Mistress of logistics

 The re-write of my second novel in the riddle quest trilogy has reached the place where my characters meet their greatest danger.  I’m about six chapters from the end, and working through them has been an exercise in sorting out logistics.

In my original, very old, manuscript both my viewpoint characters were underground in an alien bunker. There they faced a series of tests and traps, but overall the writing lacked excitement. At the moment when my readers should have been on the edge of their seats biting their nails the action was simply, well, dull.

So how did I fix this problem? The first thing I did was to split the narrative into two storylines. The original storyline remained, but I added a second, completely new, one.  Arrien now stays above ground while her brother Baak is with the underground squad.   That meant I gained the opportunity to switch between viewpoints at cliffhangers and major question points in the story. Which was all very well, but now I had to work out what those points were.

So I added a whole new dogfight to the above ground storyline, and I made it so that Arrien’s side were outnumbered.  That upped the danger level considerably, and allowed me to get her and her ship in danger.  The second viewpoint follows the original storyline, but has been substantially added to.  

In the original draft the team had to cross a bridge high over a geothermal vent.  The bridge collapses while they’re half-way across it.  But I wanted most of the team to survive that, so I needed to add details about safety harnesses and guide ropes.  I didn’t want them to seem reckless.  One of the team still gets killed, but it is as the result of a weapons blast, not because of a lack of safety.

So far, so good.  Eventually my underground team find the ship docks where the downed starship they’re looking for is housed.  This was my biggest addition to the story, getting Baak to go inside the semi-derelict ship to transfer its valuable database to his sister’s ship.  That goes okay, but then the ship says it’s dying, and wants Baak to pull the plug.  The only problem is that will trigger a self destruct, and he’d have only fifteen minutes to escape.

Here the logistics got serious. I had to swap a slow form of transport for a faster one, and send Baak’s  companion out of the ship to pilot that pod so they could take off fast.  Baak had to run down a metal staircase, leap into the pod, escape out of the hole in the roof, get aboard his sister’s ship, and have the ship get clear of the debris field from the explosion, all in fifteen minutes.

So I added a power assist to Baak’s armour, got the pod coming in hot to the already-moving ship, and just got them clear in time.  Call me the mistress of logistics.