Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Like some kind of incandescent word-cannon, I managed to get over 12,500 words down this weekend. Ponder that for a moment. Twelve thousand, 500 words, averaging about 5.8 characters in length. It's kind of astounding.
Of course, that came at a price. I seem to average 1,000 to 1,500 words per hour, so I spent around 12 hours sitting on my butt, typing into an ancient laptop. Saturday saw about 8,800 words down, and Sunday about 3,700. By the end of Saturday, I'd barely left my chair, much less my house. I was ready to do almost anything that involved being not in my house any more. We had dinner downtown, at a favorite pub, Paddy Coynes. It was good to be out.
The story is progressing well enough, but I have a feeling I may be doing it wrong. That's not a concern for this month, of course, since the whole point is to spew words at a furious rate, and nothing else.
At the risk of selling myself short (or long, I suppose), I'll give you a glimpse into the story. Note that all names are subject to revision, I haven't found myself feeling particularly inspired about any of the names I've come up with. We follow the adventures of Jura Cortan, human freight captain, who has tried unsuccessfully to escape from crime for his entire life. The setting is a galaxy distant from our own, so I wouldn't have to worry about any research -- this is purely me makin' stuff up. It may or may not be long, long ago. That's really of no concern right now.
For a mental image of Jura, picture a guy from an old Kung Fu movie, one of the ones with long, braided black hair. Now cross that image with Han Solo from a certain popular movie series. That's kind of what Jura looks like. Sort of.
The story starts with Jura taking his latest job, a simple passenger transport, moving a young woman from the Kalinar system to the Borot system. She can only afford half the fee now, with the other half to be delivered by her presumably-rich uncle on Borot III. Riiight. As I'm sure you can imagine, this setup allows for a lot of (mis-)adventures to happen, and they do.
Only now, about 50% through my wordcount, I'm kind of done with that storyline. I found a way to continue it, but it feels like story #1 has wrapped up, and now we're starting on story #2. I don't know that that's the proper novelistic way to do things. It'll do, but it makes me wonder if #1 can be expanded to a full novel, or if the final product can make the two stories a bit more tightly integrated.
As I mentioned before, you can follow along with the numbers at this site. If you're feeling especially daring (or curious, I guess), you can read what I've got so far here, spelling errors and all. That'll get updated on a somewhat random basis, usually in the late evening, and there should be more every day if I'm writing like I'm supposed to. Consider yourself warned, it may be terrible.
Posted at 09:58 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater