These last few blog posts, I laid out the bones that forms the skeletal structure of MILK RUN. These are major events in the story: from the Inciting Incident that changes our hero’s life forever; through the point where he decides what he must do; then down to the story’s Low Point where all hope seems lost; followed by the Climax of defeating the bad guys and saving the girl; only to wonder if all is as it appears to be at the story’s cliff hanger Wrap-Up.
Those are the building blocks of this young adult science fiction novel about a young captain fresh out of space command school on his first mission as captain of the USS Princeton, an old destroyer class spacecraft. Earth is losing the war against the Telrachnids and our young captain is charged with delivering a new weapon to a secret star base far from the front lines. But what our hero thought would be an easy first mission turns out to be a test of his ability to lead a crew and ship much older than he against an enemy that is using his own fiancée to destroy him, his ship and his mission.
By the way, this is one of those classic space cowboy shot’em up stories inspired by and exploring themes such as obsession and butting heads with crew members that’s found in that old WWII black-and-white movie RUN SILENT RUN DEEP—staring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. After scifi-ing up the venue by exchanging the deep blue Earthly sea for starry parallel spacial dimensions, I decided to spice up the story even further with a love triangle complication.
I’ll start to put some meat on MILK RUN’s story bones by laying out major plot action in the next several blogs. Feel free to tell me what you think of these story beat points in terms of interest, character arc, story consistency/believability, writing style and of course marketability to readers and those finicky agents/publishers.
To get things going, my next post will summarize the list of characters and science fiction terms/technology (based on real science of course) used as the story backdrop.
