picowrimo | Pico day 22

Probably not going to get a chance to post later -- we have guests coming. I moved on to chapter 9 and decided to split out another of those bridging sections. I seem to have worked out how to treat the blighters now, because I managed to draft a whole new little scene to slot in and get the short chapter to first draft. It's nowhere near as dramatic as the previous chapter but they can't all be high points, can they? Have an excerpt of the new stuff.

I opened a cupboard. Then I opened another cupboard. I found a couple of mugs, one of which had ‘Property of Lieutenant Harebell’ stencilled on it in an egg-shell blue paint. It was a neat job. I took a moment to admire it. A bit more work on the cupboards got me a caddy with some black dust at the bottom. The best that could be said for the dust was it didn’t smell like rushwash leaves.

I spooned some black dust into the big brown office pot. It looked lonely down there so I tipped the rest of the caddy in. ‘Tell her I ordered you,’ I said. ‘The broad can’t sack me.’

Nicely noir!

A solid hour's work this morning.
A week's vacation gone, poof! I didn't get much writing done last week, but managed to work on it nearly every day for a while, just tweaking things, no hard thinking involved!

Good times always go at warp speed, unfortunately.
A solid hour's work is excellent, though.

Moving on to Chapter 9 is excellent!
I'm always a little baffled when I read the expression "eggshell blue". For me, eggs are off-white or brown. Or green, if they're laid by nandus. I'll have to google the words and see what I'll come up with. *g*

Typing up Chapter 9 is a slow process, especially as I've got so many other things to do I never had the time for during school term. But I'm making headway, as you can see on the snipped below.

I've also started laying the grounds for the rest of "Brothers-in-Arms". I read through the existing chapters, made a list of events that already happened; then I went through the last 9 chapters of the original novel the story is based on and made a list of the canon events I actually can and/or want to use. I hope that I can start writing tomorrow, as most of the research has been done years ago, I just have to read through it and refresh my memory.

Excerpt:

If not ten, but fifteen minutes later Geordi returned to Engineering, carrying a PADD with odd diagrams and detailed instructions on it. He handed it to Alfonse Pacelli, one of the enlisted specialists that nominally belonged to the science division but actually worked for Engineering most of the times.

“Here,” he said. “I want lots of these things, preferably yesterday, or the day before. As many as you and your team can churn out within the next hour and a half.”

Pacelli studied the PADD with interest. “What are these things?”

“According to Ensign Rina, and I quote, they’re 98.6-degree objects within a carbon dioxide shell(*) that can mimic organic life for a limited time,” Geordi replied. “We have to fool that alien killing machine somehow, and these little gizmos are supposed to do the trick.”

“Wow!” Pacelli’s eyes grew bigger and bigger as he was reading the instructions. “I’ve never seen this kind of technology before.”

“It’s Bridrani,” Geordi explained. “They’re damn good engineers and Ensign Rina is a certified genius, so I trust that it’s doable.”

“Oh, absolutely!” Pacelli agreed. “It will be a bit tricky, but we can do this.” He graduated the Starfleet Technical Services Academy with honours, so his confidence was well-grounded.

*My apologies if the technobabble sounds stupid. It's quoted from the actual rejected first draft for the TNG-episode "Unnatural Selection". So, you see, it's not my fault at all!

Edited 2015-06-22 17:33 (UTC)

Another couple of hundred on the Stargate one, including some small changes to the bit I posted yesterday, because I decided to try and make it clear that the dark nothingness Sheppard was in (which we got a first person description of) was thinner and patchier than that Daniel (whose experience I'm writing at second-hand through Radek, so it won't be easy) went through - this will tie into the fact that they travelled through time, not space, and the horror has had a long time to die a bit before it got to Sheppard :)

A snippet, because like so many fans I like hurting Daniel I do :)

With what might have been a faint sound, something like the memory of a death rattle, the darkness shifted... and Daniel fell out on top of Rodney, both of them staggering and toppling into a shaking heap before Radek could stop them.
Daniel was grey-white, lips blue, eyes wide open and almost, almost fixed as if in death, but the thin, ragged sounds he made that were as faint as a whisper, as piercing and agonized as a scream... they hurt, but they meant he was alive.
It was a long, oh so long, eon within a minute - the only sound Radek's breathing, ragged and harsh and Rodney's even more so - before Daniel gasped and bit down on the moan, choking them off with an effort that the others could almost feel, then closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe.

