The Department of War should immediately evolve the LUCAS (Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System) into LOCUST (Low-cost Offensive Combat Unmanned Swarm Technology).

Swarm technology is the Achilles’ heel of any Iron or Golden Dome defense system. How can our defense system intercept 500,000 drones flying in coordinated waves toward the homeland? There is simply no way current-generation defenses could counter saturation of this magnitude, which is why the United States must recognize this reality and begin scaling manufacturing immediately.

LOCUST swarming would become the Department of War’s flagship drone initiative. Capable of overwhelming any aerial defense system in any country, it achieves dominance simply by launching enough drones that there are not enough interceptors to engage them all. A LOCUST swarm would serve as a devastating tactical weapon, comparable to nuclear bombs of the previous era—while doubling up as the most effective tool to neutralize the defense systems of any geopolitical adversary of the United States, including China, Russia, Pakistan, and Cuba.

Beyond its direct military effect, LOCUST serves a vital psychological purpose: using imagery to frighten adversaries into submission. The mushroom cloud symbol of the nuclear bomb once produced a similar deterrent effect, yet its use has become so stigmatized that it is now reserved strictly for last-resort scenarios.

Imagine the scene from the enemy’s perspective. You look over the horizon and notice a dark cloud approaching. At first it resembles a rainstorm, but as it draws nearer you realize it is composed of thousands upon thousands of tiny dots moving in perfect unison, so dense it blots out the sun. As the city’s aerial defenses activate, it becomes clear the entire sky is filled with drones—and that those defenses will not matter. The LOCUST swarm begins to descend on the target, systematically wiping out everything in its path until every building, bunker, and blade of grass is gone and nothing remains.

A system like LOCUST would serve as a powerful deterrent. The locust swarm is one of humanity’s oldest and most terrifying symbols, especially among generations of farmers who have watched their fields devoured in mere hours. It represents unstoppable invasion and total devastation—a merciless horde that consumes everything without pause or pity. Once descended, the effects are apocalyptic: in mere hours, billions of locusts can strip every leaf, crop, blade of grass, piece of bark, and even wooden structures or fabric.

For thousands of years—through the Biblical eighth plague of Egypt, the prophet Joel’s war-horse imagery, and real mega-plagues such as the 1874–77 Albert’s Swarm—the Locust has stood as the universal metaphor for any overwhelming, swarm-like force that arrives in irresistible numbers and consumes all resources in its wake.

This symbol is a perfect fit for today’s military-technology trend: the shift from a few large, expensive weapons to vast numbers of cheap, versatile ones manufactured at massive scale. A single drone is like a single grasshopper—limited damage, easily intercepted, no real threat. If you multiply a single drone by 500,000, it becomes an unstoppable force that strikes terror into the heart of any enemy.

Lessons from Ukraine and Russia
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict has provided the clearest real-world validation of swarm tactics. Russian electronic-warfare jamming has repeatedly neutralized GPS-dependent drones, yet Ukrainian forces have shown that mesh networking and vision-based AI navigation allow swarms to persist and adapt even under heavy interference. High attrition rates are expected and acceptable when unit costs are low; the key insight is that quantity overwhelms quality. Russian air defenses, including S-400 systems once considered impenetrable, have been saturated and exhausted by waves of cheap drones and decoys. These lessons directly inform LOCUST: by stripping out jam-vulnerable systems and relying on collaborative autonomy, we turn the adversary’s own electronic-warfare strengths into liabilities while driving their interceptor costs into the unsustainable range.

Counter-Swarm Integration: Layered Offense-Defense Dominance
While LOCUST is built as an offensive system, it integrates seamlessly with U.S. defensive counter-drone capabilities to deliver full-spectrum dominance. Pairing offensive swarms with proven technologies such as the Navy’s LOCUST directed-energy laser, high-power microwave systems, and AI-directed kinetic interceptors creates layered protection. LOCUST drones can serve dual roles—striking deep targets while simultaneously acting as decoys or electronic jammers that draw enemy fire and reveal their defensive positions. In a peer conflict, our swarms would saturate and exhaust an adversary’s defenses, buying time for U.S. counter-swarm assets to neutralize any incoming threats. This offense-defense synergy turns the swarm era into an asymmetric advantage for the United States rather than a mutual vulnerability.

