Troping STARWIND

Warning: the following post is made almost entirely out of links to TV Tropes.  Following these links could result in serious damage to your free time and cause you to fall victim to one of the internet's largest black holes.  Please click responsibly.

Like everything else I've written, I have no idea if STARWIND will ever be published.  This isn't me being self-deprecating, this is me being realistic since I just finished the first draft last week.  With this uncertainty, I also have no idea if the book will ever have its own TV Tropes page.

So, as a way to talk about the book that's not "here's what the book's about", I figured, why not make my own out of this week's blog entry?  Let's see....

Apocalypse How: not one, not two, but three of the planes the crew visits have endured significant destructive events.  One used to be a universe.

Artistic License: Martial Arts/Supernatural Martial Arts: Phoenix and Sarai spar in the subjective gravity of the Between.  Fighting someone gets a lot more interesting when each combatant gets to decide which way is down for them.

Asexuality: Phoenix.  It's even a minor plot point.

Badass Longcoat: Kris's brown coat.  Sometimes I feel like she knows what sort of story she's in.

Barrier Warrior: Sarai, though it's doubtful she'd consider herself a warrior.

Bi the Way: Kris.  Considering that she's dating outside her species, it's possible that another designation might work better, but I'll leave that for other people to argue about.

Chekhov's Gun: played straight with something Kris acquires early on.  Averted entirely with Kris and Phoenix's actual guns, which they carry but never fire.

Cool Ship: the Starwind, of course, as well as the five other ships in the race.

Elemental Powers: Kris prefers water magic, but can use earth when necessary.  Phoenix favors fire, which surprises no one.

Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons: the book starts with Kris quite literally inside the mouth of one plane's version of a dragon.

Magitek: crystal datapads, magical ship engines, and an eternal gravity engine as one of the race's required items.  And Captain, who's a sentient wargolem.

Science Fantasy: the story has both a very wide definition of "fantasy" and a lot of (soft) sci-fi trappings all blended together.

The Big Race: the main plot of the story is the Starwind's crew participating in a race/scavenger hunt, which has them gathering five items from across the multiverse.

Train Job: played straight, in both a deliberate shout-out to this book's inspiration and the fact that Kris is a fan of Firefly and decides that if it worked in the TV show...

Unspoken Plan Guarantee: the crew has plans to acquire everything they need for the race.  Nothing goes as planned.

I think I'll stop now, as I've spent way too long on this already and I'm trying to avoid spoilers.  Hope I didn't make any of y'all lose too much time with those links.  :P

Next week: IWSG.