Young Writers Society

Well, truth be said I don't really have a burning inspiration for the short juvenile novellas, I'm rather doing it a bit mechanically, on autopilot. But I've meditated, I've outlined my deficiencies, inclinations and possible genre potentials, and am working on various projects, even if my heart isn't a 100% in all of them. I see it as an investment

Mastering the simple cliches of various genres in the end must be a good way of gathering experience. In order to compose a covincing heavy metal or rock song one must first learn the elementary rules of the Blues, etc.

...I want to become a top notch author by 2014. Better of course by 2011, but that's kinda unrealistic . And that means I gotta write juvenile novellas, fantasy and sci-fi adventures, small town and big town horror scenarios, conspiracy thrillers and postmodernist transgressive texts, fairy tales and mystery stories, until little by little experience is accumulated and I stop feeling helpess in the face of the empty page. Or maybe that never goes away, time will tell, hehe.

...So I guess y'all feel the lack of a 100% inspiration in the story. But! As you know I place value on the internal logic of a narrative, and once this one is done you'll see that the elements of the story are not randomly collected, they do tie in together, and they are plausable. Once disbelief is suspended that is.

Hey, man. Yeah, like Gryphon said, it is highly unlikely that a mere dozen people could bring a foreign planet to life. It worked for the Bible. First Adam and Eve, and then Noah and his family. But in today's society, something like that is scoffed at. Moving on,

I see sheepish grins and listen to weak banter as everyone else starts coming to as well. We are twelve people in all. Around me eleven cryogenic pods have opened their lids. Five girls and six guys have woken up and are climbing out, pulling on their white robes.

Thanx for the review, Seeminglymeaningless,
everything /more or less/ I think I'll be able to set straight as I really do finish this novella, but the style jump... well... In the beginning the style reflects a persona that travels in the /inner/space, and then as the MC wakes up and returns to his limited self, so does the style degenerate correspondingly. 'But why didn't you come up with a concept which wouldn't entail a degeneration of the style, Napalmerski?' Thank you for this question, nameless guy, and a good question it is. Mayhaps in the near future I will plot a story where the narrative style is more outlandish.
'Humanity awaits this offering with it's breath held, Napalmerski.'
Now, now, I am but a scribbler, no need for all the flowers, just throw the money at me. Anyway, there's a novel in the offing, 'Son of Nothing', it'll be fit to put into the 'advanced critiques' section in a month, maybe less. I think. And in this novel, one third of which will be third-person, and the other two thirds - two different POV's - there the style will again jump abruptly, but none of the three /four/ styles will be on the level of ole honorable Stine.

Hey

Comments in red.

napalmerski wrote:CHAPTER ONE

I dreamt of floating in space for so long, I forgot I had a body and a name. I forgot I had an 'I'. #FF0000 ">Interesting start. Caught my attention right away.

My mind would traverse immense distances in any direction, through planets, asteroid belts and glowing clouds, zooming in and out, seeing star clusters and galaxies like they were atoms, and then seeing atoms like they were galaxies. At times I would go too far and be bounced back by the the #00BF00 ">curved boundaries of the universe itself. #FF0000 "> While I love the imagery of that sentence, I can't help but point out that there are no boundaries of the universe. It's forever expanding. Sure, one day it'll lose energy and stop expanding and start contracting, but until then, the universe is like the area between two parrallel lines: infinite. For decades I voyaged the void between the stars, like a sentient nebula driven on by solar winds and electromagnetic storms and the mad flickering of quantum particles.

Then, my freedom was suddenly #00BF00 ">restricted. The #00BF00 ">walls of space closed in on me, the universe grew smaller and tighter. #00BF00 ">And then the #00BF00 ">walls of space gradually transformed into the #00BF00 ">curved bone #00BF00 ">walls of my skull #FF0000 ">Careful with resusing words within small amounts of time. They are in green throughout this text., inside which intersecting strings of frantic thoughts sped along at a madcap pace. #00BF00 ">And then even the major portion of the brain itself became closed off, #00BF00 ">restricted territory, my mind once again confined to the tiny part which it had been meant to inhabit. Waking up. #FF0000 ">But otherwise, this paragraph was fantastic

My body tingles as it cames back to life. #FF0000 ">Eeeh, I don't see this story working in present tense, as it's hard to follow, generally. Past tense seems to work better, but it's a personal preference thing. Also, the body wouldn't just be tingling, it'd be itchy, the blood would start circulating again, you'd be on fire with movement. You'd be cold but extremely warm inside, eventually. Or at least this is what I imagine being frozen and the thawed would be like. As if with utmost reluctance the juices flowing through my limbs gradually pick up the pace. I apply willpower to my eyelids and force them apart. For some reason only then do I take in a deep, seemingly endless breath. The air has a metallic taste.