Development Roadmap (18–24 Months to Full Swarm Capability)
The roadmap focuses relentlessly on quantity over quality, leverages proven technology, and spreads production across every willing defense contractor. Speed and scale are paramount.

Phase 0: Develop the System
Officially evolve the LUCAS system (Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System) into LOCUST (Low-cost Offensive Combat Unmanned Swarm Technology).
Retrofit existing LUCAS airframes with mesh-networking nodes, stripped-down inertial plus vision-based AI targeting (eliminating expensive jam-prone GPS), modular commercial-off-the-shelf electronics, and basic collaborative-autonomy software.
Drawing directly from Ukraine-Russia lessons, the AI-vision system mirrors NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars: each drone carries a pre-loaded map of its flight path, updates its position using onboard cameras, landmarks, and accelerometers, and adjusts in real time until terminal impact.
Leverage ongoing Gauntlet testing at Fort Benning/Yuma for rapid iteration.
Output: First “LOCUST 1.0” swarm-capable units by mid-2026.

Phase 1: Swarm Optimization & Mass-Launch (Q2–Q4 2026)
Complete the full decentralized AI system so drones self-organize into altitude-layered waves, share targeting data via mesh networking, collaboratively evade defenses, and saturate 180° horizons.
Optimize for psychological “horizon-covering” effect with 1,000+ simultaneous launches per truck or ship. Containerized mass launchers are already in advanced R&D.
Further simplify: 3D-printed composites, low-cost piston-engine copies, minimal sensors, and modular warheads sourced from multiple vendors.
Test at scale with 10,000-drone waves to validate saturation against Patriot- and Iron Dome-style defenses.
Output: LOCUST 2.0 at $5k–$10k per unit; first operational squadrons trained in true swarm tactics.

Phase 2: Cost Crash & Million-Unit Scale (2027)
Shift to wartime-surge production involving 20+ vendors plus Army depots.
Drive unit costs down through volume, commercial-off-the-shelf parts, and ultra-stripped designs (inertial + AI mesh only).
Add advanced features iteratively: multi-altitude layering, repeated waves, and psychological “endless cloud” effects.
Output: Hundreds of thousands fielded; stockpiles ready for repeated 50,000–200,000-drone operations. An aggressive push could reach 1 million total inventory.

Phase 3: Doctrinal Integration & Continuous Evolution (2027+)
Arm every Army squad, Marine unit, Navy ship, and Air Force detachment.
Train operators on “swarm command-and-control” (one human overseeing hundreds when jamming is absent).
Iterate rapidly via feedback from exercises and combat, accelerating Ukraine/Russia lessons.

End-State Vision
By late 2026, initial LOCUST swarms (thousands per operation) will be fielded at $5k–$10k per unit. By 2027, the United States will possess full horizon-covering capability with 50,000–200,000-drone waves and hundreds of thousands of units in inventory. By 2028 and beyond, million-drone stockpiles will enable repeatable “unconditional power” strikes cheaper than a single F-35 squadron. At $5k per unit, a 100,000-drone swarm costs roughly $500 million—less than one Tomahawk salvo. A single carrier equipped with containerized launchers could generate a 50,000-drone wave at a fraction of current strike-package costs, delivering overwhelming effect anywhere on the globe. With several million units stockpiled, the United States could blot out the sky repeatedly against any adversary, restoring deterrence through sheer, visible, unstoppable mass. This is not merely an upgrade—it is the decisive leap into the swarm era.

500,000 LOCUST drones, or one B2. Which one would you choose?

A tall, dark man stepped off the stage after the others, an imposing figure sporting a reinforced blue cloak with sleek black boots. He moved quickly, starting directly for the office door.

