A Distant Blue Light, Chap 1, Part 2

[Michael Bickford]

NOTE: My chapters are 3X longer than allowed here, so this is part 2 of 3
Pilot Nazareth Colton is slipping in and out of consciousness during a major acceleration burn to enter solar orbit on the way with her husband/flight engineer, Del to a multi-year mission to supervise asteroid mining. This is halfway through backstory and a remembrance of her childhood outside the Palmdale spaceport.

###

The sprawl of FEMA trailers surrounding the old core of the compound doubled and tripled over generations of the Colton clan. Along with the easy availability of the trailers themselves, the draw of escaping ever-denser urban cores to open spaces, even to a FEMA trailer in the desert—even with the petty religious tyranny of Colton patriarchs—was strong enough to draw Coltons and their in-laws, cousins, and friends from all over the country. Live Free, Rent Free was a powerful slogan employed to great effect by the Old Man and his succeeding eldest son and grandson in their quest to expand their self-serving religious dominion. The US government and the growing international space-based business community that controlled the spaceport used the scattered army of extra eyes and ears around their tightly secured facility to separate it from the industrial ag land with it’s hard-to-monitor large-scale comings and goings and from the growing urban crush of Palmcaster. Easy availability of cheap casual labor was a boon to the spaceport and the surrounding agribusiness—the jobs an additional draw for the Colton fiefdom.

By the time Naz was coming into herself at the end of a hot, dusty childhood, there were over a hundred “relatives” living on Old Man Colton’s original half-mile block. The family had become a “faith-based” non-profit and owned several of the adjoining empty blocks of sand and sagebrush.

Ironically, even though the Antelope Valley was situated above a fully restored aquifer, their water was supplied by LA Water Works. Desalinized from the Pacific, it was delivered through City of Palmdale pipes via the now-reversed flow of the Los Angeles aqueduct. The Sierra water of the Owens valley had also been restored. The government of Palmdale was paid by the feds over the decades for the forced scrapping of their development plans for the Redman District. But, while water was not a problem, on desert land where modern agriculture is prohibited, feeding a hundred-seventeen people was.

~ ~​

In Naz’s waking memory-dream, her brother Josh—the middle one of five, and the only one who seemed to see her as a real person—was lounging in the shade of the stick-fort when she returned from her secret garden plot. “Where you been getting off to lately?” he said. Hidden by the only shade on a brilliant spring morning, his voice startled her as she approached, squinting into the glare.

“Just out watering my crops.”

“Oh, they’re crops now, huh?” Her eyes adjusted to the interior of the lath A-frame and she saw the familiar flat smile and little shake of his head with that side-ways glance that said I gotta treat you like the others do, but you know I don’t mean it. “I thought they’d-a dried up by now. How’re you watering them?”

“I got my ways. What’a you care?” Naz said, standing over him at the edge of the shade. He sat with forearms resting on his knees, staring out the open end of the crude structure.

“Hey, I’d just like some extra feed, like everybody else, that’s all.” Again, with the reassuring glance, his palms defensively raised.

“Well, if you’d give me a little help around here sometimes, I’d put you on my list for when the onions come in. ” A reflexive tease, knowing full well Josh was already the only person in the family—in the whole compound, really—who ever gave her a hand with her chores.

“You’re growing onions?” He sat up straight and faced his sister directly now, licking his lips and swallowing what was surely a burst of saliva elicited by the thought of onions.

“’Course! Antelope Valley—onion capital of the solar system!”

Craning his neck to scan about outside, Josh let go of his big-brother cool. “What else you got growing?”

Spinning and flopping, Naz settled into the relative cool of the stick fort next to her brother. She nestled her bottom into the sand, feeling its soft grit through the thin cotton of the long shift that was Colton Family General Issue for the girls of the clan. Restraining her excitement but warming to his attention, she clapped her hands together lightly. “OK, I got golden beets, green beans, some kinda squash, strawberries...”

“Wait. Your growing strawberries?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how they’re gonna do in the heat, but I’m trying to build a little stick fort around them, so maybe...”

“You’re shittin’ me Naz! I thought you had maybe some flowers going or something. Sounds like you got a flippin’ farm!” Josh seemed to realize he was forgetting his preferred position of older brother and visibly calmed himself. Staring out toward the silver mirage of the city in the distance, he said with obvious disappointment, “I don’t know what I’m getting so excited about. It’s all gonna burn up when summer really hits.” He returned to giving her the usual sidelong look.

“Nope.” Naz squirmed a little in the powdery sand, trying to decide if she trusted her favorite brother with her secret. Her eagerness decided for her. “I found some water,” she whispered, implying a secret between them.