Had I dreamt the un#00BF00 ">restricted roving of my thoughts in the dark starless gulfs and fabulous galactic cores? It had felt so real. Perhaps an echo from before I was born as a human. If there was anything before that. I guess I'll never know. #FF0000 ">Loving this story.

I had been frozen for twenty two years #FF0000 ">I hope you did your research Because if I'm correct, the closest planet to our own in inhabitableness is hundreds of light years away, so unless we had *just* slower than light star travel, it'd take longer than 22 years. Unless of course mankind has already populated the stars. More then two decades spent in a state that put me outside the general passage of time, the world inhabited by my species. But #00BF00 ">since by the measures of this world, the years in the cryogenic pod don't count, #00BF00 ">since the organic cells haven't aged, I am still the same age I was when I boarded this space ship. Seventeen. #FF0000 ">I find this slightly. . . dubious. While young people are needed, I think people in their twenties would be better suited.

My name is Conrad and I am on the final lap #FF0000 ">"lap" insinuates a return tripof a fantastic voyage. I am sure of this and of my mission. I know who I am and where I am going. I am myself again.

With #FF0000 ">*the* grating sounds of latches unlock#FF0000 ">ing and with a hydraulic hiss the lid of my white coffin-like cryogenic pod opens up ever so slowly, as its sensors confirm that I am now awake. I blink at the light which floods into my eyes, anchoring me completely to the waking world. It takes seconds of being awake to forget all that stuff about floating in space forever.

I see sheepish grins and listen to weak banter as everyone else starts coming to #FF0000 ">While I understand what you mean here, I think you can come up with something better than "coming to" as well. We are twelve people in all. Around me eleven cryogenic pods have opened their lids. Five girls and six guys #FF0000 ">Guys? You've been so professional so far, don't sink below the line with slack word usage have woken up and are climbing out, pulling on their white robes.

Jacob has a crumpled sleepy face and he picks his nose until he blinks a couple of times and realizes he is back in reality and everyone can see him. He jerks his hand away from his face and #00BF00 ">looks around with an expression of urgency. Then his expression melts into a #00BF00 ">smile, as he meets Frida's gaze. I also #00BF00 ">smile when someone #00BF00 ">looks at me, but most of my mental drives are still busy with reestablishing connection with my body. I feel very tired and it's as if my bones ache to the very marrow. #FF0000 ">I understand that you're trying to set the scene, but this paragraph seems so weak compared to the others I have read

We are #00BF00 ">colonists. #00BF00 ">Colonists headed for a colony #FF0000 ">Redundant. We shall never see our #00BF00 ">homeworld again. We will make ourselves a new #00BF00 ">homeworld. "Forge a new haven for mankind," as the governor had put it so eloquently #FF0000 ">during the ceremony in the middle of the capital. The day before we were frozen and fired into space.

We are in fact the second team. The first team arrived there thirty years ago. But more on that later. #FF0000 ">Uh. Please either elaborate now, or don't have this here. It's like saying, for example, "The One Power, Saidin, will drive male magic users insane, but more on that later."

The colony, Dalarn Four, the fourth planet around the star Dalarn, is eighty light years away from our home planet. My home. Vermlandia. #FF0000 ">Ah. I take back my previous question about Earth.

What would take light itself eighty years to travel, took our ship just twenty two years, because it's powered by a DMD #FF0000 ">Normally this is put after a name of something, ie, "This is a Bio Force Gun 9000, or as we like to call it, Big Fucking Gun (BFG)."- a Dark Matter Drive.

As I understand it after all the lectures, the world of matter, #00BF00 ">energy, planets and stuff #FF0000 ">Sorry, but if this guy was chosen to populate a colony, he'd know what he was talking about. In science fiction, it's okay to info dump if you do it right. is a tiny island surrounded by dark matter and dark #00BF00 ">energy, which make up ninety six percent of the whole universe. We can't see or feel this dark #00BF00 ">energy, but it is the force which makes the universe expand. And it is this force into which the Dark #00BF00 ">Energy Drive taps, making our ship travel more then four times faster than light #FF0000 ">There are so many things wrong with "faster than light" travel that I just can't. . . *strains* . . . *has heart attack* Just listen. What happens when you travel faster than light and you shine a light at yourself? Faster than light travel just doesn't work. It can't. It breaks physics. Basically you can travel *just* shorter than 3.0 x 10^8, but you can't travel faster than it unless you can justify yourself really really really well Do some research into it .

"Hey lazy bones," says a #00BF00 ">familiar voice and I turn my head. A pale grinning face crowned by unruly blond hair. That's Teo, my best friend. He volunteered for this missions with me. He's seventeen too. #FF0000 ">. . . Just. . . Volunteer? I don't see teenagers volunteering to populate a planet. . .

"Hey," I say in return and bulge my eyes to show that I'm fine and awake. Then I finally sit up, put my feet on the floor, wrap myself in my robe and give a hearty yawn, bits of my body popping and clicking into place as I stretch my arms.

