I just wrote the intro chapter to my first full-length novel. It's going to be a longer, more involved adventure of the Misevelin Salvage team, with a lot more characters and stuff going on. This is something I've been waiting to start on for a while, because I wanted to spend a little time working on short stories and novella-length works before diving into a full novel.
However, what I want to talk about in this post is how difficult it can be to write in a medium-hard or hard sci-fi system. I've already set up that there is no artificial gravity, and that most ships don't bother to install a rotating part, since most space flights are relatively short (due to Shelf space travel--FTL, basically).
This means that when I tried to write a scene that takes place in zero-G, the first thing I noticed upon re-reading it is how many unsuitable habits of speech/writing made their way into it on the first draft. I felt funny and... I guess a good word would be "uncomfortable," when I wrote the first draft, and I didn't realize why until the next day.
I basically had to re-write the whole thing, because things were happening and people were doing things that wouldn't or couldn't happen in zero-G. It's second nature to write what happens when someone is injured, isn't it? But if you really think about it, a lot of those reactions that flow so easily from the pen are just plain wrong for zero-G.
On the plus side, the zero-G environment gave me a few opportunities for (I think) very interesting visual descriptions. So, upon going back over the whole thing and making a huge number of changes, I also found a bunch of places to add some descriptions that I think lend a lot of atmosphere to the setting.
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