ballooning

First order of business: I finally reached one of the scenes that I've known about from the beginning last night. And it only took 40,000 words. (On a side note, FORTY THOUSAND WORDS?! I've written over 50,000 of one story before for NaNoWriMo, but I've never written 40,000 consecutive words. Consecutive is a big deal.) Anyway, since this story first started making itself known in the deep dark corners of my brain, I've known that Aries, Merry and Niko were going to ride skyders. Yup, skyders. Giants spiders that use ballooning to fly. Yes, ballooning. It's a real thing. Wiki it. Or, okay, I could just explain it. Real life spiders will do handstands and shoot strands of spider silk out of their butt into the air, which magically forms into a sort of parachute that the wind catches. The spider is carried into the air and taken to places like islands and mountaintops, waaaay faster than any spider could walk. I mean, spiders have been seen stuck to weather balloons that are thousands of feet in the air. Crazy.

But let's forget about real life and get back to the giant talking skyders. Just picture it. Giant spiders with giant balloons hovering above them, floating lazily over the treetops. I would love for someone like Keith Thompson to illustrate this scene for the novel. (Hahaha, pardon my delusions. They just make me happy.) In fact, I've even sketched this scene out, but I'm definitely no Keith Thompson. There's just something about this scene that is so easy for me to visualize, maybe because it's been so sharply present in my mind for so long.

I'm usually the sort of person who writes things entirely out of order. I'm usually a very vocal defender of that strategy, in fact. The problem is that when I think up an idea for a new story, the whole story doesn't present itself all at once. That would be too easy. Instead, I'll get a general sense of what the story is about, with a few scattered scenes illustrated in perfect clarity for me. Which is all fine and dandy, except that I don't know how to get to those scenes, or how to connect them to one another, or exactly where they fit in the grand scheme of the storyline. And I definitely don't want to go through the trouble of writing all of the boring filler bits between the action-packed and romance-oozing scenes that I think up. So I'll write those scenes, leaving blank spaces between them in the Word document as if I'm actually going to go back and write the rest of the boring stuff someday. (I'm not.)

That's okay, for most of the things I write. I came to the realization not too long ago that many of the story ideas I get are absolutely great, but only for myself. The fact is that they make better daydreams than novels; when I'm bored or waiting to fall asleep at night I can replay those certain scenes in my head as much as I like, without ever having to contemplate the bits in between. Some of my characters just aren't eager to be famous, I guess.

But Thistleswitch is an entirely different story. It's the first thing I've written in chronological order. I have an entirely separate document entitled brainstorm that I put all the ideas for future scenes in, so that I don't just skip to them and forget about the fluff in the middle. Hopefully, this means that I'll actually have to write all of that fluff, which means that I'll actually finish a full story. It's worked so far.

Anyway, the fact that I actually had to write everything that's happened so far to get to the skyder scene - along with the fact that I've been eager for this scene to occur for months and months - made last night, when I finally did get to write about giant skyders with giant balloons hovering above them, floating lazily over the treetops, a special event. They really exist now, in the Thistlethought and on paper. They're not just a daydream. It makes me want to do a happy dance.

Or go hot air ballooning.