Getting Organized

While I was eager to get back to forging ahead with "Resistance," I had to pause this morning for research and getting organized. A couple of ideas about how the world of the future that forms the backdrop for my story came to the state it is in. It's the year 2070, and the action takes place in a city rising from the ashes of destruction. An island of civilization has grown up in the middle of a vast urban wasteland. I knew I wanted to do this from the start, but I needed to figure out what cause a thriving city to be devastated on a scale wide enough to cause a city to be deserted. Once I solved that problem with a touch of inspiration and a bit of research, I had another problem to tackle.

This new city was built one ten-square-mile sector at a time, starting with the central business district and pushing outward with surrounding sectors. Beyond this re-civilized area is the No Zone, not yet revitalized and full of danger and mystery. Anyway, the characters refer to locations by sector number. In several cases, I had already written about the proximity of No Zone perimeters in some scenes, but I had to determine how the sectors were numbered in order to reference them. I first drew a map and then built a table in a Word document to use as a guide. With that task done, I then went back through the manuscript to adjust any references to addresses by sector number, block number, and unit number. Nothing in this fictional city I'm creating has a name. It's all numbers, which is logical in a way when you think about police and firefighting services.

But now I face a new problem. There are rules for how to represent numbers in a manuscript, and here I have created uses for numbers that don't exist in the real world. How to do this properly is going to take more research, or at the very least, careful editing to make sure I do it consistently.

Now, back to writing.