{"id":294,"date":"2017-01-01T00:08:13","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T06:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/?p=294"},"modified":"2017-01-01T00:08:13","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T06:08:13","slug":"more-zeros-more-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/01\/more-zeros-more-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"More Zeros, More Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’ve been some hitches in the work on the book lately, but some reworking of sections this week seems to have unkinked things again.\u00a0 Tonight I hit 110,000 words, and today’s words feel like good words rather than just “I have to make the wordage if it means writing I can’t think, I don’t know, this is stupid, my brain is mush<\/em> over and over.”\u00a0\u00a0 (Although, pro tip here, if you actually do<\/em> write something of that type for long enough–usually just a few minutes–the brain gives up and agrees to produce some story.\u00a0 About half a page usually does it for me.\u00a0 And you never knew there were bits like that embedded in books, did you???)<\/p>\n

Since everything in *this* book would spoiler Cold Welcome,\u00a0 and you already know water is involved in that book, here’s a snippet to start the New Year with (and the book’s only just over 3 months away now…)<\/p>\n

Where: Slotter Key’s southern ocean, south of its southernmost continent<\/p>\n

Who: Ky Vatta, MSgt Marek (senior NCO)<\/p>\n

When: Winter is coming<\/p>\n

Situation: Shuttle ditched in ocean. All but one survivor now in liferafts.\u00a0 Marek has been launching rafts, is planning to come aboard one.<\/p>\n

————————————————–<\/p>\n

Now, as the raft bumped into the bottom of the slide, he made a loop in the end of that line, then lifted it to put it over his head.<\/p>\n

Just as he did, one of the forward flotation sausages burst with a loud bang and whoosh.\u00a0 The module lurched, leaning toward them.\u00a0 Then a second one blew, on the other side of the module\u00a0 The module nose slammed into a wave,\u00a0 sending a large splash downwind, toward the slide and raft.\u00a0 Marek stumbled, fell out the hatch onto the slide, and tumbled down it.\u00a0 Through a face-full of water Ky saw the loop of rope flying through the air, blown by the wind away from Marek.<\/p>\n

Instantly, the rafts drifted away from the slide, rotating in the swirl of water from the splash.\u00a0 Ky had just time to see Marek hit the water meters short of the raft, when the raft rotated so she could not see him.<\/p>\n

\n

The research for this book involved a lot of reading and online video watching, as well as some fortuitous TV programs (including the re-creation of Shackleford’s voyage by lifeboat to a very inhospitable island using period boat, clothing, supplies, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 I saw no reason to stick with that period, since this is far-future SF,\u00a0 but seeing and hearing the ocean in those areas was very helpful.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Also useful was a book on the sinking of the modern Bounty, during Hurricane Sandy, especially the details of survivors’ struggle to get into life rafts, and difficulties with the “Gumby suits.”\u00a0 Also first-hand accounts of cold-water rescues (successful and not) from boats capsizing and individuals falling into the water near drilling platforms north of Scotland.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And so on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’ve been some hitches in the work on the book lately, but some reworking of sections this week seems to have unkinked things again.\u00a0 Tonight I hit 110,000 words, and today’s words feel like good words rather than just “I have to make the wordage if it means writing I can’t think, I don’t know, Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,32,28,5],"tags":[20,8,31,21],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cold-welcome","category-progress","category-snippet","category-vatta","tag-characters","tag-cold-welcome","tag-snippet","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}