As mentioned here previously, one of my New Year's resolutions was to write every day, damn it! I'm still working on that, but I am writing a lot more often then I was say, last year. I also mentioned that the current work-in-progress involved aliens hiding in the wilderness of a human-colonized world. Apropos of that idea, I find an article about a family that hid in Soviet Siberia for 40 years. Several members of the family were born in the wilderness, and had never seen a human who wasn't an immediate family member. Sometimes truth is stranger (or at least as strange) as fiction.

In other writing neepery, I just wrote the first of two space battles for the book. In this book, I'm really winging things, writing without an outline. I do not recommend this, especially for first novels, but right now it's working. This is the second novel I attempted without an outline, and the first one turned into a hot mess. I think it matters that I'm writing, if not daily, frequently, and so I don't loose the thread.

At any rate, I reached a point in the book that I needed to sit down and design my space ships. I needed:
1) Plausible faster than light (FTL) capability
2) A system of FTL travel not dependent on gates or other pre-positioned hardware
3) A system where my human fleet would get several weeks' notice of the alien fleet

This resulted in several hours plugging away at the wonderful time-sink Atomic Rockets of the Space Patrol. I ended up with a system of "folding space" (trying to avoid "warp drive") that's only effective if you get a long way away from any gravity well. This, plus accelerations on the order of .1 gee leads to spending weeks getting out from the planet of interest to the point where you can actually start folding space.

Research over, now back to writing!