Shiny new idea

 This week I've finished the rewrite of my 2009 novel.  I'm off on writing retreat today for the next week, and I desperately wanted to finish it before I left home.

 Next week will be a week of writing in a new environment, a house overlooking the beach, so it ought to be an inspiring setting.  Perfect, in fact, for exploring a shiny new idea.  

I have two new concepts which I want to develop into series.  I was talking to my friend Carol Westron about them yesterday, and her comments helped me to decide which idea to explore first over the next week.

It will be a story set on a space-based medical facility which will bring a group of characters together.  Carol suggests I could have a small group of core characters, and tell each person's story in turn in their own novel.  That would give me a series of linked standalone stories, which I had planned to do anyway.  The medical facility will be the place which brings all these disparate characters together, and I think the setting has the potential to become a character in its own right.

This is what I did in my novel Tiger's Eye.  That was a rewrite of a twenty year old novel set on a orbital shipyard.  I have in fact written the stories of three of that core group of characters, and I have a complete chapter plan for the story of a fourth character.

In the shiny new idea I want to explore next week I first have to decide what specialisms my characters  have.  I've decided the medical facility will be financed by three governments, involving three alien species working together.  That gives me the potential for importing political intrigue into the medical facility.  It could involve battles for funding, and perhaps having to stand up and refuse to do research which is unethical.

Then perhaps there's sabotage at the facility, and perhaps espionage.  And if someone was snooping around finding out about secret things that would give me the potential to write a murder mystery too.  So I think a lot of my work next week will be diving down into this shiny new idea and pulling out the details.  I have these rough ideas of events which might take place, but now I need to work out how and why.

The hard work lies in creating the details of the story.  Deciding what the characters are named is the first step.  Then, if some of them are aliens, I need to decide how they survive.  Are they organic, or sentient AIs?  What do they look like?  I quite fancy trying to use an octopus creature as a character.  Octopuses are incredibly smart, and would be the experts on treating creatures who live in oceans.

The ideas are already spilling out of me.  My task for the next week is refining them and coralling them into some sensible order which can provide a plot.  I'm looking forward to the challenge.