Back in the saddle
by Richard Perkins
I’m back in the thick of it again. Eliza just couldn’t wait for JulNoWriMo to start. Protagonists can be so pushy sometimes, can’t they? So with the outline, character descriptions, and scene mapping for the sequel to the Renegade’s Door, I started writing again yesterday.
The picture to the left is the plot scene tree for the new story, much like the one I did for Renegade’s Door last October. This one is a bit more evolved than my first attempt. Renegade started out with an outline of only 10-15 scenes, but by the time I finished revisions for scene flow and continuity there were 24 scenes in the first novel.
I added a lot of material after the first draft. Throughout the revisions I felt like I was just padding the word count to get the novel up to a marketable length. So for this second novel I’m targeting a 90,000 word first draft. Then during the revision process I can focus on trimming the fat, tightening up the prose, and dumping the fluff that doesn’t moving the story along. Steven King advises that a second draft should be a lot like a first draft told with 10% fewer words in his autobiography, On Writing. If I can manage that, Eliza’s story should weigh in at 80,000 words after revision, which is just a little bit longer than Mikel’s story from Renegade.
Aiming for a 90,000 word draft for a month long novel writing contest like JulNo seemed like a tall order. To get there, I increased my daily word count target from 1667 (NaNoWriMo levels) to 1915 words per day and started writing two week ahead of the official contest start date. This way I’ll finish the last 63,000 words of the new novel during JulNo (which still qualifies as a win accordign to JulNo rules).
Of course writing over 1900 words a day for 47 straight days will be a challenge. I maintained that pace for NaNo for only 27 days last November. Wish me luck!
Looking for a sneak peek? Here’s a rough (extremely rough) look at the opening scene. Enjoy! 
Sand Dragon Dance
18th of the 3rd moon of Spring, 283 SC
Eliza tumbled forward as the stone beneath her outstretched hand crumbled beneath her weight. A fissure of light stabbed painfully at her eyes, widening as the wall of the soot-stained vent she had been climbing disintegrated. Helpless to stop herself, she pitched out into the glaring desert sunlight, blind to the sands that rushed to stop her skidding descent.
She felt a wrenching jolt across her hips and jerked to a halt. She felt strangely reassured that the stars had returned as her vision went dark again. Then the pinpricks of light faded and her eyes started to adjust to the harsh, desert light. Bands of dark and light appeared first, and then color seeped back into the world around her. She almost wept with relief as she recognized the rusty red of stone outcroppings, the sweeping gold of windswept sands above her, and the vivid blue of cloudless sky beneath her.
Wait, that wasn’t right. And what was that tension gripping her hips like the jaws of a mother wolf on the scruff of a wayward cub? Eliza marshaled her scattered thoughts with an effort.
“All-Mother! Mother Eliza, can you hear me! Are you all right?” Kenbo’s gravelly voice, hoarse and ragged, finally broke through the ringing in Eliza’s ears.
She blinked to clear the tears from her eyes, looking toward her waist. A stout length of rope was looped low around her hips, doubled back around each leg just above the thigh and tied in a strong knot below her navel. Right. Her harness. She vaguely remembered tying it but why?
The harness was cinched tight, straining against a tether that stretched into the sky beneath her feet. Eliza’s head spun as she realized the sky wasn’t beneath her. She was hanging upside down on the face of a ragged stone outcropping that reared many spans above the surrounding desert. The tether ran from her harness back through the ragged hole she had punched through the face of the stone chimney during her fall.
“All-Mother! Eliza! Kenji, hold the line while I go after the All-Mother!”
That wasn’t good. The lanky tribesman was sincere and well intentioned, but he wasn’t a climber. Nor was his brother, Kenji. “Ken-”
Her voice failed. Her throat was scraped raw and burned with every word. She coughed wetly and forced herself to be heard. “Stay where you are!”
“Mother Eliza?” Kenji cried out and Eliza heard the scrabble of loose stones cascading down inside the vent as the brothers re-oriented toward her voice.
“I said, stay put!” Eliza reached up to her harness, put one hand on the tether and righted herself in a single, dizzying motion. She waited for her vision to clear again, trying to remember something, something important. She had been climbing blindly for so long, scrambling over stone ledges stained black with foul soot and slicked with glassy nodules of fused crystal. She had wanted to give up more times than she could count, but always she had been pulled upward. She had been led toward the distant light, and she had followed, but followed who… she should know.
A bleat tugged at her awareness and she looked up to find a familiar black, triangular face peering down from a ledge just above the hole she had tumbled through. Eliza breathed a sigh of relief. “Sasha.”
The goat flicked her long ears and bleated as she cocked her head to one side.
“Well, you could have warned me, now couldn’t you?”
Sasha blinked and flicked her ears again as she regarded the bedraggled medicine woman dangling on the wall beneath her. Eliza had never felt happier to see the pack goat’s face, framed as it was by the dazzling blue sky. She chuckled, and suddenly found herself laughing like a mad woman.
“All-Mother? Are you… all right?” Kenbo’s voice cracked, the sound echoing inside the chimney of stone that belched a faint plume of acrid smoke high into the sky above.
Her laughter subsided slowly. But the victorious feeling of being out under the open sky once more remained. “I’m fine Kenbo. Just fine. We made it!” She drummed her heels against the wind-sculpted stone behind her as she stared out over the unfamiliar dune scape of the northern desert. The sense of elation faded as she realized that she couldn’t recognize a single landmark. Every feature of the desert was foreign to her as far as the eye see. How far had they stumbled through those hellish tunnels? How long had it been since she had seen the sky? One night? Two?
[...] – 60,000 words to write this month to reach this novel’s dramatic conclusion. I gave you a sneak peek at the opening scene in one of my previous posts. Read on for the continuation of the first scene [...]