Sometimes scenes evolve. You realize things the outline didn't address, and addressing them opens up opportunities you hadn't spotted before.
And, I know. The fierce outliners and the dedicated pantsers (and especially the WriMoNo -- NaNoWriMo is dead but some people still try to do 50K over November) call you stupid if you delay in getting those words on the page. But I think that time comes due eventually. Fix it now, or fix it in rewrites. As long as you are capable of holding enough story in your head, you don't have to have it written down in order to realize it is wrong and needs to be re-written.
The drive from Alamogordo to the tiny census-designated place (it's too small to be a town) of Yah-ta-hey is about five hours. The original plan/outline/mind mapper diagram just said "Mary leads Penny to the rez to talk to a man who knows about the 'Sheep Ranch'."
The original spec was that Penny doesn't get friends in this one. She doesn't get people she can lean on for emotional support, or people who are too helpful. They all have agenda, problems, and hide stuff from her. Mary is mostly...angry. I got her character and voice from a couple of different writers on continuing problems with radiological contamination on tribal lands.
But can she and Penny take a five-hour drive without either getting some resolution, or killing each other? Am I better off having Penny go alone? Or...is it the better option to make this a longer scene, to go deeper into Mary's personality, and give them a mini character arc?
Sigh. The hard one, of course.
The world continues to change. I started this in 2018. An American tourist loose in the world. The world's view of America has changed since then. COVID has changed things, the economic slump has changed things, and tourism has changed for everyone; European tourists are in the same hot water with over-travelled destinations and Venice is not the only place fighting back.
It always blind-sides you, change does. I had minor bit on a minor characters; a senior airman at the 49th with a shaving profile. I couldn't even name it, because that's the sort of thing that people who have been in the service would recognize but most of my readers would never have heard of.
Until it suddenly became a big thing to the pushup king, our current Secretary of War.
I did happen to think of a new silly idea, possibly for the "weird high-tech company in the wilds of Colorado" next adventure. Probably more productive is I've finally started making a proper vector of the new series logo so I can try out the new cover.
So there actually is a magical artifact. Sort of not very. It is extremely valuable and holds secrets because it is a replica and there's a USB stick in it with a bunch of trade secrets or something.
And maybe, I thought, it isn't the product of a historical culture, but instead a replica prop. And comes out of an imaginary IP, some sprawling fantasy saga with a lot of borrowing from various bits of real history (like GOT, say).
I mentioned a while back that various authors have tried to create a Disneyworld based on an imagined IP. The tough part is communicating this IP to the reader; you can't just say, "Look, it's Elsa from Frozen!" The fun part is, of course, creating the IP in the first place.
And, yeah, finally broke down and built a new computer. Things have moved on there, as well. SSDs aren't being fitted with expansion rails so they can slot in where the old 3.5" drive bays are. Instead they have a PCIe slot on the motherboard -- underneath a built-in heatsink because modern gaming machines run hot.
Darkrock case, MSI board, I7 CPU, 64gb starter RAM, 2tb SSD as the "C" drive, 1000 watt PSU and of course a nice floor heater of an RTX 3090 with 24gb of VRAM.
Mostly did it because I wanted to do it. Not because I had a need for it. But, oh boy, when I finally got the updates installed and running and tried out Satisfactory it looked so good...
The test render on WAN2.2 t2v took 160 seconds. Not bad.
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