Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly

Maybe that wasn't the solution. I wrote fast, but I was breaking things. I hit the story beats I wanted, but awkwardly. This story could be told better.

I actually know how. Dylan was the root of most of the problems; he was too nice, too chatty, and he made it too easy to slip into the "a friend tells Penny stuff" mode. And I wanted to do so much more with Doctors Bleekman and Bell. And there were some smaller problems, like I didn't give time for the "useless wasteland we use to test bombs at" to develop, or explain what the hell this dig was about and what was at stake.

I hadn't defined how Penny feels about the military because I was trying not to describe them all (and reveal the holes in my research.) I also didn't have a good read on where she should be emotionally with finding a body.

And in my effort to reset her to more of a blank slate without all that messy history, and to show not tell and leave more space for the reader to come with their own impression, I've ended up making her, well, dumb. And that's going to remain a problem.

(And I am still intensely uncomfortable with the way I can pretty much pick an emotion I want for her to react with, and make it work. Means either she is one flighty girl, or means her character is way too undefined and a bad character.)

Anyhow. I can see how to use Bleekman and Bell, and involve the "Duke Boys," as Penny started calling the two Field Technicians who aren't Dylan. And places to take Dylan that make him a better character. To make the idiot lectures much more confrontational and to have a lot more emotional underpinning going on.

I already discovered that in the earlier draft. Tom Bell was being patronizing, but protective, and even as she disliked the first Penny also valued the second. I can put her not just in conflict with him but in conflict with her own instincts and internal conflict is always the good stuff.

But.

These aren't bandaid fixes. These aren't things I can do by moving around descriptions and changing a few names. This is top-to-tail re-write.

So...all that "progress," and what I have to show for it is 12,000 words of shit.

I think I'm gonna turn off the lights and go play computer games for the rest of the weekend.