Glancing back down at his receiving papers, the clerk gaped at the name of the passenger: Mr. John Halliday, in town on business. Reaching for his computer, the clerk began to type out a message.

The door hissed, and the dark man entered the room, pausing to take in the room, before continuing to the desk.
“Morning, friend. I believe there’s a package for me that arrived yesterday.”

“Um, yes, yes, sir. That must be in the back. Let me just go and get it.”

The clerk stood up awkwardly and stepped into the back room. A little too quickly, the dark man noted, almost as if...

He stepped around the desk, glancing at the computer screen— passenger transport software, but… With a few quick keystrokes, a new page opened: a messager, with a half typed, “Halliday the bounty hunter came in on the stage! Must be after…”

Halliday stepped back around the desk, amused, leaving the message open. It was addressed to a Captain Harlan Voss, evidently someone who liked to know who came and went in this small town.

The clerk returned, hefting the package in his two skinny arms and heaving it onto the counter. “If you could sign for it here…”

“Thanks, friend. I’ll be staying at the hotel. Is there a machine shop in town? Somewhere I can get a set of blades and a sled?”

“Yes, sir!” The clerk looked at him wide-eyed.
“We have two smithies and one machine shop. Both are down the street, past the saloon and the dance hall.”

Halliday seemed not to acknowledge. He slid a short lever down on the inside of his boot, and a thin blade extended from the front to the heel. He double checked the mechanism, sliding his hand down the blade, before repeating the process on the other side. Halliday straightened, picked up the package with ease, and stepped to the door.

“Thanks, friend, and give my regards to the Captain.”

The clerk looked quickly to his computer screen and jumped, his eyes bulging, ready excuses already spilling out, but the door was already hissing shut.

Halliday stepped onto the street, the solution of Ice and gravel had gotten more slippery as the day passed and the blades kept John’s feet from slipping sideways as he made his way across to the hotel. Checking into his room, John opened his package, pulling out two twin pistols, five extra magazines, two sealskin holsters which he left in the hotel safe. Also in the package, a sleek fixed blade knife and sheath, box of churchills, and a 3 shot sleeve gun, easily concealed in a bag, or inside coat pocket.

The pistols were sleek, 22-shot, short-barreled, with built-in silencers, lest a shooting blow out the hearing of the whole damn town. The holsters were slung low, with a short rope tying them to the leg, made for a quick and easy draw. Halliday finally began to relax. He thought by now the entire town had heard of his arrival, and he’d better get his intentions stated before people started getting any strange notions.

It was nearing 4:00, which was the typical dinnertime for a modest sized town like Fairview. Typically the Glacier people woke and ate early. As the day goes on, ice melts more and more causing work to get unpleasant. Most of the folk working outside started their various Jobs around 2-3 in the morning when the Ice was thoroughly frozen over.

The Rumors had already started when John entered the cafe adjacent to the hotel. Small towns like these hadn’t much to talk about day to day, and the arrival of a tall dark stranger had the men whispering in low concerned voices as John entered.

A game of Poker was going on in the corner, with what looked like a couple handlers and one sleek looking gambler. John approached the table, “Howdy gents, mind if I join for a hand or two?” The gambler gave an easy smile, “Of course Mr Halliday..” he said smoothly, “come and try your luck.” Evidently some of the room hadn’t realized John was the many they’d been talking about, many looked over in shock.

John smirked, “I see the town doesn’t miss much, especially with that nosy clerk of yours..” The Gambler shuffled a new deck, “Oh don’t mind Perrin, he’s been the stage clerk here for close t’ 10 years now. Likes to tell folks what’s going on sure, but he’s harmless,” He gestured to an open chair, “Come! have a seat, My name is Jonah Lockwood, this is Bill, Charlie, and Ash.”

John ordered coffee, and started playing with no real focus on the game. John was never much of a gambler, but he understood why men down here played so much. A welcome escape from the endless work, building homes, securing the town, reacting to the changing Glacier outside, raising stock in the underground lakes.. Any man could come in and get away from all that, the moment when the die is cast, where time stands still, and a man is waiting to see the result, is one of the most powerful escapes from a rough life.

