Some changes to E-ships

I've been revamping things in E-ships even as I post and now some of the changes are going to impact what you read here. Not a lot, most of the changes are in parts of the story that I haven't posted yet, but Kurgan Brown's name is changing to Kurgan Umbago and the chapter breaks are different so the numbering may be just a bit off for the next post. It's not that any of the story is missing or repeated, just that the chapters have been renumbered.

I've never noticed a set pattern for chapter heading, in science fiction or fantasy any more than other genres, just that some people will do more than one scene per chapter and some won't. I do, generally, and don't like to have 50 chapters in a short book, and that makes it a little more of a challenge to know when to make a chapter break, but when I noticed that various other changes had created chapters that went on for more than 50 pages, I decided it was time to rethink the chapter structure. It's still a tad on the arbitrary side, aiming for 15-20 pages on average and once or twice breaking what would otherwise have been a single scene, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

If this leads to too much confusion, since you won't have the previous chapters to check back against for clarity, let me know and I can send you a copy of the new version of the preceding chapters of the book. More of the changes, however, will be in the flow and polish of the chapters to come and I hope you will enjoy them. Let me know if anything I'm doing makes it worse! Improvement is always a desirable change in fiction writing, never making it worse!

alien versions of English

Okay, right off, I know the ast scene in E-ships has problems, for one, valley hillbilly doesn't really make sense, and certainly isn't the sort of phrase these people would use. On the other hand, is it something my readers will understand? Think amusing? Hillbilly has all kinds of implicatinos, mostly what I intend here, including the mountain base (though outsiders think of them as coming from the valleys, they themsleves think of themselves as living on the mountains) but are there other words that would provide the meaning without the apparent contradiction? And is the contradiction absurd, or clever? Sometimes, I just don't know.

And then there is the "witty reparte" between the two. Does it come off right? Endeavor is probably too high end a word for the hillbilly. I enjoy writing the word play and rarely have the characters who would participate. I suspect half of it is a stretch of my imagination to see a connection between the words at all, and that the other half is too blatent to seem anything but trite, but that, too, is hard to tell from the writer side of the equation. How does it come across to the reader?

I think I'm Back

A computer crash turned out to be more complete than originally hoped so I now have a new computer, new versions of all my old files, and access to the internet at LOOONG last. Meanwhile, Earthlink changed some of their web software so it is no longer compatible with Firefox and I can't update my story that I was presenting there. So, that one will join E-ships on this blog (in it's own category) as soon as I figure out where I was. As I generally do when I am sans computer, I wrote a lot of stuff on paper which now has to be typed and I have to re-establish my posting schedule, so it is likely to be irratic, especially with the upcoming holidays. Please bare with me as I find the most effective new pattern for getting on line, and I hope you enjoy the side order of fantasy to accompany the science fiction.