Having trouble starting a new story.
Posted: 2005-04-13 08:00pm
I want to write a space opera. I want it to be an epic about empires, beautiful princesses, and adventure!
Trouble is, I can't really seem where to start. I don't really just want to rip off of Star Wars. Dune. The Foundation, and Deathstalker. And yet these are my most immediate influences.
Anyway, any general advice would be welcome.
What follows is just some of my thoughts about it ...
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The technology would be pretty science light, the predominant weapon the age is the "blaster," they possess the ability to create force fields, FTL travel is accomplished through instantaneous jumps. Nanotechnology, AI, cybernetics, cloning, genetic engineering, and technological advancement (outside of technology of scale) is pretty much nonexistent, regulated to an extremely small group, forbidden, or in the background and unmentioned.
Humans currently are expanding out aggressively and waging Crusades against the Alien Menace (read everyone in their way). I was thinking of setting the story as the Humans encounter, for the first time, a league of alien races united under the mysterious aliens called the Thoss.
Within the Humans sphere there is a pogrom launched against people born with a certain gene, called, for now, the Wheel Gene. Reasons why are pretty much unknown to me for the moment.
And now for the magic element. I haven't quite figured that out yet either. I wondered at first about tying it into the Wheel Gene, but then decided that the Wheel Gene is independent of that. The Wheel Gene, as of right now, was introduced to humanity at some point intentionally to prevent something. No real idea about where to go for the magic yet. I was thinking of something like super-speed coupled with some kind of spider-sense/precognition. Whatever.
I guess I've been neglecting the most important part which is the characters. There's the Old Warrior, a veteran of many wars, and his Young Disciple, the protagonist. The Young Disciple was born of nobility, or at least an extremely wealthy family, but under improbable conditions to a mother he never knew.
I still haven't figured out what they are trying to do and where they are trying to go.
Trouble is, I can't really seem where to start. I don't really just want to rip off of Star Wars. Dune. The Foundation, and Deathstalker. And yet these are my most immediate influences.
Anyway, any general advice would be welcome.
What follows is just some of my thoughts about it ...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The technology would be pretty science light, the predominant weapon the age is the "blaster," they possess the ability to create force fields, FTL travel is accomplished through instantaneous jumps. Nanotechnology, AI, cybernetics, cloning, genetic engineering, and technological advancement (outside of technology of scale) is pretty much nonexistent, regulated to an extremely small group, forbidden, or in the background and unmentioned.
Humans currently are expanding out aggressively and waging Crusades against the Alien Menace (read everyone in their way). I was thinking of setting the story as the Humans encounter, for the first time, a league of alien races united under the mysterious aliens called the Thoss.
Within the Humans sphere there is a pogrom launched against people born with a certain gene, called, for now, the Wheel Gene. Reasons why are pretty much unknown to me for the moment.
And now for the magic element. I haven't quite figured that out yet either. I wondered at first about tying it into the Wheel Gene, but then decided that the Wheel Gene is independent of that. The Wheel Gene, as of right now, was introduced to humanity at some point intentionally to prevent something. No real idea about where to go for the magic yet. I was thinking of something like super-speed coupled with some kind of spider-sense/precognition. Whatever.
I guess I've been neglecting the most important part which is the characters. There's the Old Warrior, a veteran of many wars, and his Young Disciple, the protagonist. The Young Disciple was born of nobility, or at least an extremely wealthy family, but under improbable conditions to a mother he never knew.
I still haven't figured out what they are trying to do and where they are trying to go.