Tag Archives: writing

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Do I have to?

Okay, this is totally a rant, so ignore it if you’re not into that sort of thing. I’m struggling to get into my story, and I’m going to blame life. This week started out as something of a panic attack. I had Monday off, but still had phone calls from work (This is generally okay, I’d rather have the discussion on sampling difficulties real-time than weeks later when nothing can be done about it.) Then, on Tuesday, I spent most of the day memorizing four slides of a presentation I’ve already given, along with a good 40 pages of supporting material. (I love the State’s public process. It makes me feel good about the state we live in – everyone can have a say in regulation, but when you work for the state, it can sometimes feel outrageously onerous to prepare for a presentation for a proposal that could very well be DoA.) Sometime during this memorization process, I got an e-mail asking to submit an abstract for the ‘little triple-a’s’ (This is cool and all, I mean getting to stand in front of folks and say: I help to manage the largest data-set of subsistence information in the world and now I’ve got a super-shiny way for you to look at our data, is super-neat. I mean, what I’ve got to present becomes a bit of an ego-trip.) sort of no-problem (I cheated and submitted the same abstract I used for a presentation at a climate change conference in November), except that I’ve already got 4 30-page survey instruments to finalize, and finish the database redesign project I’ve been promising for the better part of six months, and also the one major analysis project I didn’t delegate is four months behind schedule. At the end of the workday, with all this on my mind, I keep opening the file containing the first 12 pages of chapter 11, scanning to the end, and staring blankly at the last paragraph. I KNOW what needs to go there, I can see it, it’s not long, or even difficult to write, yet I can’t get there. I’m just too distracted by work!

Ahhh -now that’s off my chest, I’ve got an hour before bed. I think I’m going to close wordpress, pour a nip of the cheapest whiskey I have in the house, and stare at that chapter for a while.

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Fantasy book research #2

The question of this research topic is: How far can a person walk in a day? The answer is always: it depends. Once again, this is the least helpful response for someone who just needs to know what’s a reasonable distance for a human being to travel. Now, this is a topic I researched some time ago, and is buried in my notes. Also, I’ve tacked in my own opinion on the matter by applying my various, albeit limited, hiking and hunting experiences.

Easy terrain – a road, or well worn trail, with gradual slopes or short stretches of steeper terrain. This would include game trails. A fit person over relatively easy terrain can travel about 30 miles in an 8-10 hour day. If well trained, and pushing it, a person could plausibly go 40-50 miles. Keep in mind that over the course of 10 hours, stops have to be made for food and bodily functions.

Moderately difficult terrain –  This would include some steep terrain in open forest with limited trails. Imagine a forest with lots of big mature trees, few thickets, some windfall trees mostly knee-deep grasses, bracken and similar foliage. A few creek fords might be thrown in there. My experience is that you could probably cover about 20 miles, pushing 30 in a full day. The terrain isn’t really that difficult, and the slow-down comes largely from navigating around obstacles, and being a little more careful with footing.

Hard terrain – This is where you have lots of steep bits, dense thickets of willow and alder (or similar depending on your climate). I’d say something like 10 miles per day would be reasonable. Part of this comes with elevation, you tire much faster when you climb, so you have to stop and rest more often. You may still cover a lot of ground, but you won’t make much actual distance across the landscape.

Painful terrain – Knee-deep (or deeper) fresh snow on reasonably flat ground, I bet you could make 10 miles, but it would hurt, and you couldn’t keep up the pace for long. On hard-packed snow, you might be able to make it closer to 20 or even 30 miles. The thing about walking through snow, even with snowshoes, is that it’s like walking with thirty pound weights on each leg.

Don’t ever do this terrain – Deep snow up the side of a mountain – A very fit person is going to make 600feet in an hour without having a heart attack. There will be a lot of switch backs, and slipping around on uncertain footing. In this case, it really does depend on how steep the mountain is. Bottom line is that over the course of a day you could make it up and over two or three 600 or 800 foot ridges, and the actual distance covered is going to be on the order of 3-5 miles or a lot less.

I’m not going to promise these are the best estimates ever, but this is generally what I think is reasonable for a fantasy book adventurer beating his or her way across some exotic landscape.

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The dreaded chapter 3 re-write

Right now, I’m staring down the barrel of a chapter 3 re-write. The second half of the chapter is generally pretty good, just needs polishing and copy editing. The first half, however, has major plausibility issues. Well, not major, but they’re annoying enough that they won’t work. It’s not so bad it can’t be fixed, and once I do it’s going to be a whole lot better. I just haven’t got the foggiest idea on how to go about dealing with it. Part of the issue is that the circumstances of the scene have been in place for such a long time, I’m having a hard time visualizing a different, better situation.

The more I think about it, the stupider it seems that I can’t just tweak it. As much as I want to rubber-duck* this, and have a solution, I’m still struggling to come up with one. Perhaps the solution is to try a few different things and see where they eventually lead me. I mean, I’m really only talking about twenty-five hundred words. So, with that in mind, I’m going to start by changing the situation to be impossibly difficult for the protagonist (and writer), then revise until it works. With any luck, I will have fixed the problem.

* For an explanation of rubber-ducking see my about page