CHAPTER 4.2

This week I’m sharing a rough draft of 4.2, which is roughly 90% complete. You can see the full outline for Chapter Four here. The beginning and end feel the fuzziest to me – I’ll likely make revisions when 4.1 and 4.3 are complete, to make sure they flow together well.

I see a few small variations between my original outline and this draft:

Alman’s son is new, but given the Bennett family ideology, it makes sense members would have a surfeit of offspring and a relatively cavalier attitude about children in the workplace.
I might wind up changing Alman’s name; in the earliest version of this chapter they were brothers and I wanted the paronymic resemblance, but it might be better if there was more distance between them now.
The very first draft of 4.2 was done all the way back when I was still working on Chapter 2. It was fragmentary and incomplete, more of a rough sketch than anything, but it included the cables and the passing reference to Haldor.
The Continuum Security beat (which also appeared in the original draft) is missing here, but can be moved to 4.3 without too much trouble. I’m considering having it pop up as a problem Serafin encounters in the wild, perhaps explained sheepishly by Alman when Serafin demands to know why someone else has been sniffing around the assignment.
Ramani is treated as someone the reader should already know, since we’ll encounter him first in Chapter 4.1. I may need to make some revisions as a result, but it will mostly be tweaking dialogue to make sure his voice and personality remain consistent.
Serafin’s briefing is now divided into two sessions: the first, more discursive version from Ibrahim, and the follow-up brass tacks chat with Alman and Ramani.
I’ve worked out the Bennett succession crisis in more detail than is apparent here, but it’s not particularly relevant to Serafin’s work, so a passing reference feels sufficient.
Hyper-natalism is popular with many powerful and influential figures today (Elon Musk being the most famous example) and there is even a convention. Combining this ideology with a family-owned business makes sense to me.
I spent a considerable amount of time researching family businesses in South Korea and in Saudi Arabia but aside from picking up some cultural flavor and interpersonal dynamics I didn’t really get much out of it. This can be frustrating, but I do try to remind myself this isn’t necessarily failure: there can be as much value in not finding things as there is in finding them.
The conversation about debtings, a quasi-fungible secondary currency based on debt, is a world-building idea I’ve had in my notes for ages.

STATUS REPORTS

Anyone following the status report Twitter account will note that there haven’t been any updates for some time. I’ve had some technical issues with the application I built, which was a serious problem: tracking my work was beginning to feel like a burden, which meant it became slightly but persistently discouraging whenever I started to work.

I haven’t resolved this issue yet, but I have identified what I believe are the major problems and I believe the process can be made less intrusive and more automatic – for example, I’ve set up a plugin in Obsidian that automatically tracks writing time for specific folders. I hope this will relieve some of the strain. I still firmly believe there’s a lot of value in tracking, in being able to answer the question “what did I actually do this week?”

That said, the work will always take priority over the tracking of the work.

COLLINS SHORT STORY

I spent a lot of time working on a short story that explores Collins in greater detail, but it wound up being a considerably longer and more complicated project than I expected. I’ve found it immensely helpful in developing the setting and gaining a deeper understanding of the politics and culture of the station, but I’m also well aware that time spent on the Collins story is not time spent on the novel.

Normally I’d just abandon the story in its rough and unfinished state and go back to the novel, but I do hope to finish it and maybe submit it to a magazine at some point.