Alien Girls Make it Easy

February 26, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 4 Comments

It’s always a good thing when a plan comes together.  Or so some fictional character told me a long time ago.

Getting back into my novel, Transporting, has been a great experience, and a great time.  Here it is, Day 7 of Trying to Finish This Sucker, and I’m two chapters down and that much closer to the end.  Today I begin Chapter 40, and I’m looking through my Scrivener layout, and . . . yes.  Including this one, there are only six chapters to go before I bring this mess to a complete and complete end.

Sure, that sounds like, “Oh, you’ll be finished in a week,” talk.  Each chapter is cut up into scenes, and if I drill down like that . . . I’ve a total of eighteen scenes to complete.  If you think that, maybe, each scene is going to run about 1,000 words, then I’ve got about 18,000 words to write.  (One of these days I’ll have to get some screen shots of my layout in Scrivener and show you what this all looks like.)

Add that to 260,000 words I already have, and I’m going to get very close to the 275,000 target I’ve sent for the novel.

Chapter 38 was really the first one I’ve done in a while where I sat and thought, “Okay, what do I need to do next?” for this story.  Most of it I’ve had in my head for a long time; the chapter I’m going to start today is a perfect example of that.  I’ve pretty much known this chapters for about 20 years, give or take a few years either way.  It’s going to involve some sadness for one of the main characters, but since I’ve come to have a different view of how this novel should precede, I don’t know that it’s going to have as much of a  freak out factor as I’d once imagined . . .

Actually, that freak out factor will start in Chapter 43, and continue on into Chapter 44 . . . I know, I’m showing off now, ain’t I?  Like I’ve said, I’ve lived with this story for 25 years, so I know what’s going on.

This last chapters wasn’t part of that story, though.  It came about when I was plotting out what was going to happen as the novel finished up.  To give you the Reader’s Digest version of what’s happening, my characters have shown up on this other planet, intent on helping the civilization there avoid an Extinction Level Event.  They’ve conducted a few tests to see if they have a working hypothesis, and during Chapter 39, they’d reached the point where they needed to get the locals in on the game.

So that chapter was about the set up for my characters, a scene where they went out to select the people who were going to help them, and then the experiment itself.  The heading of this post is pretty much something one of the characters actually feels, that she–the alien girl, for my characters really are the aliens here–make it look a lot easier than it should be.

Of course it’s not always going to be that way, but it’s a good way to start.  Let’s get that hubris cranked!

Lets see if I can make this easy for them today . . .

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