Egad, I had an idea for yet another novel last night.
I woke up enough to write down 500 words, enough to establish a setting, my main character, the tone, the hook, and the theme. This way, I'll have a foundation to build upon when I come back to it.
You're minding your own business, and suddenly a story idea pops into your head and you have to write it down.
Okay, I found it. I got it up and running. But I feel like a four-year-old at the wheel of the family car.I have Paint 3D, but "We can't connect right now."
Depressed at my inability to produce an acceptable map for Wee's cover art. I began flipping through old stubs of stories.
Why is this a bad thing?It happened again.
One of them takes place on a planet which as neither land nor sea. All is airborne...which means no metal and no electricity. The story never worked before because I kept trying to connect it with a great off-planet civilization, which means interstellar trade bringing in both metal and electricity.
This time I thought of it as a long-abandoned colony, cut off from humanity for thousands of years. Story ideas/world-building ideas suddenly began flooding in. I oozed out a thousand words before falling asleep.
Don't get me wrong. This is a wondrous story.Why is this a bad thing?
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
I'm mesmerized by the idea of gently flying around everywhere. 
But while I'm busy with this, Wee isn't getting published, Lovelash Locket isn't getting corrected, my Count of Monte Banco is bankrupt & powerless, my MC in Erebus is imprisoned on a submarine, my elf guy is headed to the evil bishop's hotel room where he will discover how the bishop is cheating at cards, etc. There's just a lot on my plate. 
You might want to read Isaac Asimov's autobiography some day (it's in 3 very large volumes, so it'll take awhile). One of the secrets to his prolific writing career is that he always had at least half a dozen projects on the go at the same time. That way, if he hit writer's block with one, he could always go on to another. He didn't regard that as a bad thing.Don't get me wrong. This is a wondrous story.
BTW: Up to 1,500 words.
Unlike my other fanfics, this isn't either science fiction or fantasy. It's based on the Vacation Adventures: Park Ranger computer game. If I put Ogopogo into this game, it would have to be set in the interior of British Columbia, in the Okanagan. Its supposed actual setting is somewhere in Washington state, but whoever did the artwork for some of the scenes screwed up and used a location that anyone familiar with Banff/Jasper National Parks in Alberta would recognize instantly.
I tend to find his plots & characters boring 
and so I avoid his stuff unless he's teamed with Jerry Pournell. 
In Integral Trees, Niven puts his sealess/landless world it an atmospheric torus [donut] in orbit around a black hole [or neutron star?]. But the people in his world are weightless, a road I don't wish to travel down. 
This is something for me to think about...later. 
There are some good books written by pro science fiction authors, dealing with the science of world-building.I received a PM suggesting I read Niven's Integral Trees. I respect Niven as one of the best (if not the best) world builders around.
This means I will have to deal sometime with my physics problem: What kind of world can maintain a 1-G oxygen-nitrogen, body-temperature atmosphere if it has no solid or liquid core? Even our gas giants, with their solid H/He cores can only maintain an H/He atmosphere. My planet's core would have to have even more mass to maintain a oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.
Meanwhile Ben, my main character, is playing hooky from work as a herdsman so he can search out a really important job. My task: figure out what this could be.
Okay, here we go: 
When in doubt: aliens.
There is a basic problem here: Blue-white giants are very young stars that go through their fuel really fast. They're one of the kinds of stars that end up as supernovas, blowing themselves up after only a brief time (in astronomical terms). They're so young that they go through their life cycles too fast to be able to support planets that would be capable of supporting life. You can see Vega from your latitude, right? It's only 26 light-years from here, which means we can basically watch it in real-time as it was 26 years ago. That's like current events in astronomical terms. There was a point made in Carl Sagan's Contact that the Message couldn't have come from Vega because it's too young. The book/movie provided an explanation to account for this.
A gigantic iron core, rapidly spinning, creates powerful magnetic forces. On Earth, the weight of our mantle is what turns our core molten. On my planet, it's the magnetic attraction of the core on its iron constituents which turns the core molten. [Over the core, is a layer of non-ferrous lava]. The mass of this iron core is sufficient to maintain the planet's O2-N2 atmosphere.
My planet orbits a blue-white giant. The deadly radiation from the star is captured by the planet's magnetosphere resulting in a perpetual, planet-wide aurora borealis. The deadly radiation also explain why the humans on my planet have been functionally cut off from the rest of humanity.
This means a quick rewrite of the scene where Ben returns at night to his city and finds it lit with bio-luminescence. Now the lighting will be from the aurora borealis.
you've given me a problem & solving it will make my story even better. 
I need an explanation of where the "trees" [etc.] came from. They obviously didn't evolve naturally.
