Action!
Day 151 of Writing
The Relentless is a science fiction spy story, and inherent in that genre are action sequences. Trying to come up with new and different action sequences is challenging. What hasn’t already been done to death?
I have several action sequences that take place very high in the air. The risk of falling adds another element of danger. Each of these adds little twists to make them a little different. I also have a car chase, although it takes place on streets filled with self-driving cars.
Still, I have been looking for something really different, something that no one has done before. I think I may have stumbled upon it. I have to give it a lot more thought.
Just yesterday my wife mentioned that four people in Philadelphia had been struck by lightning and two of them died. We don’t get much lightning here in L.A., which may be why I find lightning so scary. The constant flashes and booming of a Chicago lightning storm was terrifying to me, and I was an adult at the time.
There is a place on Earth where lightning strikes almost constantly. It is not really a place you can safely go. What if global climate change makes it even worse and more dangerous? That is not so outlandish, as for every degree of global temperature increase, the number of lightning strikes increases by 6 percent.
What happens when you send a group of people into a storm of unrelenting lightning constantly striking all around them? I believe there are dramatic possibilities with that. What they are all yet I have not figured out, but that is the fun part.
The first step for me was to learn more about lightning. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the United States, although those numbers have been trending downwards. Amazingly, about 9 out of 10 people struck by lightning survive. It is not pleasant though.
It can send life threatening current some 100 feet along the ground. It can travel through concrete floors and walls, as they often have metal embedded in them. Running inside a concrete building might be a fairly bad idea. In fact, one third of injuries from lightning occur indoors. This lightning stuff is sounding more and more like it has a lot of possibilities.
Being struck by lightning can cause major personality changes, mood swings and memory loss. That has potential. My characters go through a lot of struggles to keep their brains working normally, which they often don’t. This could fit in nicely with that.
So, my initial assessment is that this has potential, so I will continue working on it. The writing of the novel has slowed down a bit, as I am stuck on a number of issues I need to figure out. It is not really writer’s block. Some things just take time to think about.
The past month was difficult with all of the health challenges. I did finish final edit on another book that had been sitting waiting for me to do final edit. Not my favorite task, going through and catching the last remaining mistakes, awkward sentences, and in some cases, deleting what just does not fit or work. It is off for a final read from the editor and hopefully I should be able to get it out during the pandemic.
The Relentless will probably take a little over a year to write. I will continue to work on other books (I have a good start on another non-fiction book), plus I write a lot of stuff for online publication. I try to write every single day, but that is not always possible. Even with all of the other challenges, I think I can publish at least four books this year.
What’s Up with Us
My arm is better but I still can’t put weight on my elbow. Belle had to do much of the lifting, but we did finish the pond and waterfall over the weekend. There is still a little more to do, but it is functional and aesthetically pleasing. Here is what it looks like:
The water flows from the spillway to the first level. It then splits and flows down the two sides. This breaks up the sound of the water and makes it a lot more complex and interesting. We could just have had the water fall in a sheet directly into the water, but this creates a consistent swoosh sound rather than the bubbly gurgling I am looking for.
We have a palm tree in the background as well as a Plumeria that is the second of ours to start blooming. We have hidden pots with rocks so that some of the plants appear to be growing out of the rocks. We have had good luck growing tropical plants outdoors, even in L.A. heat. The waterfall ups the humidity and they really like it.
This is a very small side yard that went largely unused except for the area around the barbecue. Now we go out and sit by the pond and waterfall and it is profoundly relaxing and de-stressing. It has completely transformed this section of the yard.
This is all free standing on what used to be just a corner of patio. We used no mortar with nothing holding it together other than gravity.
Here is what it looked like as we were working on it:
We found these decorative blocks that were angled in at the back making it much easier to create a curved front wall for the pond. The planter was just two bricks tall and wrapped around the yard. We added three bricks all the way along the back corner to increase the height to five bricks tall to equal the height of the decorative blocks.
The planter at the back was cleared out, filled with sand, and then leveled. On top of this we added the five cinder blocks that provide the structure. It is a good idea to use an underlining beneath your plastic liner to cushion it and help reduce punctures. We had a bunch of old moving blankets and cut one to shape. The picture shows it before it is cut into shape and folded over to cover the top part of the waterfall.
The next step is to put in the liner and cut it to shape. When you have a spillway rather than just a straight fall, there are always leaks you have to track down. Water always finds a way.
To cover the plastic, we used a couple of hundred pounds of Utah Quartzite. It has flecks of quartz in it that glint in the light. It can have pinkish or reddish streaks from iron oxide, and sometimes other colors from different minerals. It just leans up against the sides of the pond and holds the sides of the liner in place.
The problem with all of these types of flat rock is that the edges can be sharp as a knife, which is not good for your plastic liner. We bought a bag of medium size smooth volcanic rock that covers the bottom of the pond. All we had to do is set the quartzite on those smooth rocks, which keeps the sharp edges up off of the plastic.
You might notice two lattice planting boxes that almost disappear in the finished version. These appeared in the 2011 movie Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, along with the archway that leads to our front door.