Hello, writing friends! I am happy to report that tonight I put in my 60 minutes and successfully completed day 4 of my November writing challenge.
Tonight’s session was all about research and timeline planning. Much of the first act of my novel in progress happens on board a plane that is traveling from Newark to DIA, and unfortunately for our hero and heroine, their flight is interrupted by a mechanical issue.
Tonight wasn’t the first time I have spent researching similar scenarios and what happens if you find yourself in an emergency landing–my research folder in Scrivener is already full of links. But tonight I needed to start nailing down what actually is going to happen, the sequence of events, how the hero and heroine react, and what happens after they land.
I want it to be completely accurate, but I am realizing that I might have to take some creative liberties, and hope that my travel-savvy readers of the future forgive me for any snafus or inaccuracies that I am probably going to have in the text.
This fight between reality and fiction always sends me down research rabbit holes, and I am trying very very hard to leave my perfectionistic nature aside and get on with the plotting.
What’s funny is that it isn’t the mechanical failure that is hard to find out about; what is difficult is finding passenger accounts about what happened after the emergency landing. How did they get to their next destination? Did they have to wait overnight? Did they sleep in a hotel or in the airport? What happened to their luggage? How long was their travel delayed?
So I am going to have to give it my best guess based on the what I’ve managed to find out, and hope that my scenarios are mostly believable.
I think that I have enough to start figuring out the actual plot points of the plane scene tomorrow. Fingers crossed!
I hope that your writing day was a successful one.
Happy writing!
–Karyn