Project Challenge, day 2
Progress report
I wrote for probably close to 20 minutes, took a break for some evening routine stuff, then wrote for another 15 minutes. All in all, I wrote just over 600 words of good solid prose for the beginning, expanding on the bare bones from yesterday. It felt nice to get into the flow of things. This may sound a little egotistical, but I am proud of my writing and the prose style I have developed over the years; I enjoy reading what I have written. Mostly because I write for myself.
I didn’t do much planning, but I did plenty of that yesterday, even in the short amount of time I spent, so I felt okay with just a little bit of setting visualization as planning. Roselia inhabits a space ship for the majority of the story, so I’ve got to figure out how I want it to look when I describe it in the prose.
Factoid
The cathedral ship that Roselia lives and works on (and gets trapped along on) is a passenger ship, at the heart of which is a domed hydroponics garden. This garden houses not only the plants that work hard for oxygen production for the ship, but it also houses a massive tree that basically powers the ship's ability to travel and communicate faster-than-light (remember, this is a science fantasy story, so I can play around with how physics work). The tree, called the Great Tree, looks like an old, sprawling oak tree, except with white leaves. I’ll talk more about the tree in another post.
The ship, though, is a passenger ship, shuttling thousands of people from planet to planet in the civilization of this universe. At first I had considered calling it the Cantuel (Cantwell), coming from “cantus”, the Latin word for sound, and “el”, the Hebrew word for God. I was trying to come up with something similar to Hebrew names that invoke God, that either end in or start with “el”, like Gabriel or Elizabeth. And “Cantuel” could be slurred enough to not exactly sound like an angelic name. But I thought about looking at the Hebrew word for music, just to see what it might be, and found “zimrah”, which is a feminine noun translated in the King James Bible as “psalm”. I already have a psalm on the inspiration docket in a few days, so it felt fortuitous, and now the ship is called the Zimrael, or the Psalm to God. This does sound like an angel name, but for now it’s good. I like naming things with important meanings like that. But it may change in the future, as names of locations are not set in stone like people names are (for me).
Inspiration 2 – One-Way Trips
Back in January, I went and saw the movie Iron Lung in theaters. It’s an indie film made by the Youtuber Markiplier, based on the indie game of the same name by David Szymanski. It’s a dark, tense movie with a slow build up and an intense climax that ends on the barest pinprick of hope, and it currently holds the world record for most fake blood used in a film. I watched it twice in theaters, and a few more times on Youtube once it was released for digital purchase, because I loved it so much.
This weekend I finally got around to watching the spring blockbuster Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling, based on the book by Andy Weir. It is a stunning movie, both visually and with its story, and easily in my top three films of the year.
These two movies are tonally very different, but seem to be in conversation with each other. Both are about a man sent on a one-way trip to save humankind (without their un-coerced consent), and the character growth toward a final sacrifice, though the result of that sacrifice is almost the complete opposite between the two. There’s already a lot of discussion on the internet about the two movies, including a lot of crossover fanfiction about the two protagonists, so I won’t get into that, but what really hit me with these two stories is how a person deals with being trapped for the greater good, and what it takes to get a person to make the unselfish choice. Watching both movies made me want to explore that in my own writing.
It will be interesting to see how that intertwines with exploring the problem of evil. Previous
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