He offered little information, but learned the men around him besides Jonah were indeed handlers, wrestling Fish all day and night a couple miles below town.

After dinner was served, the talk moved to the surrounding Glacier weather, mainly core temperatures, movement trends and areas that were designated too dangerous by the town Seer. The Gambler was easy talking, “There’s a couple areas near Voss’s place west of here that’ve been getting worse, Base losing stability, opening Crevasses, don’t say you heard it from me, but I don’t think he’s too pleased with what’s been going on..”

”That’s Captain Voss? What kind of outfit does he run?”
Ash spoke up, “Harlan Voss runs one of the tightest outfits around here, a massive crew 50 men strong. We call him the Captain on account of he runs the tightest crew you ever saw. Knows the name of every hand, and makes sure everything is to his satisfaction. He’s strict sure, but pays 10 dollars more a hand after a year of work.

Jonah laid down the last card, John’s hand looked good, he checked.

”So what did you come here for then,” another hand wanted to know,
“On business, but I don’t fully know myself, I’ll have some more to go on when the next Comm Express comes in.

The percentages are automatically updated based on the number of todos that are checked off in my project page, typically they look like this. I measure project progress by the scenes written, not really the chapters, and I don’t write them in order.

For less complex work like articles, there’s typically less todo items, this is my setup for the latest good article, I am currently 67% done, that is not a coincidence.

This is the best way I’ve found to complete things with an ADHD addled brain, incapable of doing anything without caffeine, constant encouragement from peers, and many bowls of Pipe tobacco.

The plan is to give percentage updates weekly, using this new system, as well as release new scenes I’ve written..

I did eight chapters with no plot completed, which is not the greatest way to write a story, however I realized this, and started work on a real outline, now completed.


Full Plot Outline
A gold shipment leaving the adjacent mining settlement is intercepted in the main city by the town Seer, Spencer Thorne. He skims a good portion of the gold, murders the three accountants who are able to verify the correct weight under state regulation, then secretly ships the stolen portion back to his stash near Fairview. He plans to use the gold to buy out an adjacent bankrupt fishery plot, stock it with a superior seed herd of fish, withhold the accurate prophecy about an upcoming major ice shift, and have his accomplice weaken the structural ice supports above Captain Voss’s prime breeding lake. When the shift hits, the lake will catastrophically collapse, destroying the herd, flooding the operation, killing workers, and leaving Voss completely ruined and blamed for negligence. The Seer will then become the sole controller of all environmental information and fish herds in Fairview. The unsolved crime is posted as a bounty by the city. John Halliday, the territory’s top bounty hunter, takes the contract. Early impressions mask the role of the Seer in the crime solving—until the full story ties everything together in the final confrontation.

Act 1 – Fairview (false trails, meeting major Characters)

• John Halliday arrives in town and checks into the hotel. (Reasoning: This is the standard opening that places him in Fairview to begin the investigation.)

• John witnesses the receiving agent notifying Captain Voss about John’s arrival. (Reasoning: This creates an immediate false trail that makes John suspect Voss may be involved in irregularities.)

• The town gathers publicly to admire the arrival and unloading of the rare deep-strain superior fish seed herd that the Seer has just ordered; John first meets the Seer during this event. The Seer appears helpful and concerned. (Reasoning: This shows the Seer spending stolen gold while misdirecting by making him look cooperative and legitimate.)

• John sees Violet at the herd shipment of the new rare strain of fish, the later meets Violet at the hotel. He recognizes her last name as the same as one of the murdered accountants (her brother Elias). He later mentions it to her before heading out of town, and she confirms it was her brother. (Reasoning: This adds light personal involvement for John and masks the realization by making the murders initially feel like they could be connected to her family.)

