Kam Oi Lee » research

sticking names on places

Kam Oi Lee — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:08:03 +0000

Have been doing one last read-through/brushup on the novella. There was a place name that had always bugged me. It was the name for the highest point on a certain rugged mountain road. Originally I had called it Midpoint, always thinking I’d come up with something better later. Later I changed it to Vista, but it kept reminding me of the sucky Windows OS, so I changed it to Farview, which sort of meant the same thing. But I never liked Farview either. I do favor simple, descriptive place names, but Farview sounds too generic to me. I thought about changing it to Iron Peak, but I already have a similar place name, a bar called the Iron Pig. Today I felt compelled to list all the proper names and place names in the story, thinking somehow this would help me choose a better name. It did help; I came up with a new name, Magnet Peak, which fits the composition of the rocks there. Much better!

Then I remembered that cool Wordle site. So I took my list of names and made a Wordle!

In this story, there’s also a mountainous area called the Tiger Range. There are no tigers on this planet and never have been. The reason for the name had to do with a secondary character and his very rich father and how the father’s personal symbol was a tiger… and well, that secondary character isn’t even in the story any more, but the mountains were still called the Tiger Range. And I had been wondering if I should change the name… However, the planet does have plenty of Banded Iron Formations (layers of iron oxides and shale, chert, tiger eye or jasper), and today I discovered that there’s another name for them: Tiger Iron. On Earth, tiger iron is found in Western Australia. *wants some tiger iron jewelry now*

Consider this wall… walked!

Kam Oi Lee — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:34:54 +0000

I finished the rough draft of Wallwalker yesterday! It feels good to actually finish a piece. I had been feeling a bit disheartened about my writing lately, for various reasons, and yesterday I finally realized that the only thing to do was to keep at it–which inspired me to bang out the rest of the story. So there!

Incidentally, all of the main characters in the story are cats. After finishing the story, I found myself looking at my own cats differently. Particularly Luba, our Siamese, who reminds me a bit of the character of Dark Tiger… I know, I’m a weirdo

I definitely want to come up with a better title, but for now I’m just calling it Wallwalker after the main character. Now–on to the whittling and polishing!

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Oh, and I’ve made some progress on Sweet Heart Catalyst too:

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And last but not least, I haz some new research books (and an excuse to try out the OpenBook plugin):

Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide for Writers (Howdunit)

Lee Lofland; Writers Digest Books 2007

WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI (St. Martin's True Crime Library)

; St. Martin's Paperbacks 1993

WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

things are moving… slowly…

Kam Oi Lee — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:44:50 +0000

Wow, that really doesn’t look like much progress since the last time I posted a progress bar, does it?

I’ve become a big fan of the Stuff You Should Know podcast. It’s a really good resource when you don’t know much about a topic, and need to find out the basics in like, 20 or 30 minutes. I’ve been listening to all the episodes I find especially relevant for the purposes of this story, such as “How SWAT Teams Work”, “Are there people who feel others’ pain?”, “The Real Jack the Ripper”, “How Witness Protection Works”, “How Hostage Negotiation Works”, “How Body Armor Works”, “What’s the best place on your body to get shot?”, and of course, “How Rigor Mortis Works”.

Too bad research doesn’t count as wordage.

All the little details

Kam Oi Lee — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:08:41 +0000

I’m furiously working on Algae to try to get it into some semblance of shape for my deadline on Monday. I know I’ve probably said this before, but this is the longest and biggest 10K to 12K story I’ve ever written. Good gawd, the details! I guess that’s the danger of writing about something that actually exists and your readers might know about it—you have to get it right. Or else people might, y’know, laugh at you and think you’re dumb. I just keep wondering, though—how right do I need to get it? I mean, sometimes I feel like I might actually need to learn how to fix diesel engines, just in order to get this stoopid story *not* to completely make no sense. And then it’s like, omg no, I don’t have time to go to school for two years or however long it would take! *flails around in a panic* …Seriously, this is what this story has been doing to my brain. But I know, I know—you just need to show the “edges of ideas”. (Can’t remember who coined that phrase right now…)

Well, but I like the details, though. Like, I had been trying to figure out how much my characters’ field service truck should weigh (so that I can make it fall through the ice). I was sifting through all these web sites, and they would give weights like 6,000 lbs and it just didn’t make sense, until I realized that was merely the weight of the service body that’s attached on top of the truck. So then finally today I found the most wonderful page on mechanics’ trucks, where the author went into great detail about how much they weigh when loaded, and *why*. You get a truck, you put a crane on top, then add all the 9 zillion tools and gear you need to fix heavy equipment like mining machines, and that makes it *way heavier than I had thought*. Because if you try to lift something really heavy, like for example an engine that weighs a couple thousand pounds, with a crane attached to a little light truck, well, the truck tips over. I never thought of it before. But it makes sense, right?

Then I started working on the very first scene and I realized that I’ve given them 3 hours of sunlight that day, ’cause it’s late fall/early winter—but *what time* does the sun come up? Surely it’s not up yet when my main character walks out his front door early that morning. And what time does it set? I decided to use a town near the Arctic Circle in NWT as a model, and found out that on a certain day in late November, the sun would come up noonish and set around 3pm. And this just caused me to squee. Because the timing just worked right for a dramatic moment in the story when my characters need to see the last light of sunset.

