In a white room with black curtains by the station

Battersea sequence is almost finished. In the middle of writing it I realized it was a pretty good Tomb Crawl.

Well, duh, that's why it was in the outline in the first place. I sort of forgot in the struggle to write the thing. So my protagonist is deep in a maze of passages, climbing and crawling and otherwise struggling to break through to spectacular hidden chambers, solving puzzles and dealing with dangers both environmental and human. Well, not really the puzzles. That will have to wait.

So about as close as I can get to a classic "steal the golden idol from the booby-trapped ancient temple" and not completely violate serious history and modern archaeology.

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The rewrite was great and reinforces why the "get the draft on paper first" style works. I'm a revise-as-you-go but the idea is still there.

The first version of the abseil scene was perfectly functional. I had Penny open a few stitches so focus would go on that after the rescue and I wouldn't have to figure out what everyone's reactions would be otherwise.

Yeah, better choices. The revision, there's more emotion. She does not have a plan when she grabs him, so there's more tension and it helps advance the theme of her plunging into things unwisely -- something this book is going to make her think about more. And the obvious aftermath was, when I thought about it, that the guy she rescued would get angry and blame her for all of it.

I won't be surprised if I don't come up with a stronger way to play the Goldeneye N64 scene as well. That went decently. The Station A control room is really harder to describe. Little annoying stuff, like I can't say a paneled ceiling because it makes it sound like there's control panels up there. And it is also showing me that more and more I'm changing a place slightly because it is easier to describe that way. That's not good historical fiction work there.

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I'm almost done with Battersea. Should clock in around 5K when done, right on estimates. Just have to figure out where I'm going with the White Room.

The only reference I've seen on it is it was a "minimalist mock-up" of a luxury flat with hot tub and walls that were mirrors when they weren't white. Here I'm changing history and making something more interesting but I am having trouble deciding what.

The conclusion to this is a grudging acceptance of preservation of history via redevelopment projects like this, where the old control room can be rented out for weddings (yes, just check their website). So I'd like that whatever the white room is, it pays homage to the original station and doesn't just use it as a convenient shell.

But I don't know what. Maybe I should just go with the hot tub. And black curtains.

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White room scene is done. Going by the dates on blog posts, that's 6,400 words in 7 days. I'm hoping to get some of the next scene on paper before the weekend is over but I suspect it won't be many.

(And, yes, that means that over the Battersea sequence I name-dropped two movies, a game, two songs, an album cover, and four or five fictional characters. Plus made two more veiled Doctor Who references and there's a character who has clear roots to Blade Runner.)