OCTOBER

This month I’ve been mainly preparing for a project that I have mentioned before in this blog, and it’s one I am very excited about. If I manage to pull it off I might even have spawned a whole new genre of fiction; the spreadsheet novel.

Of course NaNoWriMo is no more, but many writers have vowed to continue the challenge of writing a fifty-thousand word novel in a month, mainly because it’s become a tradition and it’s a great way to add another first draft to your projects folder. One of the reasons that NaNoWriMo ended (there was more than one reason) was because of the backlash that was created when the organisers said that there were no rules preventing you from using AI to write your novel.

With AI on the rise and fierce debate over its use in the creative arts, I have come up with an alternative method of creating fiction without the use of any artificial intelligence. The method I have developed uses procedural generation to create a simulation based on initial conditions that I set. For those unfamiliar with the concept, procedural generation uses a numerical seed to create an output from a list of predetermined outcomes. It is not random, and the author can set what the outputs are ahead of time and tweak the model until they get somewhere close to the desired effect.

Anyone who has played the classic video game Elite, or the later space exploration game No Man’s Sky will know what kinds of things PG can do, but the worlds, or universes that are created can sometimes become rather bland and predictable. In the case of my project the simulation in question is a race series, set in the same universe as my Quanta-B Tales.

Based on the Aleph League, which appeared in the Spy’s Tale, the races will be run from a spreadsheet that I’ve spent the last several months building and testing. I have populated the race series with multiple teams and pilots, all with their own stats and abilities, and when the starting flag drops on the first race I won’t know what the outcome will be.

In a sense my job will be more like journalism than writing fiction. The novel won’t just be a series of dry facts and numbers though, because that isn’t what journalism is; journalism is about creating stories from real events. My novel will take the events of the races and delve into the backstories of the pilots, team members and fans, and I will have to try and weave something interesting out of all of it. Imagine Drive to Survive meets pod-racing meets Deathrace 2000 meets Wipeout.

I also want to write the story as I go, even though the format of the book is an historical account of ‘the best season of the Aleph League that was ever run’. Because I won’t know who is going to win the championship, I can write from the perspective of the people who were around at the time. Then, later on with the benefit of hindsight, I can go back and write in a more analytical style about how the season unfolded and what were the key events that changed the outcome.

Of the thirty chapters I’m planning to write, fifteen will be the races themselves, told from the various viewpoints of commentators, spectators or maybe excerpts from autobiographies or diaries. In between the race chapters I might write in more of a prose style about the different storylines behind the scenes. I have a few vague ideas for characters I might use to thread the thing together, and I’ve already set up some things that have happened before the start of the season which could develop in different directions.

UPDATE: Unfortunately initial testing has thrown up a major problem with this idea, which is that running the races through a spreadsheet takes me more than a few hours. In fact it takes more than a few days, which makes the project unsuitable for a thirty day writing challenge. I will still continue with the project, but it’s going to take a lot longer to generate the races. Though I still like the idea of writing race reports as the races happen, I also want to write from an historical perspective once the season is complete.

What I might do is run each race and write it up, still in different styles, and post those on this website. I will report back soon, but in the meantime please enjoy the serial Flagship, which I am also continuing to work on.