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For the past month, between work, karate and finally reading Divergent (excellent book, by the way), I’ve been working on the second draft of Hero. And although I haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked, and I’m busting to get to the second part of the my revision process (editing the prose – why does ‘prose’ always sound so snobbish?), the novel is coming along nicely.
Just after Christmas, I finished the first draft of Hero and since the New Year I’ve been hard at work on the second draft. Dan Wells’s 7-point plot system (aka the Pantser’s Beat Sheet) has been incredibly helpful during the revision process – particularly the layering process (explained in part 5 of Dan Wells’s lecture, available on YouTube) – and it too has undergone a revision.
Meet Fink. He’s the size of a horse, has a tail, six legs and is Hero’s best, if not only, friend. Weighing in at six-hundred and twenty-two kilos with twenty-six claws and a mouth full of pointy teeth, most people find Fink intimidating, but underneath all that fur beats the heart of a teddy bear. … Read more
I first devoured the Song of the Lioness series when I was ten; to say that it was my favourite set of books ever is to understate the case. Alanna, the series protagonist, was my childhood hero, and not just because she had a magic sword and a talking cat. Alanna was my hero because she was doing something forbidden and getting away with it.
It wasn’t an especially bad thing that she was doing, like selling drugs or stealing, she was just doing what the boys did – playing with swords, riding horses, going to war – and if that meant she had to lie about her gender, well, that only added to the tension.
On Jørn, Hero’s world, people live in vast floating cities, far out of reach of an airborne toxin known as Pollen. Pollen is only toxic to humans, leaving much of the planet unexplored and its surface teeming with all sorts of weird and wonderful wildlife.
For Hero, being a xenozoologist and going down to the surface to see and study that wildlife seems like the culmination of a dream, even if she does have to be bundled up in an envrio-suit to do it.
Meet Hero, the star of Hero-Fink, a novel set in the far distant future, on a far distant world. Hero Regan is special, and not in a way she likes. She hears voices, the kind of voices that other people can’t hear. Ever since she can remember, she’s been forced to take meds and prodded … Read more
More anti-hero than hero, Crichton makes the all-star list more for his journey from squeaky clean good guy to interstellar, slightly insane, bad boy than any other trait.
Targ – a boar-like creature with spikes along it’s back. Generally considered to be the Klingon equivalent of a cat.
At 5’9” with a forehead that looks like it could deflect a sledgehammer this all-star isn’t someone you’d like to encounter in a dark alley. Half-Klingon, half-human and a good deal more attractive than the former, K’Ehleyr gets to be the first shuttle off my all-star hero rank because it’s hard to go past a woman who can take the piss out of Worf ((She’s also my favourite Star Trek character, but only if you exclude Chris Pine as Captain Kirk.)).
