(Image courtesy of Starship Operators, a fun and unique anime I recommend.)
Whenever I have a spare moment and I’m not focusing on the final preparation of Queen Ophelia’s War, I’ve been preparing for my eventual restart/rewrite of Theadia. Why am I doing this when I have most of the original version written, you ask? Good question, that.
The easy answer is that I’m doing it the same way I wrote the Bridgetown Trilogy. Whatever is about to unfold in this restart/rewrite won’t be exactly the same as that version, just as the trilogy takes what I’d started in The Phoenix Effect and pushed it in a different and much better direction.
The more convoluted answer is that I’ve chosen to expand on several plot points, characters and situations that I’d laid out in the original Theadia. I’ve been finding moments during lulls in my work shift, just like back in the day, to write down my thoughts on how to do this. Certain secondary characters will have a much deeper and richer background and even their own plot lines. While it will still focus on the two main characters — after all, they are not just the instigators of the story but what drives the rest of the main cast — I want to know more about the rest of this universe.
Thus, I’m doing what I did with the trilogy: I’m doing a world building deep dive. Something I haven’t done for quite a number of years. It makes sense for me to do this, considering this is a subgenre I don’t have nearly as much experience writing. [It’s not that I’m a ‘never say no’ writer…I’m more of the ‘I wonder if I could pull this off, let’s try it’ kind.] And if I’m going to do it justice, I want to do my homework.
The current version does work…but there are worrying moments of Handwavium and This Happens Offscreen, and I’d rather not go that route. The best way to fix this, in my experience, is to do that deep dive. I’ll do a bit of research, sure, but I also want this story as believable as possible without getting lost in super-heavy hard-sf techspeak. While it exists, that’s not what the story is about; the project’s focus has always been about the people behind the tech, both the ones who create it and the ones who use it, who may not exactly understand all of it but might at least understand how it works to some degree. [I’ve often joked that this project is my anti-Cory Doctorow story, in which I try to avoid techspeak infodumps as much as I can and still get away with it.]
Will I pull it off? Well, I won’t know until I write it, will I?
Welcome to Bridgetown 