Here, we enter uncertain territory, which I think of as the muddle.
The muddle is at once exciting and frustrating: I have created little, so there is limitless potential, but there is still a great deal I want to accomplish, and I worry I’m not equal to the task.
But it helps to have a direction, which is the value of properly identifying and aggressively articulating sticking points.
Here’s the questions I’m currently concerned with answering:
I’ve probably made the least progress here, but I’m still digging. I also decided to break this into two main areas of focus, which should help give me a clearer sense of where to look.
Mercenaries are going to become increasingly important in Razors as the story continues, so it’s essential to lay the groundwork now. I believe the essential questions are:
Having read Blackwater, The Dogs of War, and gotten partway through several other texts, I’m beginning to feel more confident about this sticking point. There’s still more reading to be done – there always is – but small moments, actions, gestures, and scenes are beginning to appear to me, which is a promising sign that the work is beginning to yield results.
This is the heart of my process: having familiarized myself with the patterns of both real world and fictional mercenaries, I can now begin building from a more sophisticated schema, and feel more comfortable imagining variations in the real-life patterns and inventing new material that fits within my established universe.
There’s a very common trope in a lot of thriller fiction of the lone hero going in alone, but I don’t think this is plausible, and I also don’t belive it fits Serafin’s personality. With that in mind, I believe it would be logical to build a small group composed of shooters and scouts to help locate and retrieve Othman:
This is probably where the most progress has been made. I’ve currently written a decent chunk of a short story that focuses on the station, which I’ll try to share in the coming weeks.
Major questions:
Here’s a rough outline of my current vision of the station:
Collins, located at Lagrange Point 5, is one of the oldest waystations, and has a violent and troubled history. One of the many stations that declared independence in the days of the Lunar Rebellion, Collins maintained this status for some time before its annexation by the Iblis in the early days of the war.
As SDF regained control of the majority of the station in ‘76, and remains the current occupying force. There is a significant number of refugees from other stations, including citizens of the Universal Soviet, which has resulted in a great deal of unrest and occasional outbreaks of civil conflict.
Collins is based on the Stanford torus concept, although considerably enlarged. The Stanford plan only has a diameter of 1,790 meters, which is a little small for what I want, so we’ll need to bump it up a fair amount. The space station in the film Elysium is around 60 km in diameter and 2 km in width, which is closer, although I’d probably shrink it down a bit.
So let’s say Collins roughly 47.75 km in diameter with a similar width, and it completes a full rotation once every seven minutes. A significant undertaking, to be sure, but still less effort than the O’Neill Island Three design.
If you were to walk one complete revolution around the station, that would be nearly 150 km.
Collins is divided into eight sections, one of which has sustained catastrophic damage during the Iblis Conflict and is no longer habitable.
Collins has a habitable land mass of about 300 square kilometers, which is close to the size of Malta. I imagine the station was intended for a population of approximately 3 million people spread across each section, but the loss of the eighth section and mass migration from other stations as a result of the Iblis Conflict has led to dramatic shifts in both demographics and population size.
Different sections have different issues – one might have issues dissipating heat, another is having trouble with its lighting systems, while yet another is struggling with maintaining nitrogen levels. Many are suffering from overpopulation, particularly Section Sitta, which is home to nearly two million residents and sits somewhere between an urban center and a refugee camp, with a population density of roughly 60,000/km².
For context, some average population densities in the real world would include:
So, what next?
I’ve got a couple different potential topics brewing: I’ve been experimenting with different systems to translate a book about mercenaries, and I’ve also decided to give up Scrivener, so I’ll try to write up something about why I’ve made that decision and what alternatives I’m looking at.
Add that on top of the research I’m doing, and the work can start to seem overwhelming. But oddly enough, I think adding the blog has been helping: being forced to explain what I’m trying to accomplish helps me to get my thoughts in order, which helps more than I thought it would. I still feel a little lost, which is common, in the midst of the muddle, but for the most part I’m optimistic about this chapter.