What is a Bridging Conflict?

For NaNoWriMo 2018 I wrote a murder mystery set on a starliner. With all the freewriting and deleted words stripped away, it turned out to be a little over 22k words, a novelette by SFWA standards. Its main contribution to my development as a writer was that it contained a complete albeit sketchy plot – my first NaNo project I could consider finished in some reasonable sense. For this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo I intended to start turning it into a full novel, but I didn’t have enough prep time to do all the planning my research on writing mysteries showed was necessary. So I’ve been slogging through more research, world-building, plot outlining, figuring out what the various antagonists are doing – all of which is reasonably fun, but over the weekend I got frustrated with not having actually started the story. So I drafted the first chapter.

The story just didn’t work.

More on writing mysteries

My 2018 NaNoWriMo novel was a murder mystery set on a starliner. In April 2019 I was contemplating revising it, so I wrote a summary of some Internet research about writing mysteries, mostly from Writing Excuses. I wound up going a different direction, but now I am coming back to that novel. So I’ve read a wider variety of internet sources, listed at the end of this post, and have synthesized what I learned into a summary of my own. I strongly advise that you read the original sources, too.

Worldcon: Monday August 19

On this last day of Worldcon the sessions I attended were

• Bigotry is not allegorical: strategies for writing and reading
  
• Well-meaning vs ‘plain dealing’ villains
  
• Keeping the show on the road: low Earth orbit and beyond
  
• Martian landers
  

Unfortunately I have no notes on the Martian landers talk, because the lights were down for the presentation and it was so fascinating I didn’t want to risk missing anything while note-taking.

Worldcon: Sunday August 18

On Sunday, as on Saturday, there were often several sessions I wanted to attend scheduled at the same time; this hadn't happened as much on Thursday and Friday. The ones I chose were

• The lack of technological progress in fantasy
  
• What writers need to know: physics and space travel
  
• Gods, religion and atheism in the genre
  
• Using science in fantasy writing
  
• Ensembles in YA
  
• Invented mythologies in SF
  

With even further distance from the convention (I am writing this on September 2-7) I am increasingly finding that some of my notes no longer remind me of what was said, so these notes are less complete than they might have been had I written them up earlier.

Worldcon: Saturday August 17

By this point I had decided that the best way to get into the panels I cared about most was to stay in the conference centre, and skip the sessions right before the ones I most cared about so I could queue early. Today’s panels were

• How astronomy might break physics
• Invisible work: mothers and caregivers in SFF
• Young adults versus… the world!
• Urban fantasy from the margins
• Send in the crones: older women in SFF

WorldCon: Thursday August 16

On this second day of regular sessions, the convention was better organized about queue management in Conference Centre Dublin, but there were still some glitches. Today I attended sessions on

• Writing beyond king and colony
  
• Done to death: the art of killing characters
  
• Is epic fantasy conservative?
  
• Unwritable stories
  
• Craft is not a dirty word
  

Unlike yesterday I managed to get into all the sessions I wanted.

Worldcon: Thursday August 15

Worldcon 2019 was the reason for my being in Ireland this year. If you don’t know about Worldcon, here is a teeny capsule summary: the World Science Fiction Convention is a combination of panels on a wide variety of topics of interest to fans and creators of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (collectively known as speculative fiction, or sometimes SFF to people who downplay the horror element), plus events relevant to the hosting location, cosplay, and shopping (largely books, which you can sometimes get a chance to have autographed). Plus, the big item that’s relevant to fans who don’t go: attendees and associate members vote on the Hugo awards, which are presented in a big ceremony (on Sunday night this time).

Today I went to four panels:

• Crime and Punishment in the Age of Superheroes
• How to Build an Evil Empire
• Creating wonderful new worlds
• Making the asexual textual.