here I go again

Project: Lost and Found

Market: Torquere Monthly Sips, September "In Uniform" call

Deadline: July 1, 2013

Required length: 3-8K

New words written: I am not going to sit and count what's in my spiral notebook

Present total wordcount: 1615

This is the same Steadfast Tin Soldier WWII plotbunny I had for Storm Moon's "Uncommon Valor" call, which I abandoned because I knew it'd take more research than I had time for to do a 10-20K story PROPERLY.

But at 3K? I started thinking about how I could compress it. I opened my file of plot notes. I searched my Gmail archive for a conversation I'd had about it with mswyrr . And I started poking the Wonderful Research Machine for, essentially, an appropriate bomber and an appropriate battle to bring my boys down in the Pacific.

I hit a jackpot. I discovered the story of the crash of the B-24 Green Hornet, and Louis Zamperini, and I knew it'd make a terrific base for the story I wanted to tell. And I was lucky: my local library branch had a copy of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, so I drove right over there and checked it out, and spent last night reading up to the bit where they got captured by the Japanese (which was not going in my story at all).

Today I had to go to the first day of Parent Orientation. DULL LECTURES. Out came the spiral notebook, out came my ballpoint, I started writing down conversational fragments and shorthand descriptions of scene segments... it took me three tries to figure out where the actual first scene was in the sequence of events I'd absorbed... first I thought it started with the crash itself, then I thought it started in the boredom before the crash, & finally I realized it started in their CO's call for "volunteers".

When I got home I started transcribing. The first three scenes are down in full dialogue format, without too many "research this" brackets. Then a miracle occurs -- the crash, which, I am not so much for the action sequences, but I think at least I'll be able to draw on my memories of car wrecks (I'm a lousy driver, just so you all know) to get the emotional content down. And then we have ye olde Hurt/Comfort and something that some people will possibly consider a Gay For You, but it's at least as much a Did Not Know What This Was Until Now combined with Friends to Lovers, and if you can't figure out from that description that my curly-haired Jewish navigator and my rich boy hot pilot with blue, blue eyes are old friends of mine, well, you're new around here.

Their CO is not batshit insane. He's just all out of fucks to give. He knows what "with respect, sir" means. He just ignores it. He's also only there to set up the action.

As this is a 3K story & not meant as a downer I moved it a year forward to 1944 so they had some more useful survival gear on the raft. I did not, however, let them keep the plane's emergency provisions box. Also, though Harry saved his sextant and compass, they don't have two chronometers, or even one -- both their watches got utterly fucked in the crash.

Spoiler: they get rescued. Hi, this is ROMANCE.

I end it at the rescue. But I am 100% certain that after the war, they will live happily in San Francisco ever after, probably even long enough to see that first miraculous surge at City Hall. Not without sadness... they survive the Plague Years because they're very, very monogamous, but I don't doubt they lose a lot of friends.

Yeah, there's TONS of stuff I could write about these boys, given time.

But 3K in a couple-three days?

Easy peasy.