Meet Hardcandy Banks

Name: Hardcandy Banks

Rank: Lieutenant Scientist

Assignment: Science Core, Specialist in High Energy Physics with a sub-discipline in Planetology.

History: Born in the town of Baretta in the olive and wine country of Sapphire's Panrovia province. She was named for her grandmother, a genetic-meddler in the development of new strains of olives who moonlighted as an exotic dancer.

HCB was chosen for the Odyssey Project while completing her High Degree in High Energy Physics at Sapphire's University at New Tenochtitlan. She's currently single, and looking to settle down and make babies with a decent man. In the past has dated Blade Toto, but found him lacking.

Why: Worlds-Apart needed more hot chicks.

The Rule of Threes

In Book 3, Pegasus got walloped. In Book 6, Pegasus got even more beat up. In Book 9, Pegasus will receive the most serious beating of her life. I was drafting some parts of the last chapter in which David Alkema delivers to Keeler a damage report.

Still need to work out a naming convention for the characters from the planet Gethsemane. I also need more insight into Keeler's past history, which plays a major part in the story. I'm gonna use a lot of imagery from the Book of Revelation, and maybe even work in some Left Behind parody type stuff.

Serializing Book Nine

Serializing Book Nine... putting out one chapter a month for 12 months ... is something I am giving thought to. The main reason not to is so often I get an idea later in the book of how to do something better earlier in the book, and then I have to backtrack. It's easy to do that when it comes out as a finished product, but if I'm locked into a serial structure before it's finished... that's risk.

I'm working the chapter-by-chapter outline. We'll see how safe I feel when the outline is done.

Read it and Weep

B8P2 is now online

Snows

I has them.

Editing B8P2

Some stuff that's been cut out in the editing...

• The character based on Rousseau from 'Lost' --- gone. Just took up space and added nothing to the story.
  
• The "Spear and Magic Helmet" reference. It was just too forced.
  
• The "Christmas Carol" scene with Keeler has been truncated, and made slightly less silly.
  
• Several chunks of exposition. This was hard, because it would have explained and foreshadowed things that are going on back with the part of the crew that left to serve on Lexington Keeler, but the problem was, people were telling these things to Specialist Atlantic, and so it required him to make more inquiries, and I realized his character is too danged self-absorbed to make those kinds of inquiries.

Oh, and if a certain character reminds you of Number Six from BSG, that's intentional.

How it's going

Pretty well. Re-wrote the second "act" (for lack of a better word) of B8 P2. Moved the first flashback into the first act, which smoothes out the story a little bit, but I had to add a new flashback to the second act which wrecks the old hot-cold-hot-cold motif :-( but adds just a hint of detail to the character of Specialist Atlantic, and since he needs all the help he can get, so much the better.