Samurai
Posted: 2018-10-07T22:35:45+10:00 In:

A space marine on shore leave must race to rescue a scientist from enemy insurgents, or the scientist’s death or abduction could set off a doomsday weapon, killing billions.

A space marine on shore leave must race to rescue a scientist from enemy insurgents, or the scientist’s death or abduction could set off a doomsday weapon, killing billions.
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    4 Reviews

    1. Singularity

      At the moment there is a slight disconnect (In the logline) between having a marine on shore leave and him having to save the scientist. How does he go from one to the other? Why not let authorities?handle it?

      Okay, knowing a little something about Marines.? A marine goes on shore leave and usually ends up where the girls are. There is normally a street of ill repute where women of low moral character hang out. Maybe there are some seedy gambling establishments as well as places of rather crass entertainment. So the marine wants to drink a few drinks, get in a fight with a sailor, then find a girl.

      Now somewhere on the planet, there is an insurgency. How does the marine get from his ‘trying to have a good time’ to fighting an insurgency?

      What event happens that draws the marine in personally and makes it so that only he can save the day?

      (By the way, good luck with this. I take it to mean you are attempting to write this novel in 30 days, that is very cool)

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    2. Samurai

      I’ve made several attempts at a logline for this novel before I posted this one, but they all ended up too long, so I didn’t post them.

      In those attempts, I kept trying to include the marine’s reason for coming to this place for shore leave. When I wrote this version, I forgot to mention it. Another character, a cadet, whom the marine loves was last seen there before he vanished. The marine brings two of his best friends, who are also marines, to search for the cadet, and they’re granted shore leave to do so.
      The setting for this novel is a small town on the capital world of the Trident?Coalition. The protagonist and his friends are citizens of the Coalition and serve in the Coalition Marine Corps, while the Cadet is training to become an officer in the Coalition Space Fleet.
      The town is near a famous landmark where there’s an annual regatta, which is just a few days after they arrive.
      I’m not sure if “insurgents”?is the right word for the enemies that they encounter. They’re from the planet Humbaba, a world that is often aggressive and tries to invade its neighboring systems. The protagonist?and his friends have encountered Humbabans before, as they’re trying to get their hands on a WMD that a rogue officer in the Coalition Military Intelligence developed and tested. (in previous NaNoWriMo novels, I haven’t published any of them, yet.) The Protagonist?and his friends were able to stop the rogue officer, and there’s a new guy in charge, but he’s only marginally better than the previous one.
      In this novel, the Humbabans appear to be on the planet, to participate in the race, but that’s just a cover to find the inventor, who created the original blueprints for the WMD and is hiding in the wilderness where they hold the race. The protag discovers, after having found the cadet, that the Humbabans plan to use the race to find and abduct the inventor and make him create the WMD again, for them. So the marines and the cadet enters the race to stop them.
      The local authorities?are the Military Intelligence guys, who aren’t very helpful, so that’s why the protag and his friends have to do it themselves.
      Thanks for wishing me luck.
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    3. Singularity

      I checked out the?NaNoWriMo website. A 50,000-word story in one month seems doable. (As long as you have the basic story outline?constructed in your head or on paper) That ends up being 4-5 pages a day.

      It is kind of like a New York Marathon for novel writing. Sounds like a fun challenge.

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    4. Samurai

      Thank you.

      They use word count on the site. During November you input how many words you’ve written so far, and you get to see your progress graphically. I don’t remember exactly, but they recommend you write 1667 words per day, or something thereabout, to make it to precisely 50K words at the end of the month. I usually aim to overshoot, to stay on the “safe” side.

      For structure and planning, I use my take on the Save the Cat! By Blake Snyder. I start by filling out a beat sheet, which I import into Scrivener and then split into separate documents until I end up with 40 of them, and plan what will happen in each scene. I also do some?planning in Aeon Timeline.
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