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Jan 2 2012-SkyhunterCommander-Untitled Sci-Fi Epic Chapter 10


Skyhunter Commander

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Hey everyone, it's good to finally be back, now that vacation is happening and I have time to write more of this story. Nothing says starting the new year off right quite like finishing a new (fairly long) chapter. (Apologies for the length)

As I mentioned in the email, most of the chapter was written a while back, so its possible that after the point where I stopped things feel a little different. If it does, feel free to point it out.

Also, as I mentioned, if anyone who wasn't here back when I started submitting and wants to read some of the earlier chapters, I'd be more than happy to send them to you.

Summary for this chapter: Darkclaw splits his forces into two fleets, Nayasar leading a combined Felinaris/Snevan fleet against one target, Darkclaw leading his Troodon forces and half of the Snevan fleet against another. As the battle winds down, Darkclaw decides that he must take action to deal with his emotion flashes, which are becoming increasingly problematic.

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!

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Another chapter with a pair of space battles.

This makes me wonder a little bit more what the purpose of the book is going to be. So far, it has been full of battles; I don't recall a chapter without some sort of fight or battle -- possibly excepting the deliberation of the space library, which was only raided as if a battle was likely to occur. So, I'm going to focus my advice a little bit more to the space battles.

I continue to have problems with the intensity of the battles. The way they are written, I don't get the roller-coaster swings between exhilaration and fear that I would expect for a battle. I recall you've mentioned Darkclaw's emotionless state for one of the reasons why they might be moderated when presented from his viewpoint, but here we had Nayasar's viewpoint in a battle as well, and it read similarly to the others. Sure, she took part in more action, but to me it didn't increase the emotional impact at all. For example, her battle was supposed to be a cakewalk, and a chance to try out some new toys. I didn't really feel the excitement building up before this; even though it was a challenge, you wrote that it shouldn't be difficult. That would set up a wonderful swing in emotion when the other battle fleet arrives, and then the determination to do what she needs to in order to wrap up her part in the battle.

Also, I thought her battle ended too soon. Sure, the generators were destroyed, but there was still a large Alliance fleet to deal with. Six hundred or so ships should pose enough of a problem that the defensive emplacements shouldn't be all that decides it.

On the other battle, I didn't really feel Darkclaw's emotional flashes, either. The one with him surprised was well done, though; even though I don't know if surprise counts entirely as an emotion, it can generate a number of other emotions also, and it was nice to see him surprised that he was surprised. The others didn't sell themselves to me as much.

Also, I found Darkclaw's distractedness to be, well, distracting. He is supposed to be logical and emotionless, and more than once he focuses himself on the battle at hand. Why, then, does he take time in the middle of the battles to reflect on so many other things? Things like the similarity between his people and others, or formulating a plan to deal with his emotional outbreaks? If anything, I would expect Nayasar to be more flighty in her thoughts, but she stays focused on the battle the whole time.

The end of Darkclaw's battle, in contrast to Nayasar's, I thought went too long. At least, in detail. I think it might have been more effectively presented as narrative summary -- they resisted, so Darkclaw quelled the resistance with the threat of destroying more cities. They only forced him to destroy one before submitting. I think drawing it out with more details takes away from some of the punch of that part, burying it in the rest of the details.

Finally, a few more technological comments. Computers today can transmit all sorts of detailed information in little time. Nayasar asks for detailed ship information verbally, as if expecting a verbal response as well. In most any technology advanced enough to have starships, I would expect each ship to be capable of updating the command ships of their status on a near-realtime basis. If not, chances are the updates still won't come any faster whether requested or not, and the request itself could be easily automated via computer. Sure, it may not get all the exact detailed information -- the crew probably has to do a visual examination on some stuff to figure that out anyway -- but it should at least get a brief status from each ship pretty quickly.

Also, I'm unsure how the shields/generators work. I know this has been a staple in space-opera for a while, but what is being depleted when shields are only at 30% or 15%? From the way the auxiliary generators are mentioned, I would assume it uses up generator energy for the shields. In that case, however, why would you need an auxiliary in order to maintain shields? Why not just put more fuel in the main one to continue to power them for longer? In most power generators, the fuel would take up a lot less space than the machinery to convert it to energy, so logistically this would make sense. Also, even if that means the aux generator is still needed for some reason, why not hook it up to the shields at the same time as the main one, instead of waiting for the shields to go to 0 before switching to it? If it just takes energy to power the shield, then that prevents the risk of having any time with no shields, or even weak enough ones that something might get through them anyway. On the other hand, if the shield is eating up the generator itself somehow (the power draws ruin the generator's parts), why have the main ship and weapons generator hooked to the shields? Or rather, why have it be the primary source of the power, instead of another dedicated generator and have the others be a fallback. If they were both from the main generator and this was the case, having your shields go to 0% would mean the generator was ruined, and thus environmental and weapons would be gone also. Once you're shields were gone, you'd be unable to do anything.

Lastly, this is another time I've seen references to the smaller ships being faster. Why is that? I can think of some reasons for it to be true, but in general you'll want to consider two things about this. The first is that there may be a difference between acceleration and maximum speed. I don't know how this would play out in space -- it would depend on the physical "laws" your spaceship drives work on -- but it is often true in other applications. The second is that smaller ships have less mass to accelerate, but larger ships can hold larger engines to push them around. Thus, it isn't necessarily the case that smaller ships are faster. I don't doubt that they might be in the universe portrayed in your story, but I am curious if there are reasons behind them being so.