For my third lightbulb moment—I had been imagining my mysterious algal bloom coming up from below the ice and melting through to the surface. And it had been bugging me, because I needed this melting to happen rather quickly and create a huge hole in the ice and render my ice road temporarily unusable—and surely this algae doesn’t get so hot that it could melt through a large area of a couple feet’s thickness of ice in a matter of hours when it’s thirty degrees below zero outside? Then I remembered a part on the Ice Road Truckers show where they talk about pressure ridges of ice over a lake being thrust up by rapid changes in temperature, and I realized that I don’t necessarily need to melt through all the ice, I just need it to break. And if I have the heat causing a rapid temperature change, then my ice can actually rupture in a violent event that wouldn’t take much time at all. Yay!

Well, now that I’ve gotten some of these details hashed out, I’ve moved on to the whipping-into-shape phase. My strategy is to (1) make a brief outline of what happens in the story, as it is now, (2) read through the draft and mark it up, (3) make another brief outline of the story as I would like it to be, and then (4) edit the story according to the outline. This workflow seems to work well for me. Anyone else do this, or have their own method to share?

Research Fun (Part 2)

Kam Oi Lee — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:28:05 +0000

Here’s more about the topics I researched while writing my short story “Algae”.

This is Blood Falls, a formation of rust-colored ice that is emerging from the end of a glacier in Antartica. The microbes that give the ice its red color have traveled four kilometers to reach the glacier’s terminus, and they are part of an ancient ecosystem that has been trapped under the glacier for more than a million years. The red comes from iron, an end product of the microbes’ metabolism. They reproduce slowly–it’s estimated that a bacteria would divide once every 300 days.

In my story, there are algae that live in the very cold lakes of the planet Diamanta, and bloom only once every one hundred years. When they bloom, they exert a great deal of energy, resulting in enough heat to melt ice. My version is a good deal more fanciful than the Blood Falls bacteria, but there are some similarities–they have a slow metabolism, they live under the ice for long periods of time and then they finally burst forth in a way that can’t be ignored. I use these organisms as a metaphor for love. (Oh, go ahead and laugh if you want!)

Artic and Antarctic ice fish can survive in temperatures that are below the freezing point of pure water, which would freeze the blood of any regular fish. Their secret is that at some point, their ancestors lost the ability to produce hemoglobin. These fish have clear blood, without the large red blood cells which would, in other creatures, bunch up and become viscous in very cold temperatures. The ice fish still use oxygen, but it apparently is carried directly in their blood, or what’s left of it.

Ice fish don’t have any significant part to play in my story–I just thought they were cool!

Last but not least, in this story I give one of my characters a terribly painful back problem (because I’m mean and love to make my characters suffer) for which he eventually has to undergo spinal fusion, a surgical procedure where two vertebrae are combined into one. Surgeons take a bone graft from elsewhere in the body, and use metal screws to hold the vertebrae together, and eventually the bone graft grows and “fuses” the vertebrae together. I used this as a metaphor for love, too. Now I’m sure you think I’m crazy, if you didn’t already.

Research Fun! (Part 1)

Kam Oi Lee — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:46:05 +0000

I’ve been taking a break from editing The Outerlands to work on another short story. This one takes place on a fictional planet called Diamanta, where it’s almost always cold. I imagine it being kind of like “planet Alaska” or “planet far-north Canada”. One of the main industries there is mining–specifically, iron mining. They mine the ore, process it, and then use a cannon-like device to shoot it up to a space station, where it’s turned into steel.

In this story, my main character is a diesel mechanic (and an aspiring artist) who after being dumped by his ex-wife and having a falling-out with his best friend/coworker, has decided to pick up and move to the space station where his ex-wife now lives. He has set aside a vacation day to finish one last art project—a metal sculpture—but he’s unexpectedly called back to work for a repair job at one of the mines. As he and his former buddy drive to the mine, in the dead of winter, across the surface of a frozen lake, they come to a spot where the ice has begun to inexplicably and rapidly melt.

I ended up having to do a lot of research for this story. In fact, I’ve never had to do this much research for a story before! I thought it would be fun to show some of the things I’ve been reading and learning about.

Here’s the Ekati Diamond mine near Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It’s located in an area of permafrost and is only accessible by air, or via an ice road during the extremely cold winter months (as depicted in the TV show Ice Road Truckers). The mines in my story operate under similar harsh cold weather conditions. Work goes on round-the-clock in temperatures as low as -60°F (-51°C).

A truck and excavator at a coal mine. Lately I’ve spent way too much time looking at pictures of mining equipment and heavy machinery. Whenever I pass a construction site, I’ll be looking over there going, “Ooh! What machines do they have?” I also get all excited about things like the most powerful diesel engine in the world and autonomous trucks that drive themselves.

An ice road over a frozen lake in the Northwest Territories. Pic from here. Ice roads are used in situations where building a real road would be too expensive or unfeasible, in very remote locations and/or in the presence of boggy land. The Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road that provides access to many mines in NWT is 353 miles (568 km) long and the speed limit is 25 km/h (16 mph). The road in my story is more like 200 miles long.

A cutaway view of the Stanford Torus, a type of space station. Pic from here. Other designs for space stations include sphere and cylinder shapes. Theoretically, many types of manufacturing could be done better in space, because of the ready availability of vaccuum, which is essential for many industrial processes but takes effort to create on a planet’s surface. For my story, I imagined that they would be able to produce higher quality steel there than on the surface of Diamanta—steel that would eventually be used to build things like spaceships.

I’ve got more research topics in store for later. Stay tuned for ancient glacier bacteria, ice fish, and (eek!) spinal fusion.