20,000 words and counting…
This week has been amazing! The kids are both back in school (halleluiah!) which means that I have a solid 6.5 hours to myself, 5 days a week. All of my readers will be happy to know that I used that time VERY wisely and wrote nearly 20,000 words! That’s a HUGE deal! To put that in perspective- Adrift was around 70,000 words in total. So yeah, that’s probably the most I’ve ever written over the course of seven days.
This next week’s productivity will be different; there are a few details that I have to figure out. One of the main ones is the fact that my Sirilian is on Earth (a fact I told you all about in my YouTube video) and besides the obvious dilemma of hiding a man with blue skin, I have the problem of communication.
Sirilians and Arathians have translators. Each version works differently from one another, but the premise is the same. They can understand any of the universe’s languages, but can’t speak it. (If you remember, this was a big problem in Alien Incursion) I have the same problem now- my male is on Earth and can understand English, but can’t communicate back to others. Miming is great, but sooner or later I need him to be able to actually talk to his female.
There are a few ways I can address this problem:
- I can have him replicate a translator. This assumes he has a replicator. And power. And that she’ll let him implant something into her brain… which is questionable.
- He can learn English naturally. But for this to work he’d need to disable his aural translator to hear their words in English and not translated into Sirilian. How would he do this? Would he turn it off and on like a lightbulb? I’m not sure… Also, learning a new language takes time.
- He can talk to her through translation software. There again I run into the fact that I don’t want them communicating through a device. They need to be able to have a conversation with just the two of them.
Honestly, I have no idea which route I’ll take. I’m researching how other fictional stories have addressed this problem, and although I refuse to copy someone else’s work, it might give me a starting off point.
Just one of the many details that I still have to work out for the new book!
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