Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: Pantser followup, revisited again

Way back in 2018 I wrote about the perils of being a pantser, here. There's another place on the blog where I've put some snippets, though they've all been revised since then. I'm wondering if I should remove those, and publish the snippets on the blog.

I know my non-writing readers are scratching their heads. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of writers. Plotters and pantsers. Plotters are obsessive compulsive planners, building character traits, story arcs, world building, essentially everything but the actual writing. Such books can come across as mechanical and plodding. Pantsers are the opposite. We fling our characters into situations to see what happens. It's no surprise that we write ourselves into corners, or our characters don't take that left turn at Albuquerque. Endings are difficult for pantsers.

A writing joke for you. What is it that all writers want? To have written. Though that's sort of a love hate relationship, because after writing comes editing.

One writer asks herself, what's the worst thing that can happen to this character? I woke up one morning with a security guard saying to my main character, "Excuse me, ma'am. I need to see your access card. It's supposed to be worn so it's visible." What happened after that? 4,000 words that flowed like wine, generating the start of a medical conspiracy to make the world a better place, that leads into Elixer, and indirectly to something on the verge of being written. The books all pretty much much have links to each other in one way or another.

I've mentioned the great writing project off and on over the past several decades. The beginnings are lost in the mists of time, but I think somewhere in the early 1990's is about right. The texts have migrated from computer to computer, from writing tool to writing tool. The current setup is a 12 year old laptop running Scrivener that I think is one version behind.

I'm going to write this out, partly for me to summarize, and partly for you to do whatever you like. Like topsy, it's grown, and I'm losing track of some of the branches. Some of the things that are in the same writing project no longer go together, or go better with something in another project. The timeline is a bit hairy in places, since they all take place in the same universe, but not necessarily the same world.

The Plant Novel (yes, I'm good with titles) introduces Ceridwen (Dwen) Burns and some of the other characters. It starts mid 1993 or so, with Dwen interviewing at the plant, which bears a startling resemblance to Bonnybrook Wastewater Treatment plant, where I worked from 1983 to 1990. This started as a mystery romance, with human bones being discovered in a plant tank and her meeting Les. For a long while she isn't sure if she wants to screw him blind, or punch his lights out. Let's just say it's grown. I now know who put the bones there, why, and how. Those things baffled me for a while. It's very elegant.

Scrivener tells me there are about 250,000 words overall, though some of that is in chapters that are early versions that were rewritten, or have been dropped. One of the most recent bits of this is one chapter titled Moira that is 84,000 words long, and mostly covers the period from about 2005,to 2020, though flashbacks show events before that, though some things still need to be nailed down.

Bone to Elixer was intended to be the join between the Plant Novel, and Elixer, hence the title. It also explores some of the science fiction elements that came from some very strange shift work hallucinations. It's about 75,000 words.

The Sweet Elixer started as a NaNoWriMo story, and has grown. It starts about 2008, with Dwen being a minor character. It goes to about 2021, with an epilogue set in 2026 or so. One of the minor characters from the Plant Novel stepped up and is a major player here. All this was written before COVID, and has not been revised. I'll need to decide if COVID happens in this world. It's in the same world as the Plant Novel, and tells a story about what happens if stem cell technologies get invented. There are about 118,000 words.

There is the imaginatively titled DW_nano2015, and it will surprise nobody when I say it was done as the 2015 NaNoWriMo contest. It has about 145,000 words, and is mostly an action science fiction story that grows out of Bone to Elixer, over about the same time frame, though I'm struggling to fit some things in. Let's just say Dwen is a very busy woman, and no wonder she is short on sleep. Just to intrigue you, Dwen gets shot in this story, though she survives. Afterwards she learns something that affects her life.

I talked about writing about the bad guy from his point of view, where he is the hero of the story. Regan (and yes, I was channelling The Big Sleep) is only about 23,000 words, and the time frame is not certain. Some of his machinations drive events in DW, at least I think so. There is at least one scene I really like, but as written it doesn't fit anywhere, which illustrates the problem of pantsing. This, and one of the scenes in Bone to Elixer is the jumping off for another as yet unwritten branch of the story.

If you've been doing the math, this is about 466,000 words altogether. It is not remotely a commercial property, especially not the way the world is now, with AI flooding the world with shitty writing and photography. But it amuses me, and it's a fun intellectual exercise to fit things together, and think about how best to write a scene. Even now, I'm finding typos, better ways to write a scene, and linking up connections.

