During the weekend, I broke my laptop, so I was left stranded and rather confused. It’s fixed now, so I apologise for the radio silence, and for a rocky week of posts on which I have to work on. Why do I happen upon ideas when I have no medium in which to write them‽
As such, I’m going to do things a little differently today…probably for the better.
What I achieved this week-and-a-half:
I would say it was a good week for my CampNaNo… Well, it was a good week for writing until my laptop decided to give up its charge and I had to go hunting for a new charger. I managed to get to chapter fifteen, but I have no idea how long those chapters themselves have been (I’m personally not a fan of reading or writing chapters under 2K), since I still have to email them from my the notepad on my phone to my Word document. As you can probably guess, too, I don’t write as lovingly quickly on my phone as I do on a proper keys-and-clicks keyboard. Just as I much prefer print books to ebooks, I much prefer physical keyboards than touch screens.
I did, however, definitely complete one goal from last week: write about 10 – 20K, so I reach the 25K mark, past the quarter mark. Even with only up to near the end of chapter 12 fixed onto the Word doc., I have reached 27K, so hopefully I am on target.
This week, I’ve been introduced to a whole host of new characters and lost a few, too: the crew of a particular skyship, who come in handy at the heroine’s need, and, very recently, a group of anarchists living in the grounds of Vesuvius. But – shh! – the heroine doesn’t know as much yet!
A favourite paragraph from my project:
So far… I intend to post a more up-to-date paragraph once I’ve successfully moved chapters 13 to 15. This extract comes from the beginning of chapter 12, as Cathleen acquaints herself with searching for her fiancé.
Jonathon moved from the dockhand – who took that moment to run – a small click signifying that he’d tucked away the miniature knife, and slid backwards a metre or two. He pushed off from the ground and ran at the vessel, leaping the gap between the platform and the starboard side. Hands latched at his shirt and pulled him over the rail, but Jonathon had landed on the skyship with his jump before Cathy might blink and wish him helped.
“Mind the gap,” she muttered to herself.
Ah, so they’d returned for him or some other overt expedition that would unlikely take passengers. More than a simple smile would press the creases from her borrowed dress and allow her access onto the limited adventure-stat—
“Miss Cathleen!”
A hand. A wave. A flash of cowslip blonde under flying goggles. Today, Amelia had donned a pair of ivy green lenses adorned with two small glass disks, monocular and staggered. Her map-reading goggles perchance.
The biggest challenge I faced this week:
I guess knowing that a lot of what I’ve written will be cut in subsequent drafts in the name of pacing. Even in my more substantive drafts of other works, I prefer characters to sit and reflect rather than act straight away.
Something I love about my WIP:
Everything! In particular, the unlicensed skyship The Cloud-Chaser. It’s a lot more what you’d expect from Steampunk than the previous liner The Pearl: archetypal roles; less fancy, more steam-flight. The cartographer, Amelia, has a pet carrier owl called Albert, and strikes me as a tad philosophic in her spare time.
Plus she’s the perfect eye-candy for Secondary Character Jonathon. I was, from planning stages, determined that there’d be no romance between him and the MC (he’s not her type and she gets engaged in chapter one anyway), but this doesn’t stop him from being attracted to The Cloud-Chaser’s cartographer. I really like Jonathon, actually, even though, as a human being, I always planned not to like him: He’s one of those SCs that say the truth the MC doesn’t wanna hear.
Alexandrina Brant 
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