It sounds canonical, oh yes (I feel for you, my fandoms also have canonical techno-and-scientific nonsense I have to try and work within without wincing too hard :)

Oh yes, that will make excellent tea {veg} I don't think it pretty much ever goes off, does it? (Mind you, I don't know WHY I think that...)

There's a definite colour called "duck-egg blue" - I once put one of my heroes (Avon from Blakes 7, if you know him) in a duck-egg blue cardigan and 'plimsolls' in a story, just to make everyone wince. But it is a lovely colour...

Holiday time always go faster than normal time. fact, and I'm sure there's a scientific law of physics to back it up :)

Two chapters of edits completed and typed up. Rupert finally learns something about his modern-day cousins:

"Aunt Julia's brother was a pilot?" Rupert couldn't remember ever hearing that she'd had a brother, much less what had happened to him. Most of Papa's stories about her dealt with their adventures on the estate and the times they'd spent together in London after he had left the army and she'd stayed with him in spite of being married to Hugh.

"He was shot down in 1942, not long after he'd married a girl from quite the wrong sort of background – at least as far as George was concerned – and before he'd done anything about making a new will to provide for Julia." Grandmama brightened. "I hear she and her parents did a marvellous job of keeping his estate going – they'd been tenant farmers for several generations – and the current Earl Fitz-Osbert breeds beautiful Fell ponies as well. He's another one that married a girl from one of the tenant farms, of course."

"Are there any Fitz-Osbert cousins of my generation?" He could write to them – find out if one of them wanted a penfriend if nothing else. Just because previous generations of Peverils and Fitz-Osberts had fallen out, there was no reason for him not to bridge the rift.

"I think there's a boy and a girl. You should look them up in Debrett."

Oh, yes, I very much love Blake's 7. I've purchased the whole series a couple of years ago but am still in the process of going through it because the only subtitles it has are in Dutch, which I don't speak and without subtitles it's not always easy for me to understand what the characters are talking about. My English, such as it is, mostly exists in written form. ;)

Stargate does have its moments, yeah. Starting with the, well, Stargate itself.
But I love both SG-1 (up to Season 8) and Atlantis.

And poor Radek has to deal with two traumatized geniuses. Life can be cruel sometimes. *g*

Just because previous generations of Peverils and Fitz-Osberts had fallen out, there was no reason for him not to bridge the rift.

Smart boy!

Well, I have managed a rough draft of 'the incident' that takes place during the walk home. Very rough.

***

The hollow thud of an empty box hitting the concrete reverberated through the tunnel. Mycroft lifted his umbrella as he turned. There was a scrabbling sound; a low, undulating growl.

From behind the box, a pointed snout emerged.

Red crouched, blocking the way out from between the stack of cartons and the fallen box. He hissed.

Teeth bared, the rat reared. Mid-jump, it flew sideways. A metre beyond, a trail of dust marked the progress of the bullet scoring the surface of the concrete.

Red hissed again, his fur a cloud around his nearly flattened form.

Mycroft lowered his umbrella, took out his mobile. “There aren’t supposed to be any of those down here,” he said as he walked away, tapping at it.

Red turned his head and watched. When Mycroft disappeared around a corner, Red’s ears pricked up and he ran after him.

Excellent progress and a strategy for making the bridging sections behave, too!

I'm fearing what the black dust at the bottom of the caddy is going to taste like!

Welcome back! Alas for the week zooming by, but hopefully you are feeling refreshed.

A whole hour's work is terrific progress. I'm particularly impressed that you managed to edit and tweak on your holiday. Well done!

I am in awe not only of your steady progress, but its organisation and method! Too often, I cannot find my notes for old projects. I am going to try to mend my ways.

That sounds like a clever solution for tricking the aliens. Yes, canon technobabble is often a huge challenge. Man from UNCLE had some amazing canon stuff happen. The fic is almost always better.

Steady progress!

This sounds more than sufficiently excruciating.

Papa must have been doing some creative editing with the stories over the years!

110 words tonight. Getting back in the swing of things. :) Hopefully will have a new snippet to share (and a good deal of words, fingers crossed!) tomorrow.

Tea is just as important as drama! I like the squalid atmosphere here.

Time goes so quickly! But you've stayed committed, that's the important thing.

Pico day 22

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