Catching her tone he whispered back, “What? Like a creek or something?” Then, reclaiming his cool, he countered, “I don’t think so,” shaking his head and falling back into a slouch, arms on knees.

“No, like a source of water.” The look on Josh’s face told her he didn’t believe a word of it. “OK, come on. I’ll show you.”

~ ~​

Naz has drifted into a light sleep thinking of her brother, the stick fort, and her garden back in Palmdale. A hypnogogic jerk brings her up from this warm, sandy pre-dream and she is momentarily disoriented. She knows she’s in a pilot’s seat at the end of a burn, but she has to roll her eyes up a second to think. “Jesus, I hate falling asleep like that,” she hisses at herself as the particulars of the moment come rushing back in a look to her right at Del. He appears not to have moved.

 

[tinkerdan]

This is an interesting piece.
Having lived out in Palmdale and driving past the onion fields every day, I can relate.

The sprawl of FEMA trailers surrounding the old core of the compound doubled and tripled over generations of the Colton clan. Along with the easy availability of the trailers themselves, the draw of escaping ever-denser urban cores to open spaces, even to a FEMA trailer in the desert—even with the petty religious tyranny of Colton patriarchs—was strong enough to draw Coltons and their in-laws, cousins, and friends from all over the country. Live Free, Rent Free was a powerful slogan employed to great effect by the Old Man and his succeeding eldest son and grandson in their quest to expand their self-serving religious dominion. The US government and the growing international space-based business community that controlled the spaceport used the scattered army of extra eyes and ears around their tightly secured facility to separate it from the industrial ag land with it’s hard-to-monitor large-scale comings and goings and from the growing urban crush of Palmcaster. Easy availability of cheap casual labor was a boon to the spaceport and the surrounding agribusiness—the jobs an additional draw for the Colton fiefdom.

By the time Naz was coming into herself at the end of a hot, dusty childhood, there were over a hundred “relatives” living on Old Man Colton’s original half-mile block. The family had become a “faith-based” non-profit and owned several of the adjoining empty blocks of sand and sagebrush.

Ironically, even though the Antelope Valley was situated above a fully restored aquifer, their water was supplied by LA Water Works. Desalinized from the Pacific, it was delivered through City of Palmdale pipes via the now-reversed flow of the Los Angeles aqueduct. The Sierra water of the Owens valley had also been restored. The government of Palmdale was paid by the feds over the decades for the forced scrapping of their development plans for the Redman District. But, while water was not a problem, on desert land where modern agriculture is prohibited, feeding a hundred-seventeen people was.

This here is all world building and it comes in the form of a hammer blow with Naz sort of wedged in the center.
This would work better, if you have to have it, If you started in Naz's POV and organically placed the worldbuilding into it. That might be hard because you have to have some reason that Naz might be thinking or reminiscing about these things.

For instance, someone is walking down a street where they grew up and they could be waxing nostalgic about some of these things. It needs to look like it belongs there rather than like it grew there like some cancer at the top of the page.

 

[Cosmic Geoff]

This is almost all world-building and backstory, and if this novel is about Naz's spaceflight I don't see why you want it here. It could be dribbled in a little at a time over several chapters if it is just to illustrate her formative years. OTOH if the novel is really about her life on earth, why not start there and leave out the spaceflight?
The material is well enough written but I feel you have structural issues with this novel.

 

[sule]

I think this is a lot like your other pieces you've shared so far. The prose is solid. There are some redundancies in your description that I'm sure you'll clean up on another pass.

Things will happen, I assure you, but I'm laying out the foundations right now. I may very well rearrange the action and open with a sequence that happens later, but I can't write it in that order.

I completely understand that you can't write out of chronological sequence on a first draft. I do agree with Cosmic Geoff and other critiquers that this current sequencing likely won't work in a finished novel.

To be perfectly honest, I am personally not a fan of the long "telling" part of the flashback (started in the last part and continued here). I understand that you had to write it for a first draft so you know the details; I think once you're going into revisions it would feel a lot more interesting to weave the pertinent information into Naz's personal flashbacks so the reader gets the information without it being told to them in a brick of text.

Some of the actions and moods in Naz's flashback felt more like they were being told to the reader. For instance, these two:

Restraining her excitement but warming to his attention,

The look on Josh’s face told her he didn’t believe a word of it.

To me they seemed like placeholder ways of telling what was going on so later the author can find a way of describing it to get the feeling across that doesn't just say it.

I think Naz's flashback itself works, and you've got a decent start to your first draft. Keep writing.

