aadler | Day 20 at NTC

Inactivity in the morning, relaxing and trying to stay ready for anything that might spin up. We finally got word that we are, in fact, to stand fast here until tomorrow, and moreover that the order is legitimate. (It turns out that our detachment CO put in a request to have us pulled early, and then sent orders to us to begin collapsing in even though the request hadn’t yet been approved. He took a thorough reaming for that, with the result that we are, yes, exactly where we’re supposed to be.)

I used the morning’s calm to key in — using an official laptop, but saving to a personal flash drive — the text for “Zero-Sum Game”. I’m again getting the warm, satisfied glow that comes from having finished a story … even though I’ve actually produced more words for “Queen’s Gambit” while I was here then for the completed fic, QG is just so much larger an endeavor.

The A/C went out in the barracks tent (or the generator was moved to something with a higher priority), so we’re just sitting around quietly sweating.

The OC assigned to my detachment dropped by to tell me that he’ll call game over for us tomorrow morning, and that — without making any obvious preparations to alert the others here that we’ll get an early departure — we should be ready to roll out an hour, hour and a half before noon. Fine by me.

The base hasn’t been overrun the last three nights, though everyone has been drilling for it, so it’ll probably happen tonight. Unless I understood wrong, that’ll basically be the last chance for a massive emergency base defense scenario.

* * *

They finally got the cold air running again, and once I could stand to do anything besides lie very still and breathe shallowly, I hauled out my notebook and ran off some 1,200 words of draft on “Queen’s Gambit”. I’ve done over 7,000 words since arriving at Fort Irwin (in the midst of my other duties, and while writing “Zero-Sum Game” in entirety), and I still don’t know how much more it will take to finish it. It’s now almost to 24,000 words, and sroni’s original draft ran 21,000 but I’ve been expanding as I go. I’ve hit a stride and the main action is coming up, and action is where I shine (IMHO), but there’s still some set-up and stage managing to do. It’ll be, at the very least, the third-longest story I’ve written to date — I can tell that much already — and could well prove to be the longest, about half the size of a small novel.

All that said, it’s not finished until I finish it.

As I’ve mentioned before, several times, I wanted to do a dozen stories this year. “Zero-Sum Game” made two, and “Queen’s Gambit” would be three. If I completed it by the end of the month, that would leave me four months to do nine more stories. Not impossible, especially since some of the ideas I have are for things like “Zero-Sum Game” and “Precious Cargo”, stuff I could do in a relaxed week (each) if nothing else was pressing on me. Still, nine stories in four months is well ahead of my normal track record. Ten stories in ten months is the best I’ve ever managed so far.

“Zero-Sum Game” marked another letter of the alphabet for which I have a title, a process I began during the Afghanistan deployment and will continue with “Queen’s Gambit”. After that, the only missing letters will be K, O, and U. And soon, I think, though my fanfic endeavors will remain focused on the Buffyverse, I’ll begin doing more stories in other fandoms.

Can’t say you haven’t been warned.