I never pulled an all-nighter to write a paper, but apparently I will pull them for stories.

(It isn’t really an all-nighter. The sun hasn’t risen yet.)

Something like 2K tonight, and now “And Blow Them at the Moon” is finally done. 8,120 words, which can certainly be tightened, though what the word-count effect will be of making the story actually work, I couldn’t tell you. And right now, I don’t care. I’ve got the damned thing on the page, and at the moment, that’s all that really matters.

Okay. I had to ignore the lunar eclipse and pull a new trick out of Magrat’s ear for the solar one, but at least it’s a cool trick. And I have 1,514 new words: two new scenes, which between them account for the time that had to elapse before Magrat went after Francis Tresham.

I’d love to get that scene written tonight, but it’s just not happening. Too much typing today — not just that wordage, but revision done on the earlier scenes, as I figured out what I was going to do next. And other stuff, too. So I’m going to get off the computer now.

But finishing in the next day or two suddenly looks a lot more feasible.

I don’t know how to get from where I left off last night to the end of the story — so instead I’m seeing if I can get from the end of the story to where I left off last night.

That is to say, earlier tonight I sat down and wrote a chunk of the final scene, then came back after a break and started writing the scene that comes before it. I’ll see how far I can get with that, then probably write the next one forward, and at that point I’ll have pretty much everything I know about this story. Whereupon I will hopefully figure out how to splice the two together.

This is utterly backwards for me, both literally and figuratively. I don’t write this way. But the other way wasn’t working, and hey, it’s only a short story; if I end up chucking out everything I wrote tonight, and everything I write tomorrow, it’s no huge loss. This may, like “Chrysalis,” be a story I need to write wrong before I can figure out how to write it right.

(I’m hoping for a result less broken than “Chrysalis” is. Fortunately, I’m also not attempting anything a tenth as arty as that story.)

1,173 very tangled words tonight. I think tomorrow I need to re-read chunks of my reference materials and get this crap straight in my head.

ETA: another 400 or so more. I remembered, or reconstructed, the way I wanted to handle what’s probably the most crucial turning point of the story; again, it may need replacing later, but at least I have it nailed down for the moment.

Since several people have suggested new wordmeters to me: does anybody know of one that, like the old Zokutou meter, allows you to show the new material you’ve added on since the last update? As in, yesterday I had 2064, today I wrote 1028, now I have 3098. I liked seeing the different-colored bit on the end of the bar, displaying your forward progress.

Anyway, that’s where I stand, after being not at all sure I was going to get anything written today. I know where I want the story to go, but getting there is proving to be the hard part.

John Johnson showed up in today’s work, for those of you sufficiently versed in your 1605 history to know who that is. (The real trick will be figuring out a sensible way to reveal him later, for those who don’t already know. I’m not trying to be terribly coy in-text about the fact that this is a Gunpowder Plot story, but since my protagonist doesn’t know that yet, there’s a fair bit of obfuscation happening as a consequence.)

Nggggh. Needs moar action, and also some way to use the eclipses. Surely I can come up with something.

<misses the Zokutou word meter>

1280 words on “And Blow Them at the Moon” today, plus a hundred or two fleshing out the first scene I’d written, for a current total of 2064. I really want to finish this by the end of the month, which is doable if a) I figure out how to get Magrat to learn some but not all of what’s going on and b) the story doesn’t balloon out of control. The idea is to keep it below 10K at all costs, and preferably shorter than that, since the markets for such a length are limited.

Also, I need to figure out what to do with the eclipses. There were two of them, one lunar and one solar, in the weeks leading up to the Gunpowder Plot going kablooey; surely I can come up with something interesting to make out of that.

Will ponder that as I go to sleep. Maybe I’ll wake up with an idea.

I’ve started over on “And Blow Them at the Moon.” As much as I like the opening scene I’d written, it just doesn’t fit the story; it introduces an additional pov (a bad decision, if I want to keep this thing short) and the tone is too light-hearted. This is not, I fear, going to be a light-hearted story. Not given what happened to Father Garnet, and to the conspirators, in the end.

(Man, reading about the Gunpowder Plot is depressing. Especially Sir Everard Digby. Talk about a waste.)

So that’s 614 words of a new start, and already I think it’s better. Father Garnet praying in Thames Street, and Magrat confronting the fact that she is displaying conduct unbecoming to a church grim. I need to find a way to say more about him, but maybe that will fit into a later scene.

While I was in Boston, I finally figured out what “And Blow Them at the Moon” wants to be about. The Gunpowder Plot, obviously; but that’s a long and complicated tale to fit into a short story, and could easily turn into a tedious history lesson instead of an interesting piece of fiction. Ideally, this will not be like Deeds of Men — i.e. not pitched primarily at people who have already read one or both novels, and please God not twenty-one thousand words long again — what I want is a short story I can try and sell to a proper market. Which means I need some frame I can put on the Gunpowder Plot, a frame that consists of a character and an engaging emotional arc for same.

While being an Onyx Court story. And it needs to explain some of the weirdnesses in the history, most notably the Monteagle Letter. That’s not too much to ask for, right?

So I think I found it, and my 599 words I had in December are now 1,105. Not a huge amount of progress, but I think I’m going to have to do a lot of wrangling to make this thing happen; I suspect there will be a great deal of infodumping that later gets scrubbed out, as I sort through what actually matters to a) my protagonist and b) my reader. Which means my progress will likely remain slow. But I’m going to try to get this done soon; today I ordered a metric ton of research material for the next book, and I need to get my head out of the seventeenth century and into the nineteenth asap.

And, y’know, it would be nice to get a story done in the first week or two of the year. Good omens and all.