Any professionals wanna help me write military fiction?

Ender Wiggin

Junior Member
Alright the alien Ilnari space forces will be a more traditional space opera space navy, Earth or the USA anyways will have the more unorthodox and rare Militerized NASA or Airforce as the space arm.
 

KingLouis

Junior Member
you can use the German general names. like Von replace it with some other character to mean you were born as noble.
 

Ender Wiggin

Junior Member
First chapter for peoples interested:

From the train, and into the mud
By Blayne Bradley

I awoke with a start.

Normally waking up is no big deal, I was just sleeping so waking up should be perfectly natural inevitability right? After all what is so weird about sleeping? It's a natural autonomous action, like sneezing in the presence of bright sunlight or switching to infrared vision the dark?

Well... I beg to differ, I would have in fact two significant non-trivial objections to the above conclusion that most people who in their right minds would probably nod their heads sagely and agree with it. Now let me just preface the following by first stating in no uncertain terms am I an.. emotional person, I am in fact quite quiet and reserved. I have no illusions about this, it is as factual and constant as our planets orbit around our star.

I am in fact such a non-emotional person that some people would even accuse me of sociopath, but that isn't here nor there. The point that I am labourously trying to get to with the subtlety of a good kick to the groin is that I am not one to make wildly inappropriate claims or statements, in fact I am cautiously reserved most if not a majority of the time.

With that out of the way allow me to explain my first objection, first of all when I went to sleep it was in a state of what would consider a certain degree of denial. That “this will all be a dream” when I wake up from it. Unfortunately the situation itself has several layers of unusualness that will take sometime to explain, which will of course lead to my primary objection to the supposition that I... Waking up from sleeping would be in my current circumstances unusual.

I, and I say this with absolute certainty and in no way am I embellishing or exaggerating this did not, in my fullest seriousness did I ever reasonably expect to wake up from my sleep.

See? Extremely unusual am I not correct? Under what circumstances could possibly exist for someone like myself to not be certain about my ability to wake up normally like any other normal person?

This will take some explanation, fortunately the method in which I woke up could in some ways be taken to possibly provide some elaboration.

I woke up by the sound of the trains steam powered blow horn.

You heard that right, I am in fact riding a train.

What is so unusual about riding a train you may ask? Well you see, and in hindsight this would be almost worth a chuckle if I was such a person to chuckle at my unfortunate series of events.

I am however not such a person, in fact I sometimes feel the urge to weep at my misfortune.

In the train, filled to the brim as could be safely managed were other unfortunate souls like me.

We were all in fact dressed fairly similarly, with gloomy nervous expressions all around except for of course the lucky few who still managed to sleep despite the noise.

Waking up due to that noise is what shattered the last shred of denial I had stubbornly clung to, and I unfortunately possess no reserves of exhaustion to call upon to convince myself that more sleep would solve my dilemma.

There is now in fact no amount of plausible denial remaining, my location, my fate, my lot in life was certain as the orbit of the planet I rest upon as I may have mentioned already.

Some of you may have some difficulty in connecting the dots, much like how some people might have difficulty connecting the stars to form constellations in the night sky. This is natural and so I will have to explain exactly what I am getting at, of course.

I am a soldier on my way to war.

To you this may not be an outrageous conclusion depending on who might be reading this, most humans I am given to understand have “citizen-soldiers” all the time and may think this as no big deal.

To me however, this is a very huge deal! Very big deal indeed!

We are at war.

I do not know how it started, I am from a remote mountain village when a messenger soldier arrived on dragon-back to inform the village that we were under the authority of some new 'independent' government.

My apathy I held would be fairly difficult to adequately explain, to say that my apathy was reasonably close to the attitude a child would show toward eating his vegetables wouldn't be an exaggeration (as I am not an the kind of person to exaggerate). Maybe the opinion a mountain would show to the snow accumulating on its gentle slopes during the winter season would be more adequate but this still does not accurately grasp my level of apathy towards the news.

We after all had little to no contact with the central government on our homeworld, much less the central government of our own planet! For many years. I had been raised to hunt and provide for our own family and village with a simple firearm by my mother who had raised me by herself, alone; away from the village for over a century after all.

So there was little reason for me to care under normal, expected, circumstances.

However as you by now no doubt surmise my life has rarely seemed to have liked to ever follow 'normal' circumstances, since I am now after all on a train in a war on my way towards certain death.

My mother, may the Goddess find her worthy had recently died in a hunting accident. I am not a religious person and in fact on some days I (and the following will almost certainly be considered heresy and punishable by death if I am ever captured by the enemy and if they read this journal) am doubtful that the goddess even exists at all? So this alone should while in my eyes be entirely insufficient to properly convey my emotions, should at least explain partly how her untimely death affected me.

She was a tough woman, very strong, strongest and toughest female in our remote mountain village of and I say this without exaggeration of phenomenally tough and dare I say it scarily strong females.

She protected me, taught me everything she had to teach, which unfortunately taught me in the end how little I actually knew, and how perilous my situation now was without her. Had I not decided to grab what I could carry and to enlist... I shudder at the thought of my peril I would have found myself in had I tarried longer.