Annalie is all around us, pinching us, giving our eyelids a quick stretch to examine our eyeballs and waving her med-scanner thingy up and down #FF0000 ">Again. These teenagers better have some sort of genius otherwise they wouldn't have been chosen to conolize a planet. . She's the doctor of our crew, and a redhaired vixen with full pink lips. Still partially defenseless emotion-wise after being unfrozen, I feel the strong urge to approach her and do something erotic, like bite an earlobe, or lick her cheek or kiss her neck. But she's way out of my league, she's twenty two. A regular adult.

There are four real adults on the ship. Annalie the doctor; Olivia, our captain, who is a biochemist, thirty one; Franz, a twenty six year old psychologist and second in command; and Gabriel, who is nineteen and is an okay guy. He's our young gene-farm expert. He'll be helping in the designing #FF0000 ">of the food animals for the new planet.

Apart from these four adults, we also have three borderline cases, three eighteen year olds. Rutger, Frida and Emma.

Rutger is the second gene-farm expert, specializing in crops.

Frida is a master of metal-works. She seems ashamed of her big breasts, which I personally find awesome #FF0000 ">For some reason I'm not liking the teenage story telling. I feel as if the person telling this should be at least twenty-five, a mature man, experienced and somewhat wise. She tried to hide them with strategically chosen clothing during the whole time in space-school.

And Emma has the best butt in the whole ship. I don't have a chance there either. She seems smitten with our second in command. She's a hydroponics expert. In charge of the cucumbers and cabbages and the like.

And me? How do I fit in? Well, I pretend to be a human relations expert. Together with Franz the psychologist, I, Conrad the human relations guy, am to make sure we exist in comparable peace with each other. And manage to blend in the with the society of the first colonists without any major conflicts. Can I handle that? Figuring out and advising adults, while being only seventeen? Everyone seems to think so. And I almost believe them. #FF0000 "> Yeah, I don't believe you. To be honest, I wouldn't trust a seventeen year old with psycholanalyis. If I was the one who coined this colonization, I'd have the best of the best, and unless you're Artemis Fowl, you're not going to be the best at seventeen years of age.

Twenty minutes later we are all lined up first in front of the toilet cubes, and then the ion shower cabins. An hour later all the #00BF00 ">familiar faces look at each other around the jolly green plastic table. We are eating our first meal in twenty two years.

#0000BF ">All in all, a very interesting read. Would love to read about the backstory to this expedition, but I don't see why teenagers are involved in this. If they grew up on the voyage, like their parents were specialists and then they were brought up to fill out the specializations that were missing, then that would excuse his, perhaps, unprofessional thoughts. But because these teenagers were, what seems as if handpicked, then they should be of the utmost seriousness about their mission.

That's all I've got

I like it, I would like to read more.

- Jai

Ooh, aah, eeh, Griffinkeeper
Good points all, logical.
They only have resources for ships this size, they move along in a generational pace: send the first batch, when in twenty two years they receive confirmation by DMRadio that they are there and alive and cannibalizing their ship, they send the second batch. The second batch are mostly youths, in order to give a power+baby boost to the colony which they will find, which in theory should have doubled itself by this time. There is a slight gender imbalance in the numbers to offset the genetical inclination to have more babies in the other direction. Although they are just a few people, they have with them genetical material from thousands of types, to keep the local genepool from stagnating once everyone has put his/her heritage into circulation.
By plan this info dribbles down between the horniness in the second, third and fourth chapters.So there

The plot goes like this and not about massive terrafrming efforts with huge ships and thousands of people because I'm still a 'low budget' writer, I can't handle props that big. Or that genre. I can only use elements of it in a more straightforward, onesided adventure. Maybe in half a year or a year of writing I'll be able to do solemn star-spanning epics, but not yet, certainly not yet.

Let me get this straight:

"The story is about a horny young man, who after spending twenty two years in cryo, gets to start a colony with eleven other people, five of which are young women."

...

Let's talk about logistics.

1. Colony ships are expensive. The cryo equipment, a DMD, plus all the equipment needed to start a colony. That's very expensive stuff. Extremely expensive. All that, just so twelve people can colonize a planet. It hardly seems worth the effort. Usually people depict colony ships as carrying people by the hundreds, if not thousands. Because taming a planet is not an easy job. Because you need a lot of different skills.

2. About skills. Is there anyone there who is capable of actually building anything? They have two psychologists (god knows why, there is nothing to analyze during cryo, and they'd just get on each others nerves once they get on planet) but there are no carpenters, no civil engineers, no electricians or plumbers. You've got people that can genetically modify crops, but couldn't plow a field!

If there is one thing a colony needs, it's infrastructure. They'll want people that can actually build things, not psychoanalysts. I think this needs to be better thought out.