slotting in a scene I'd deleted back in 2011 that moves the plot on, and then splitting that part out. I've been working it up. Oh, and somewhere in the addition/fleshing out, the WiP passed 50k words.

I had a thought. The night I was having, I was surprised my brain could still fumble its key into the office lock, let alone grope its way to the filing cabinets and shift something to the out-tray. ‘You don’t think they could be behind… that missing persons case we’ve been working on?’

Harebell dug in her purse, pulled out a little bronze cylinder, placed it in the middle of our table with all the care of somebody who didn’t get drunk very often, activated it. The band stopped playing like the owner’d called break at a cut-rate club. ‘It did happen a few weeks after the boy’s nameday,’ she said.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ I went.

‘If you think it’s a sound summoner, then yes.’

‘That’s not CHOP issue.’

‘No, Dolph gave it to me. Thought it might come in handy for work. It’s not a Ministry one, either.’ Sure enough there was a little Sheth rune for Shelieth on top, bobbing about in all the wavy lines. ‘I’ve always wondered who was listening in on those.’

[saki101.livejournal.com]

Wow, 50K and counting! Well done on moving forward!

Magical bugs?

[saki101.livejournal.com]

113 words tonight and here they are...

***

“’Coincidence’. Seriously?” John said. “I can’t even read the word without your voice echoing in my head about the universe and laziness.”

Sherlock swiped his thumb across the screen of Kit’s mobile once more. “Unless the cat was an operative tasked with stopping Kit from getting away with the photographs, I’d say it was a coincidence that he ran her over a few steps from our front door.”

“Moments before you arrive home?”

“Even so,” Sherlock said.

John got up from his chair to press a hand to Sherlock’s forehead. A grey paw swatted at his wrist. “Oi, he was mine first,” John said, removing his hand. “Well, you don’t have a fever.”

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Good progress, kudos! I like the aside on coincidence (I'd forgotten that quotation), and now wonder if there is some nasty person who sacrificed a cat to this end. And I'm still loving all the domesticity :)

[candidlily.livejournal.com]

Tonight was pretty great, writing-wise. 326 words that really pulled a scene together and made it fit better in the overall fic. I think this leaves 24 (of my original 29) gaps to fill.

And good news! I got my computer back earlier than planned from the Apple Store AND it was cheaper to fix than they thought! What a relief. It was a lot easier to do this writing tonight in my usual spot with my trusty laptop. :)

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Words that really work are gold dust, kudos for mining them! So glad you've got your laptop back intact.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

Looked up the synopsis I wrote a while ago and decided that it isn't as bad as I thought. Tweaked it a bit.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Definite progress!