I'm still in the early days of working on The Icarus Project, but I thought I'd give you a little sneak peek. There's no spoilers in this passage. It's more or less just a transition scene with character building thrown in, but it's also one of the few bits of the rough draft I don't see changing much before publication.

In the last lesson we took a very broad overview of world building and talked about determining the scope and depth to which you will need to shape your setting. This week we will look at how the sciences factor into society.

Even if the culture you are writing about has a very limited or primitive notion of science, certain principles will play a role in shaping their society. Things like geology, climate, and biology might seem like background elements, but they influence our lives in ways we don't often think about. 

Once you have a general idea of your story and characters, it's time to think about setting. If your characters are modern, the genre's general, and you're using a real place as the setting, you might be able to skip this step. However, it is an essential one, to one degree or another, for most stories.

World building is a phrase that can sound much bigger and more complicated than it needs. It can be as simple as designing a unique family setup to as expansive as creating numerous worlds, species, and cultures within a galactic republic. However, when the story requires the creation of an entire universe, it's usually broken into a series of books. In that kind of case, it doesn't have to be done all at once. Titanic, complex universes tend to grow organically with the series as the author or authors build the series.

Before we get going, I want to say different methods work for different authors. This course is meant as a basic, introductory course for beginners. My purpose here is to lay out the process in the simplest way possible from start to finish. If you find a particular method isn't working for you, modify it however you feel the need.

Not all stories will require every step, but even if you don't think you're going to need a skill such as world building, give the post a read anyway. There are a lot of little things writers from one genre can learn from writers of a different one that can still be helpful with some tweaking.

The first step in the writing process is brainstorming, so this is where we'll begin.

There's some really good writing advice you hear a lot around the internet that goes, "Write every day."

Following said advice is something I've tried and failed to do time and again. I'm beginning to think the reason for my failure to follow through is because I've never been specific in setting aside a time to do so. Therefore, I've decided my writing resolution for 2015 is to write for at least thirty minutes every morning when I first get up.

I have more of a natural tendency to write in the afternoon, which is when my thinking is clearest, but now that I've gone back to work full time, morning coffee time is the only slot I have available on a consistent basis. I figure slow and steady beats flowing but uneven and sporadic attempts.

I can always edit or work on rewrites the few afternoons I have free, right?

My goals for 2015 are simple. I intend to finish drafting The Icarus Project, take it through the rewriting, editing, and proofing stages, and have it published before the end of the year. I also intend to have Midnight Rising, the second installment of the Yekara Series, drafted and well into rewrites. From this point forward, I'm going to strive to release at least one novel a year, which is about all I can hope to accomplish while working full time at another job, homeschooling, and running Contented Comfort.