 

[luriantimetraveler]

I think I've read all the pieces of this you've put up so far — and I like Naz; I'm invested in her journey with this new partnership, interested in the world that she came from. I would agree with others that much of what we're getting is told rather than shown, and it's unclear (at this point) how much it connects to the action of the launch/mission in space.

Just curious — do you have model texts that you can draw from as you think about structure and pacing? I know I'm always deconstructing what I'm reading to figure out how it works/why it works, and then trying to apply it. I know others have commented on the need for more action — maybe it might be helpful to do some mapping of a character-driven SF story that you really love and see how that author dealt with the genre conventions? Off the top of my head, I think Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang might be useful — very embedded in character and not at all concerned with paradigm-shifting-big-plots.

 

[Michael Bickford]

I think I've read all the pieces of this you've put up so far — and I like Naz; I'm invested in her journey with this new partnership, interested in the world that she came from. I would agree with others that much of what we're getting is told rather than shown, and it's unclear (at this point) how much it connects to the action of the launch/mission in space.

Just curious — do you have model texts that you can draw from as you think about structure and pacing? I know I'm always deconstructing what I'm reading to figure out how it works/why it works, and then trying to apply it. I know others have commented on the need for more action — maybe it might be helpful to do some mapping of a character-driven SF story that you really love and see how that author dealt with the genre conventions? Off the top of my head, I think Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang might be useful — very embedded in character and not at all concerned with paradigm-shifting-big-plots.

Thanks for the comment. Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you. The real world is opening up and I've been diving in!

Glad you are getting to know Naz. Del next, I hope.
Some thoughts about your insightful comments.

Despite growing up on Bradbury and many of the other old school sci-fi writers, I do not really know the genre as such. So I can't really write to the conventions, not knowing what they are. I have to write my characters stories so that I know who they are before I can put them into any action-packed situations. So for a person reading the rushes, so to speak, it will seem like a very slow story that's being told rather than shown. As a reader, I'm far more into poetic use of language and the beauty of language as its own show. I enjoy writing action (reading it, not so much), but often find it superfluous—an add-on to please the crowd. I'm the same way with visual media. I fast forward through the physical action. I want close-ups and character interactions that aren't violent. Just me. But I think I do run affoul of those who expect "stuff" to happen—for characters to be tested by danger. Once I've written these character's stories and know their motivations, then I will, kind of artificially, but I hope not, put them in dire straits and see what happens. Their trials await them in outline form. It certainly used to be true that just a space launch was seen as action, but its not considered so now, I guess. Accelerating to the limits of human endurance is so passe these days!
So thanks for the tip. I have enjoyed getting back to the genre by reading some of the new (to me) authors like Cixin Liu, Ted Chiang, and Neal Stephenson. I just read Ishiguro's recent contributions to see what one of my fave lit authors does with the genre, but was underwhelmed mostly because of other problems. Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun are no match for Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World!

Thematically, I'm pursuing the evolving nature of sexuality and family structure in a solar-systemic rather than an earth-centered world; the role of responsibility, ethics/morality, and legal liability in AI-dominated decision-making; and the evolution of markets, commodities, trade, art/work/labor, and money in a solar-sytemic economy. So I hope you'll stick with me, as I explore all that through these characters.

Thanks again for taking the time to write.

 

[Toby Frost]

Just a small general point about dramatic openings. I get the impression that when people talk about the need for a hook, or some kind of striking opening to a story, it's often seen as nothing more than a call for violent pulp-style action. I think that's wrong: to my mind, a story almost always starts at the point where there's some kind of break from the norm, which isn't necessarily violent or even especially active, but is new. A person receives some news, a relation arrives, someone sees something strange happening next door - that kind of thing. It will depend on the setting, too: in a story set in a prison, the hero getting some new shoes might be a really important event.

Personally, I think a mysterious or ominous event (often quite a trivial one that suggests a mood/tone as much as any clear danger) can be stronger than physical conflict. I sometimes listen to a podcast where legal cases are described as a narrative, ie a story read out by the presenter. Most episodes begin with a mysterious event rather than actual violence, even where murder and the like are involved.

None of which is to say that you can't begin a novel with several thousand words of backstory or prose poetry before the actual plot begins - just that it will be harder to do so successfully. However, I suspect that the brain is geared to answering questions, and posing them early on is a good (and not "cheap") way to make a book engrossing. The obvious one is "Who will win this fight?" for a pulp-style adventure, but gentler questions like "Why is the dog barking?" and "Will Bob get funding for his space rocket?" can be just as interesting.