It seems I have been remiss, for I had claimed two objections to waking up on a train going to war in contradiction to its supposed normality. One objection will have to do, my apologies.

It is a very strong stern objection though.

It is a cramped box car with no furniture and just a few score of poor youths like myself, with no room to even stretch a persons own legs. It is a sign of some fortune I would suppose that I am positioned along the wall which allowed me the ability to crouch to the floor, some are not so lucky.

The boxcar shook shakily as the train was clearly moving at high speed towards its destination. What the destination was I had no idea, they had given me barely a week of training before throwing me on a train and allowed only a few stops in which to get out and stretch our legs before having to return to the horrid boxcar.

If I had to describe the experience it would be to imagine that you find yourself suddenly emulating the conditions an article of clothing may feel within a closeted wardrobe. Once again I am disappointed in my lack of accuracy as certainly such an article of clothing would surely be in a luxurious situation compared to the circumstances I now find myself in.

Females and males were in an equal abundance, all of us seemed to be young within two centuries of life or less. We were all dressed very much like, albeit with some variation. Our coats, shirts, and trousers were all of military make and design. Only our boots, head wear and bags tended to differ.

I count myself one of the lucky few to have been born and raised in a remote location, for my boots were sturdy and meant to endure long daily travels along barely used mountain trails. My head wear and overcoat was furred and kept me warm these long cold nights in the bark thin walls of the boxcar. My bag of course was also one native to my village and was well suited to the task of carrying both my personal effects that I cared to bring with me from my ancestral home and the meagre supplies provided by the military before boarding this inhospitable train.

I used my bag as a pillow and my coat as a blanket, I worried and despaired at the thought of theft. But it appears no one could snatch up the courage outside of their own despair to consider such a thought, such is the debilitating effects of fatalism among the damned?

The train blew its blow horn again.

The train made a sudden lurch unbalancing me despite my crouched position, many of the others who were standing stumbled not particularly far as they merely bumped into each other awkwardly.


Fear welled up within me; was the train attacked? Were we derailed? What happened?

I got my answer quickly, too quickly for my comfort.

The trains sudden lurching ended abruptly, and so too did its speed, coming to best that I could tell was a complete halt.

I could hear faint thumping outside, a distant staccato of muffled and forgive my redundancy, muffled thumps.

I was, against my better judgement, curious. I even craned up my head slowly rising to my feet to get a better hearing of it.

I would of course be promptly punished for my curiosity, a lapse in judgement of my part as the doors to the boxcar slide open with a loud clang.

Yelling ensued.

“Get the FUCK out assholes. GET UP AND MOVE party time is OVER! OUT! OUT! OUT!” The accent of the unknown loud and obnoxious speaker was atrocious, how could anyone be allowed out of the house with such a poor grasp of basic Ilnari? But his meaning was clear and I like many others grabbed my bag and rushed out of the boxcar like cattle to the slaughter.

The thumps were explosions. I could hear them clearly now.

I was at the war zone.

My name is Nane Canorilli, I am an Ilnari volunteer citizen-soldier of the 419th liberation front army and this is the story, should you read this, of how I probably will die... Fighting for a country that did not exist until a month ago, for a cause I could not care less about, in a war that I wish I was never a part of, and definitely, without exaggeration or embellishment regret.

The guy yelling at the end there is American, what rank/position would he be to do that sort of job, what service likely?
 

xywdx

Junior Member
Since you mentioned there were "a few scores of youths" and considering the language used it's probably a master sergeant or a first sergeant.

IMHO, the first part was a bit confusing with some misuse of cliches and typos, and it felt like you were trying to increase word count even though it didn't really serve a cohesive purpose or style.
 

Ender Wiggin

Junior Member
There shouldn't be typos, I did a read through before posting. But the narrative style is similar to how protagonists speak in Japanese light novels, its fairly deliberate characterization.
 

xywdx

Junior Member
"Now let me just preface the following by first stating in no uncertain terms am I an.. emotional person"
Idioms like this makes the reading difficult, because the literary meaning would be he is an emotional person, however in this case you are using "in no uncertain terms" as a replacement for "in no ways".

"which will of course lead to my primary objection to the supposition that I... Waking up from sleeping would be in my current circumstances unusual."
I assumed it was a typo because if the supposition is that it's unusual, then the objection would mean the protagonist think it's usual.

But the narrative style is similar to how protagonists speak in Japanese light novels, its fairly deliberate characterization.

It's not about the narrative style, he's supposed to be this almost "anti-social" youth who lived and hunted in the mountains with his mother, but the way he speaks does not reinforce his character. In my opinion it would be nice to either add some background to explain this in the beginning, or change the way he talks.

I must admit I am an enthusiastic but ultimately picky reader, so I'll just stop annoying you now.
Good luck with your work.
 

Ender Wiggin

Junior Member
The bolded bit might have been me overcorrecting :) "Usual? Is that right?"

Also he and everyone with him are aliens, which should help explain the discrepancy in the way he speaks :)
 
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