Doctor, doctor.

I got to the body drop!

10,000 words down. It feels great. Maybe I've finally broken the pattern. I finally started pulling out the portable keyboard over lunch at work and somehow that's kept me in the zone long enough to get writing done on a work night as well. If I can keep up 5,000 words a week, I'll be done in under four months!

Well, I've got the first draft of the body drop chapter. The first part wasn't so bad. The second part, NEST sweeps in as well. It was meant to be a fustercluck and it is on the page, too. I'd already established that my Project Leads were stickler about titles, and then I added another stickler to the NEST team. Too many people to keep straight, and far too many of those people were insisting on "Doctor."

Another thing that is hitting me is my light outlining. I had to actually come up with a reason for the NEST team to come in -- even if it was just a training exercise -- and that meant some hurried reading on neutron activation and helium-3 detectors and such fun stuff. I basically had to commit to a certain decay chain to make things work. 240 Pu to 241 Pu via neutron capture (please imagine the proper superscript), 241 Pu decay to 241 Am, 241 Am plus beryllium to form a neutron source that NEST could detect from a helicopter.

And I planted the idea that the neutron activation (of things like the man's metal belt buckle) is too strong to be accounted for by the tiny amount of Americium they found in his medicine pouch.

(That "medicine pouch" is also a jump ahead, and one of those weird compromises of actual research. See, while there are huge difference between the different tribes regarding ritual practices, one thing that is generally true is that burial practices come under the category of "never to be shared with outsiders." In fact, one of the standard books on Tewa Pueblo beliefs has been chastised for sharing certain rituals. Even though the author was himself tribal.)

(So I'm three steps removed from being able to show something accurate. I don't know, personally. If I did know, I would be morally obligated not to share it. And if it was right, I shouldn't portray my Tewa character as identifying them as correct! This puts me in a strange place where I am borrowing things from other descriptions. That is, descriptions which are probably wrong, but which my readers could well tell me that I am wrong because I am using them differently from how they heard them!)

(So I have Penny and others calling a thing a "medicine pouch" even though Penny, at least, knows this is probably wrong. And my Tewa character bluntly saying "I can't tell you." Sigh.)

Oh, yeah. And the same game is going on with the "source." Right now, my version of it is there was weapon's grade plutonium and some beryllium alloy involved in the "thing" that Freeman and MacDonald were working with. And the NEST guys know very well that all three (that is, counting the well-known Americium-241 decay product) are characteristic of nuclear weapons. So they aren't willing to say, and like my Tewa gal, trying to be careful about saying that they can't say!

Which is a big theme of the story anyhow.

Which also hooks in some rather frustrating ways to the rest of my story-telling. I'm trying to cut back on the idiot lectures. The worst of them were coming from Penny, though, so I've actually had to make her more of an idiot. So there's a lot of stuff going on and some of it is being expressed in technical language and...I feel like I'm ending up in that same place I didn't want to be, with the reader feeling lost.

I've tried to cut down as much as possible all the stuff about archaeological dating and Bering Strait crossings and Paleoindian stone tools and...well, there's a hell of a lot of stuff going on in these opening chapters. Not because I need it to tell the story that will occupy the bulk of the novel. Because Penny only gets to enjoy herself at her first real stateside dig for a very small number of days -- and pages -- and after that it is off driving dark desert highways towards Roswell with country music playing on the radio in her rented truck and a giant black hummer on her tail.

Oh, yeah, and just to make things even more fun, I'm setting up her consciously putting aside the pop-culture references. Which means, sigh, I have to show her doing a lot of that. In the first 8,000 words. Before the body drop.

I have, however, made some progress at decompressing. Some progress at showing not telling. And some progress at shifting this book towards description-heavy instead of dialogue-heavy like the last one.

Once I clear the room of all these opening-sequence-only characters.

In the redraft of the scene, I decided to move anybody getting checked out for radiation to later (if at all). So instead of finding something and going "uh, oh," the NEST nerds are finding something and going "Ooh, this is weird. Can we take it home?"

At some entirely random point it felt like a thing to have Penny yell at the NEST team. As such things often go, that propagated out until that's a key to how she gets the answers she's after from the guy at the New Mexico WIP (that is, the all new, all-shiny, this-one-will-work-better version of Yucca Mountain.)

Another follow-on is that dropped all the technical details from the conversation. Finding out that there was plutonium involved (assuming that's what I end up going with) won't happen until much later in the story.

I still have yet to decide if MacDonald actually had anything on him. And when Freeman went back to re-dig the grave. At the moment, my best timeline for that matter is he lost contact with MacDonald after the Star Wars days, and didn't learn about his death until somewhere around the Los Alamos problems of 2011 that caused a number of physicists to quit.

I just hope I can stay ahead of my writing hand. This is too good a sprint to lose by having to go back and do more plotting.