Friday, December 27, 2013

On Writing: A New Intro to Darkness!

It's been, well, years since I've posted anything about writing.  But I have been working on Darkness Before Light inbetween the rest of life's craziness.  So I wanted share a quick bit - the latest version of the introductory paragraphs of my story.  It's taken me many, many revisions to arrive at something that I'm much more proud and confident in.  Take a read send feel free to critique!

The black sphere of a gargantuan space station shook, vibrated by the internal explosions ripping swaths of hull from its surface.  Showers of red-hot shrapnel spun off into the endless dark, chased by ephemeral trails of smoke that rapidly dissipated into space.  No sounds pierced the long dark as gray specks, lit by their burning yellow chemical fuel motors, frantically rocketed away from the dying battle station.  Their survivors shivered, cried, cursed, and stared into speckled deep space, not yet at the point of wondering when, or if, rescue would find them before the zero energy cold of space seeped into their bodies.  They were survivors, but certainly only on a delay from their fate.
The battle station heaved one more time, then split diagonally, an instant of red flame and white glow separating the pieces of the structure.  Hundreds of segments, each thousands of tons massive, spread apart in a slow dance, a giant spherical puzzle coming apart in white-hot bursts of energy, crimson fire, and silent screams.
Thirty vessels thundered away from the shattering battle station.  Their flat, sleek hulls lit by the white exhaust of their curved, bulging engine clusters.  Some were small and nimble destroyers, only a few hundred meters in length.  Others were kilometer long battleships, armed with rows sleek twin-barreled Gauss cannon turrets.  Two were the truly massive five kilometer long behemoths, the Everest and Kilimanjaro assault carriers.  The other twenty-eight vessels were only there for their protection, for those two ships carried more than four-thousand anti-gravity tanks and twenty-thousand troops between them.  The fleet stretched across thousands of kilometers of space, angling for the third planet from the star Sigma Draconis, their weapons still warm from bombarding the space stations guarding the way into the system.
Sigma Draconis’s dim, cool yellow barely reflected off the hulls of the fleet.  Being cooler and smaller than Sol, it was only just bright enough to turn its third planet into a point of light a little brighter than the rest of the stars stretching across the void:  one small, un-twinkling speck against a backdrop of millions.  The way into Sigma Draconis had been forced and the Interstellar Navy was accelerating to begin the next phase of their battle and possibly reunite mankind.