Characters include, in no particular order, Dwen, Les, Belinda, Ronnie, Llewellyn, Zoe, Rob, Mary, Maeve, Mitch, Eric, Ken, Bill, Kurt, Stu, Blair, Carol, Marcel, Ed, Betsy, Penny, David, Hardisty, Janice, Kelly, Ross, Erin, Jordan, Thomas, Audrey, Amber, Franklin, Nicole, Tannis, Theo, Bjartur, the Rah team (though other than Moira we don't see much of Kendra, Sierra, Sarah, Clara, Cassandra, and Laura, though I'm pretty sure they help Kendra escape her abusive parents in a piece I haven't written yet), the half sisters Porsche, Mercedes, and Morgan, Regan, Scage, Silence, Tia, Gart, Borden, Stevens, the mysterious Curtis who runs an oddly classy hole in the wall all day breakfast joint. Plus more. Some are related to one another, some are married, many are friends. Not all of them meet each other. I once held a coffee and cookies patio party where many of the characters showed up to chat about the work.

Shall I reward you with a snippet for getting this far? I think so.

Belinda looked up as the door to her control room opened. It was a quiet night, with nothing left to do but routine equipment checks, so she was sitting with her feet on the desk, head balanced against the corner of the annunciator panel, sort of thinking through a sewing project, not asleep but not completely awake either. She expected another operator dropping in to chat, but spasmed awake when a complete stranger strolled into the control room like she belonged.

“Good morning, Miss Vesterby.” The stranger’s voice was clear and confident. She moved the other chair towards the middle of the room in a graceful arc.

Belinda took her feet off the desk and sat up, thinking her night shift hallucinations had never been quite this focussed. Her visitor was a tall woman wearing dark grey clothing with a distinctly military cut. A quick glance down revealed practical boots without a height disguising heel. Wisps of blonde hair poked out from a dark cap. A face more handsome than pretty looked back at her with frank interest.

“I can’t remember the last time anyone called me that,” she said, hoping her voice sounded calm. “I prefer Ms.” She thought that was a much less provoking response than ‘Who the hell are you and why are you in my control room?’

The stranger slowly sat, still poised for action. “You might think it presumptuous to call you Belinda like we were friends. Just being here could be thought impolite at the least.”

“The City would think trespassing and go on from there. I’m going with startling, but I’m guessing that if you’ve gone to the trouble of getting here you’ve got a good reason. So you’ve got my attention, unless I’m really face down on the desk, asleep and dreaming. This wouldn’t even come close to my strangest dreams.”

She smiled and shook her head. “No. Unlike all the other operators, you’re awake.”

“You know my name. Are you going to tell me yours?”

“My name is Amber. We’ve never met, though we were briefly at the same event. We have several acquaintances in common who were at that event. They have a shortcut to this facility, and I know the same shortcut. That’s how I’m here, and it wasn’t that much trouble.” Amber relaxed into the chair but her eyes were alert.

Belinda slowly nodded. “The reception Dwen and Les went to. You were at the door as they were leaving. Hair up, fancy dress slit to your hip, and heels, not that you need them.”

“I wasn’t sure if you had noticed me. As for the why, I hope you’ve figured out that I’m not here to hurt you. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is a private place for us to chat about a proposition I have for you.”

Belinda pursed her lips and looked thoughtful. “I’ve never been propositioned at 3am here, so that’s new. There’s nothing else even remotely entertaining to do, so fire away.” She settled back into her chair, but didn’t put her feet up.

“I guarantee you’ve never heard anything like it, unless you lead a much more adventurous life than I realize.”

“I probably don’t.”

“You know how in movies and stage plays there is the action up front where the audience can see it, and then there’s all the invisible action backstage, or that you only see in the ‘making of’ extras?”

“Sure.”

“You are one of a few people in the interesting position of knowing there’s a backstage to this world, without being able to go there.” She gestured around in a way that was expansive yet efficient. “I heard about a recent shopping trip you were part of, so I know you’ve seen some of it played out.”

That goes on for another 15,000 or so words, including wheeling an unconscious mercenary to a rendezvous with fate in a mop bucket, a terrifying psychological interrogation, and discussion about a homicidal inner bitch.

Here's a screen shot of Aeon timeline, which is what I've been using to track dates and characters and should be using it more. In an ideal world everything here would line up with a chapter in Scrivener, but it's a work in progress. I use it to try to sort out the sequence of events.