Over the past couple of years, I've participated in this challenge and achieved the necessary word-count to complete the challenge. I'm still in the process of completing the stories in the rewriting. In 2011, I created a basic alien invasion story, in which giant UFOs start plopping themselves on the planet, crushing entire cities in their wake. Last year, I wrote about a society ruled over by an elite class of superheroes.
Even though the next challenge is still a couple of months away, I couldn't help but to start thinking about what my next project will be. Even though the actual writing has to start on November 1st, I still have a lot of time to start thinking about what the story will be. First and foremost, I needed to sift through the myriad of outstanding story ideas I had floating around, and pick one to focus on. I had ideas for a futuristic detective story, an alternate history story taking place during WWII, a pirate adventure, and probably some others too.
For this year, however, I've been inspired to resurrect an old story idea that I've had since high school. This is a concept that I've tried to draft before, was unhappy with it, and tried to redraft it before. Even though the newer draft was going okay, I decided to start over yet again, with even bigger ideas and a different approach.
The story goes by the (working) title of VOID, so named because it will be all about outer space and intergalactic combat. The premise is that, in the distant future, an extraterrestrial race will close in on the Earth's sun and destroy it, obliterating all life in the solar system. As the human race struggles to find a new habitable world to retreat to, war breaks out across the galaxy, as these aliens drive deeper toward the galactic core and destroys even more stars in their wake.
This all came about initially during a discussion on black holes in my high school physics class. I was already aware of what a black hole was: a singularity in space with a gravity well so dense that not even light can escape its grasp. The thought suddenly came up that, if stellar black holes are formed by collapsing stars, and it takes thousands and thousands of years for starlight to reach our eyes on Earth, then how do we know that the stars we see still exist? For all we know, all the stars we see could have been destroyed, but we would never see it until thousands of years from now. The idea kinda creeped me out, thinking that there could be a malevolent alien force destroying all the stars in the galaxy, but we would never actually know about it with our current observation technology.
In this story's first incarnation, I wrote this as a trilogy of short novels. The first book chronicled Earth's first contact with this evil alien race, and the book ended with the aliens destroying our sun and turning it into a black hole. The second book focused on a series of conflicts, and it ended with the black hole being reversed and bringing the sun back (in retrospect, I don't think this is even physically possible). The third book was the final battle. All three of these books kinda sucked; it was a time when my writing style was still immature and silly, and I didn't give enough attention to maintaining any realism in the science or the military culture of the story. If anything, it came off as a lame Star Wars rip-off, and I filed this entire trilogy in my rejects folder.
My second attempt for this story wasn't looking too bad; I was planning to just start off with the aliens attacking the Earth's sun, and then going through the war campaign. The story probably would have been decent this way, but after the first twenty pages or so, I stalled. I think the story was looking pretty dry, and I became uninspired.
Over the past few months, I've revisited the story ideas with a fresh new light. Having played the Mass Effect games for the first time, I was enthralled by the games' lush universe and attentive world-building. Looking at other favorite franchises - Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and more - I realized that I would be much more inspired to write Void as a more expansive saga than I initially pictured. I had a few alien races in the original trilogy of drafts, but I felt they were lame and uninspired; revising the concepts now, I believe I can make Void work better with a different set of alien races, featuring outlandish alien worlds and a whole galaxy of unique star systems and nebulae and other interstellar phenomenon. And, of course, I would still love to give diligent attention to the science of space travel and combat.
I realize that a story like Void inherently requires a lot of research and a lot of design. I think my first drafts suffered so much because I didn't devote enough research, and hardly any design, into the story, so it was all slapped together lazily. To make the next draft really shine, I've been looking deeper at all aspects of astronomy. Watching various documentary shows - Stephen Hawking's Into the Universe, How the Universe Works, and The Universe - has helped me understand the basics of relativity, the various types of interstellar bodies that exist, the birth and death of stars and planets, and the difficulties of common sci-fi concepts (such as faster-than-light travel, FTL communications, the possibilities of alien life, planetary colonization, and more). Sources on the Internet and books can provide even more detailed information on astronomy (although, I seriously cannot comprehend quantum physics, so that will likely be the extent of how "hard" my sci-fi will ultimately be). Through these efforts, I felt that an entire universe of possibilities have opened up. There are myriads of beautiful nebulae that could serve as a backdrop to some gorgeous imagery. There are weird anomalies, such as neutron stars, pulsars, and black holes, that could provide a really unique challenge to certain scenes. There are an infinite number of ways that a planet could form in this universe, and their evolution could be a host to any kind of life form imaginable. Through these considerations, I've been able to design possible alien worlds, alien life, alien culture, and perhaps even alien languages, to be used in the story.
The more detail and depth I can invest now, the easier it is to envision things during drafting. Understanding how a starship, how an alien culture, or how future society works, will help direct the story to its logical course. It's a lot harder to make it all up on the fly, and it's too easy to create inconsistencies and errors without doing the necessary research in advance. So, between now and November, I've been compiling all kinds of notes on the vast universe of Void. The more I compile, the more vividly the story comes together in my head, and the easier it becomes to translate to paper. And, the more psyched I become.
Void is a story idea that's haunted me for years, with its grand premise of starfighters and starships blasting each other away around vast nebulae and while orbiting violent black holes. Every day, a new and exciting idea gets thrown into the pot, making it even richer and more incredible than I previously envisioned. As it is, I have pretty wild visions in mind for this story: not only will the Earth's sun collapse from an attack from a malevolent alien race, but I've also envisioned entire planets getting sliced to pieces, entire fleets of ships getting ripped apart, massive stars flying at hypervelocity, and the possibility of life beyond our three-dimensional space. There will be combat, romance, wonder, and terror. There will be a plethora of human, alien, and even synthetic characters. Even though Earth may be tragically absent in this story, there will be fantastic worlds with lush alien jungles, weird mountains, tropic islands, and exotic colorful gasses. At the center of it all, I hope to thematically explore the galaxy and what our place is, or could be, in the universe.
So that's what I've been toiling on for the past several weeks, and I'm hoping I'll be prepared enough by November to take on this epic project. I will post updates and excerpts as I go along; feel free to check them out, critique them, and enjoy my foray into the Void.
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