I copied Chapter 3 into the master draft and came up just shy of 13,000 words. It seems like I’m writing slower because the scenes are longer. I had particular fun with the scene that sort of became the seed of this story.
A few years ago, after rewatching the 2009 Star Trek, I also caught an episode of Ice Road Truckers. Late at night with the mind fogging up, Kirk’s crashing on an icy planetoid got conflated with semi drivers in the Arctic. I imagined someone crashing their shuttle on the icy core world of Demeter, Admiral Quentin Austin’s homeworld. The crashed pilot would have to hitchhike back to civilization by catching a ride with a passing mining transport out in the subzero cold, Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge” blaring in the background.
Well, no Aerosmith (though AC/DC does make an appearance in Storming Amargosa), but the actual scene creates some nice tension between pilot Tomle Modesto and spec force officer Mitsuko Yamato. So I was glad to expand on that one scene. Quite often, I’ve come up with stories from germ scenes only to have that scene disappear.
This one is tracking close to its outline. But a reread of Storming Amargosa suggests I need to change the ending. Some of the events near the end are now in Storming, so they’ll have to come out. Does that mean a new ending?
Possibly. But as this novella reveals what happens to JT and Suicide after the events of Second Wave, there are other opportunities to build a lead-in to that story.