Intersection Logs

I wrote 2200 words this evening, determined to make up for the missed days during the week. The ship's on its way, and the heroine is learning about her new environment.

(Chatterbox teenage girl makes a useful infodump-vehicle, but I almost stalled when I had to think of a suitable bit of approbatory teenage slang. I settled for 'Keen', but may revisit that later.)

That energy I had on Saturday seems to have been my allowance for the week. I've written all of three hundred words in the last two evenings, and all I want to do now is go to bed, even though the weather's been remarkably pleasant the last couple of days. (Actual cool breezes, probably not to be repeated until fall.)

It doesn't help that all my heroine wants to do is go to bed, too. (She's been running all over town on public transport all day after spending a sleepless night in the cells, and I don't think she got much sleep the night before, either -- and then there's the emotional strain on top of all that.) Does anyone else get this sort of psychosomatic feedback from their characters?

For once, I had energy on a non-Phoenix Saturday; this makes a nice contrast to the weekend before last, when I accomplished pretty much nothing at all. Maybe it's because I got a reasonable amount of sleep last night, or maybe because the allergies are tapering off as the flowering season winds down. I not only got groceries, I've done laundry and put it away and re-sheeted the bed, cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, picked up mail and changed the batteries in the bedroom phone and stuck the posters back on the wall, and written 770 words. I also watched the last two episodes of SG-1 S9, to which my reaction is that I'm glad I don't have to wait until October for the S10 DVDs! (Also, I wonder if B5's CGI space battles will look cheesy by modern standards when I get back to that.)

We appear to be having a plague of locusts, or at least small grasshoppers, which seem to be everywhere.

And another 617 today. Maybe tomorrow we'll actually get to the ship.

"Prosper and Plenty, Hope and Opportunity, Diamond and Sapphire and long-lost Pearl, Enterprise and Song-in-the-dark and Home-at-last; one by one the colonies took root."

I learned a lot about the history of the Worldwheel tonight. Maybe tomorrow I'll find out what, or who, convinced the Shipwights to go into business with humans rather than just granting them occasional passage.


(Also, GIP.)

When I left home yesterday, there was cold gritty wind and a pall of dirty grey clouds or dust over the mountains. The shuttle ran into the real storm half an hour north of Tucson, with driving rain and bad visibility, and passed a couple of bad accidents, the sort that leaves battered vehicles sitting in the sunken median, before getting into Phoenix about fifteen minutes late. In the meantime, I'd committed about 700 words to Old Laptop's rattly little hard drive, once I persuaded the machine to boot up and open my file. The SuperShuttle dispatcher at the Phoenix airport had taken refuge inside the terminal building, which made him hard to find, but we connected eventually.

We watched the second half of Ben Hur after supper, and the first half of the making-of documentary. I found myself wondering, later, if that was the LOTR of its time -- the book that attracted a cult following, kept selling for two or three generations, and challenged the technology of the day to bring it to stage and screen.

Today dawned bright and sunny. On the way back to the airport we could see snow on the mountains -- a most unusual sight from downtown Phoenix! I spent a lot of the shuttle ride back just watching the landscape in that unaccustomed mode of little fluffy clouds and distant snow-covered peaks.

The campus weather gauge at the UofA registered 0.17 inches yesterday; I think Phoenix got a lot more, though. The Santa Catalina range to the north has just the faintest dusting of snow, like sifted sugar, on the highest ridges. As I came into the apartment complex, I passed a tree with a whole flock of little birds -- at least one house finch with its vivid splash of crimson on the chest, some plain brown sparrowish things, and some darkly irridescent in the low light, all chirping in sweet, liquid voices.

6,903 / 100,000 (6.9%)

( writing thoughts )

5,600 / 100,000 (5.6%)

Current silly problem; heroine has entered a cafe on a cold damp morning. I'm having the hardest time remembering that she doesn't wear glasses and therefore wouldn't be instantly blinded by steam on the lenses.

Well, that could have been worse. Five pages, nearly three thousand words, a few of them new, and the story moved along a smidge further than it was. I managed to resist fiddling with the controls on Word until after I got that far, too. I'm still not entirely happy with it, and as someone who always used to write clean, readable-for-pleasure first drafts I find it hard to accept less than the best possible before moving on, but I think I need to forge ahead for now.

Every time I think I've got the Behemoth thing nailed down enough to make a start, it hits me with another question.

At the moment I'm going with the idea that J is T's long-lost son. Once they're on the same ship, which happens fairly early on, maybe a quarter or a third of the way through the plot, they will find out, probably in the first couple of days. If the reunion was completely satisfactory, there wouldn't be a plot any more, or at least, those characters wouldn't be very interested in carrying on with it.

So, J has had a pretty strange upbringing, and isn't exactly the son T had been imagining all these years.

And all of a sudden, last night, J has acquired memories of a foster mother who used to work with T and despised him. What's more, I'm beginning to wonder if J needs to be a viewpoint character too, because some of those scenes will be really tricky to do offstage and by inference. It would be a familiar pattern for me -- the hero and heroine taking turns, with maybe a third character getting an occasional look-in -- but I always thought this was going to be a single-viewpoint story, and that's one thing I need to decide before I can even plan the thing properly.

It's been a while, but as I said last night the story is nibbling at my brain again. Leaving aside the fact that I suspect I've entirely forgotten how to write, there are some things I need to settle in my mind before I can even think about starting on the thing.

I'm thinking aloud here, more or less, in the hope that writing the possibilities down will help me to pick one or think of something better.
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