Water Boy

Looks like I have work. The summer stock kind; just signed on to put up a set in at an outdoors theater I've worked at before, sweltering in the heat and mostly (from the sound of it) pushing paint. Hopefully I'm not too rusty there.

It will be just my luck if the sit-down inside assembly job calls now. But I think I can schedule that. The only question is getting enough time to keep the Raygun on schedule. And other things. I finally tracked down the correct diffuse layer files from my new Holocron but I've had the devil of a time trying to get out of the house for most of this week. By the time I have files prepped and am ready to go out and do them, all the machine reservations are snapped up.

Well, you push where it gives, right? The fanfic -- for all that it earns me no money and a dishearteningly small amount of feedback -- started moving briskly. I just this morning put down 1200 words about a book signing in Berlin. Helps that I only had to look up a few things here and there and could basically just write from memory of my own trip there. Unlike the Prague chapters, which were open-book essays involving up to forty browser tabs at a time.

Well. The final Prague chapter was stalled for weeks because I couldn't figure out how to recover from the chapter break. Restarting the inertia with a recap or a long camera shot wasn't working, starting in media res wasn't working, and cutting away to Sam's adventures on an abandoned Goa'uld mining world wasn't right, either.

At last I pretty much stumbled on how to do it. Come in hard with the somatics. Which is generally great advice. A lot of writers forget to put anything other than sight and sound in. Smell, kinesthetics...all of those I think help ground the reader more strongly in the world you are building.

In this case, I started with the cold of the underground room, and pretty much free-associated a synopsis on Lara's early and life-shaping experience in Nepal. With my own spin, which I think explains a number of things and makes her an even more interesting (but conflicted) character.

Oh...I was on a roll, and was able to finish off Sam's adventure in the next 7,000 words. Which was practically straight-to-the-page from my own experience in the military and, I suspect, a wee bit too much recently-read military science fiction. In fact, I'm damned if Sam didn't get just a wee bit too Honor Harrington on me there. I really, really have to back off, take the idiot lectures and info dumps way down, and pay way more attention than I have to capturing the distinct voices of these various characters.