For many of these technical aspects, you might want to have a more technically-minded person mention them at some point. Or, alternately, you might not. It depends on how much of the end of your book relies on one or more of the aspects of the technology. I have heard, however, that a good number of people that read space-battles enjoy figuring out how the battle will play out based on the rules that have been established earlier in the book. I am sometimes one of them.

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Thanks for the feedback; it's all valuable. I'd just like to reply mainly to explain what I was attempting to do with the bits you had issues with, both so I can pinpoint exactly what was the problem and what I can do to fix things.

Well, chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 didn't have any battles. (Chapter 1 only had Darkclaw killing a couple of things, taking up all of two paragraphs, and the others had no fighting to speak of, unless we count Nayasar and Felivas's playing in chapter 2, which I don't count.) I see your point though, which is why there aren't any battles in chapters 11 and 12. What I've been attempting to do (possibly without complete success), is use the battles (which the plot needs to progress at this point) as a backdrop to further the story of my viewpoint characters.

I also see your point on the battles. I was initially considering returning to Nayasar's viewpoint at the end of the chapter to continue the battle, but I worried that it would be too many viewpoint shifts within the chapter (and it felt off to me to include the rest immediately after the first part of the battle. And I actually did have trouble ending Darkclaw's battle scene, and I would agree that it dragged a bit. In fact, one of my alpha readers mentioned the same thing, but not in time to edit before I was going to submit it.

Could you maybe detail a bit of what made the 'surprised' emotion flash work better for you than the others? I've been trying to both get it right while showing a progression from the early ones, which had him just realize that he felt something, to them just coming on more subtly as he unconsciously gets more used to them, and him not noticing until he's already experiencing its effects.

That is also the reason I'm having Darkclaw be distracted; the rules of his world are inexplicably crumbling slowly and he is trying to make sense of it(while Nayasar, on the other hand, is satisfied and completely devoted to the war she's been waiting for and has nothing distracting her aside from a fascination with Darkclaw).

As far as the technology goes, as of now I'm for the most part sticking with general sci-fi conventions (with tech functioning similarly to that of the Star Trek/Star Wars universes) because technology, or at least technical ship details, is not the focus of the story. I want to leave it simple and understandable to readers without drawing focus away from the characters.

I understand what you had issues with well enough, but for some I'm just not sure why(particularly regarding the emotion flashes), which is in my opinion more valuable for when I edit.

Thanks again.

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Well, chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 didn't have any battles. (Chapter 1 only had Darkclaw killing a couple of things, taking up all of two paragraphs, and the others had no fighting to speak of, unless we count Nayasar and Felivas's playing in chapter 2, which I don't count.) I see your point though, which is why there aren't any battles in chapters 11 and 12. What I've been attempting to do (possibly without complete success), is use the battles (which the plot needs to progress at this point) as a backdrop to further the story of my viewpoint characters.

I think I joined and started reading sometime around where you put out chapter 3 or 4, so that might account for some of my impression that it is battle-heavy.

However, if your focus is to truly be on the characters, there are certainly a lot of battles around, and they are very detailed. It might partially be a blocking problem -- I know they've talked about it in Writing Excuses, about how some of Brandon's early revisions of fight scenes felt more like video game tutorials or (more charitably) movie scripts, describing a lot of the action but not as much of the character involvement. I feel like I'm getting a lot of this. Part of it can likely be improved by focusing more tightly on the character's and their reactions, but you'll want to make sure it's not just an overload of battles.

I also see your point on the battles. I was initially considering returning to Nayasar's viewpoint at the end of the chapter to continue the battle, but I worried that it would be too many viewpoint shifts within the chapter (and it felt off to me to include the rest immediately after the first part of the battle. And I actually did have trouble ending Darkclaw's battle scene, and I would agree that it dragged a bit. In fact, one of my alpha readers mentioned the same thing, but not in time to edit before I was going to submit it.

I don't know that I'd recommend returning to Nayasar's battle. It may have only been in contrast to Darkclaw's dragging on at the end that made the departure from her battle seem abrupt. However, you might put in a messaged result at the end of Darkclaw's section or something to wrap it up, if you feel it needs it. Alternately, just having her acknowledge the next step before cutting away might be enough.

Could you maybe detail a bit of what made the 'surprised' emotion flash work better for you than the others?

I'm not positive on this, but I think it's something about surprise being, to me, a very intellectual emotion. It's hard to be surprised by much if you have no expectations, and Darkclaw obviously has a lot of expectations. I could see the surprise leading to a little bit of anger over it as well, although I don't know why it didn't work as well for me.

Have you had any points yet at which Darkclaw experiences emotion (maybe just slightly) and it goes right by him? Perhaps it's the fact that he's always confronting the emotions that makes them seem a little awkward.

As far as the technology goes, as of now I'm for the most part sticking with general sci-fi conventions (with tech functioning similarly to that of the Star Trek/Star Wars universes) because technology, or at least technical ship details, is not the focus of the story. I want to leave it simple and understandable to readers without drawing focus away from the characters.

If this is to be a characters in space novel instead of a war novel, I won't belabor the technology point. I thought it was shaping up to be the latter, given the amount of battle shown on-screen, so I thought I'd bring them up. I agree it's difficult to include all aspects of a novel in equal weight, so perhaps this part of world-building will remain generic. Nonetheless, you might want to consider adding a small detail or twist to this, just so it doesn't seem so uniformly generic.

Alternately, you could perhaps talk in other terms -- such as how many more minutes the ship can withstand getting hit, instead of what percentage the shields are at.

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