Tsunami!

This was the other thing I needed to post about: Tsunamis. Yeah. They're a real drag. To write about. I mean, sure, they're probably also a real drag to survive, or not survive, as the case may be, but they're a real drag to write about.

Allow me to explain.

One of the main points in my novel is a tsunami. It happens right at the beginning and serves to get the ball rolling, so to speak. I also discuss its effects later on in the book. The tsunami, at least to me, has never been what the book is about, so I don't care to discuss it that much. When I wrote about it I wasn't going into detail, I was just using it as the trigger for the action. It wasn't that any of the information was inaccurate, it was just not detailed.

The problem with this approach was two-fold. First, I was writing this book for myself, at least at first, and not for the reader. The book didn't confuse me, but that's because I knew what was going on. Now that I'm doing edits, I find that everything that needs work is the stuff I wrote just for myself. It's a pain in the ass, but it's going to make the book far better in the long run. So when I was making the tsunami just a vague wall of water in the beginning, that was all I needed, but it wasn't what other people would necessarily need. Second, the tsunami came in the first chapter. It doesn't matter if it's not a central point of the plot from that moment on, it matters that that's all the reader is going to know up to that point, and if I don't do a bang up job on it, they're not going to buy the rest of the story.

So I rewrote the first chapter completely. There were other problems. I'm trying to make it at least five pages, and trying to go into the nature of Timmy's relationship with his family, and trying to make it more detailed. The first five pages, as I've discussed in previous blogs, have to be the best writing I can muster. They have to be. They're what the agent is going to see and they're what is going to stick in the agent's head.

One other problem with the tsunami as it stood was the type of tsunami I envisioned. There are two main types: One with the trough-first, and one with the peak-first. My original tsunami had the peak first- that is, nothing changed about the sea until the wave came. The new tsunami has the trough leading. The trough-first kind is the most famous kind, as evidenced by the Java Trench Tsunami of 2004. A trough-first tsunami sucks the water back a few hundred feet, so the ocean life is exposed, and people come out to see the novelty of it. Then the wave comes and traps them. The sucking of the water back takes a few minutes, so the tension mounts. As a disaster opener, you have to understand the drama of this! I had no choice, I had to put it in!

Of course, the thought that some ignorant people whose only brush with tsunamis was the 2004 event would say that I was being inaccurate with my depiction of a peak-first tsunami did come into my mind. But only about ten percent.

So, let this be another reminder that the fourth draft of Vanheim is going to be completely different than the third draft.