The middle part of a story is usually the tricky bit -- trying to see how the characters and events line up to take them to the big scene, figuring out what you'd better go back and foreshadow before it shows up later. Can Sarah Jane Lotzenheiser touch-type? If a small herd of "mopers"* slows up the truckbus our heroine is riding to the big city and she shifts in her seat to make her sidearm easier to get at, are the big animals the point, or is it her 1911? And why isn't she carrying it in some easier-to-reach way? Are Edgers in the mid-1970s any more advanced in how they carry than their Earthbound counterparts?
And so on. I know how it starts. I know how it ends. Middles, there's the interesting part.
__________________________
* Yeah, I heard of mopers, always moping about sad-faced.... But in this case, I refer to the animal, pilosispedes immanes macanally, a large, slow, shambling pseudo-ruminant native to Trinity's Other Continent. The pilospedes fill most of the prey-animal niches on the O.C. and the things that hunt them, you would not want to meet. Mopers dealt with this by becoming too big for most predators.
It always makes my morning when you post a new story. It's a shame the real world intrudes on your writing time because you're really good at the bigger back story stuff.
ReplyDeleteYay! More stories from the Hidden Frontier!
ReplyDeleteRe carry. Maybe open carry is the norm in the back-of-beyond where dangerous beasties roam but the (slightly) more delicate flowers in the city expect concealed carry...
Sarah Jane isn't used to her IWB holster so she fidgets...
I hate middles.
ReplyDeleteEagerly anticipating another HF story, though!