I’m furiously working on Algae to try to get it into some semblance of shape for my deadline on Monday. I know I’ve probably said this before, but this is the longest and biggest 10K to 12K story I’ve ever written. Good gawd, the details! I guess that’s the danger of writing about something that actually exists and your readers might know about it—you have to get it right. Or else people might, y’know, laugh at you and think you’re dumb. I just keep wondering, though—how right do I need to get it? I mean, sometimes I feel like I might actually need to learn how to fix diesel engines, just in order to get this stoopid story *not* to completely make no sense. And then it’s like, omg no, I don’t have time to go to school for two years or however long it would take! *flails around in a panic* …Seriously, this is what this story has been doing to my brain. But I know, I know—you just need to show the “edges of ideas”. (Can’t remember who coined that phrase right now…)
Well, but I like the details, though. Like, I had been trying to figure out how much my characters’ field service truck should weigh (so that I can make it fall through the ice). I was sifting through all these web sites, and they would give weights like 6,000 lbs and it just didn’t make sense, until I realized that was merely the weight of the service body that’s attached on top of the truck. So then finally today I found the most wonderful page on mechanics’ trucks, where the author went into great detail about how much they weigh when loaded, and *why*. You get a truck, you put a crane on top, then add all the 9 zillion tools and gear you need to fix heavy equipment like mining machines, and that makes it *way heavier than I had thought*. Because if you try to lift something really heavy, like for example an engine that weighs a couple thousand pounds, with a crane attached to a little light truck, well, the truck tips over. I never thought of it before. But it makes sense, right?
Then I started working on the very first scene and I realized that I’ve given them 3 hours of sunlight that day, ’cause it’s late fall/early winter—but *what time* does the sun come up? Surely it’s not up yet when my main character walks out his front door early that morning. And what time does it set? I decided to use a town near the Arctic Circle in NWT as a model, and found out that on a certain day in late November, the sun would come up noonish and set around 3pm. And this just caused me to squee. Because the timing just worked right for a dramatic moment in the story when my characters need to see the last light of sunset.
For my third lightbulb moment—I had been imagining my mysterious algal bloom coming up from below the ice and melting through to the surface. And it had been bugging me, because I needed this melting to happen rather quickly and create a huge hole in the ice and render my ice road temporarily unusable—and surely this algae doesn’t get so hot that it could melt through a large area of a couple feet’s thickness of ice in a matter of hours when it’s thirty degrees below zero outside? Then I remembered a part on the Ice Road Truckers show where they talk about pressure ridges of ice over a lake being thrust up by rapid changes in temperature, and I realized that I don’t necessarily need to melt through all the ice, I just need it to break. And if I have the heat causing a rapid temperature change, then my ice can actually rupture in a violent event that wouldn’t take much time at all. Yay!
Well, now that I’ve gotten some of these details hashed out, I’ve moved on to the whipping-into-shape phase. My strategy is to (1) make a brief outline of what happens in the story, as it is now, (2) read through the draft and mark it up, (3) make another brief outline of the story as I would like it to be, and then (4) edit the story according to the outline. This workflow seems to work well for me. Anyone else do this, or have their own method to share?