• The official bounty letter arrives stating the three murdered accountants were the only ones authorized under state regulation to certify shipments from the adjacent mining settlement and this caused a delay in the verification process. (Reasoning: This ties the accountants together officially and gives John his only thin lead to travel to the mining settlement.)

• John visits the Seer for standard trail and ice-condition information. (Reasoning: This follows normal procedure and allows the Seer to learn John is on the case while giving him the “safe” route map and ravine warning; the Seer continues to appear helpful.)

Seeds (planted here, pay off later):

• Violet connection and her request about her brother, she is very reserved in the first act. (adds personal thread and initial misdirection).

• Receiving agent notifying Captain Voss (false trail cleared in Act 3).

• Public admiration of the superior seed-herd order (reveals the Seer is spending stolen money).

• Seer’s overly familiar knowledge of John’s path of travel, and where he intends to go. The Seer gives him a direct path to the settlement, but because the only dangerous area he mentions is earlier on in the trail, John eventually deviates from that path in Act 2, finding the dead man in the checkpoint.

Other Notes:

• The skimmed gold funded both the adjacent-plot purchase and the seed-herd order seen arriving.

• The Seer works almost entirely alone except for one bitter accomplice that does some of the dirty work when the Seer isn’t there.

• Early clues point toward Voss; the Seer is portrayed as helpful, and well liked in town.

• This act is a lot of information gathering, and setting all the plot and subplot structures, as well as a couple micro stories that happen; these are great for retention.

Act 2 – The Mining Settlement and Captain Voss’s Ranch

• John gathers gear and travels to the mining settlement. (Reasoning: The bounty letter is his only lead and mentions the accountants as the sole state-regulated certifiers.)

• John deviates from his path and discovers the guard murdered and tortured at the outer checkpoint. John transports the body into the camp. (Reasoning: The guard was one of Captain Voss’s men because verification duty for outgoing gold shipments is split between the miners and the Captain. The Seer learned they were doing checkpoints after the fact, tracked the guards on checkpoint duty, tracked one of their next shifts, and sent his accomplice to kill the guard and alter the verification records so the 20% skim would remain undetected for as long as possible.)

• The miners attempt to detain John upon seeing the body until one miner recognizes him and we have the classic “do you know who this guy is? That’s John Halliday.” (Reasoning: This keeps John free to continue investigating without new characters or complications.)

• John questions the foreman. The foreman explains the shared verification duty between the miners and Captain Voss. The foreman gives John a photo of a strange man seen in town, as well as a copy of the current shipment verification records. (Reasoning: This provides John with physical evidence to examine later and establishes the direct connection between the dead guard and Captain Voss, strengthening the false trail toward Voss. The photo of the strange man turns out to be Violet’s brother Deacon, who is friendly with the Captain. Deacon’s brother was killed, and he is also hunting whoever did it in Fairview.)

• John questions miners about the guard and recent shipments. A fistfight occurs in the bar when the Seer’s lone helper (still in camp to finish altering records and appearing to be a disgruntled Voss employee) attempts to stop the discussion. (Reasoning: The fight protects the tampering and continues the misdirection by making the helper look connected to Voss.)

• After the fight, an older miner advises John to speak directly with Captain Harlan Voss before returning to Fairview. (Reasoning: This gives John the earned new direction to visit the Captain first, based on the shared verification duty and the dead guard’s connection.)

• John travels to Captain Harlan Voss’s ranch with the copied records. (Reasoning: This follows the new direction from the mining settlement and keeps the act focused on information gathering.)

• John speaks with Captain Harlan Voss. During the conversation the size of the operation and envy come up. The Captain mentions that multiple people do not like him, including the Seer. This occurs before record comparison. (Reasoning: The mention is casual and presented among many names to conceal any special importance of the Seer connection at this stage.)

• John compares the copied verification records against known shipment weights. He discovers the records have been deliberately altered. (Reasoning: This is the first time the gold theft is revealed — the alteration hid the 20% skim. The tampering initially looks like it could benefit or implicate Voss, continuing the misdirection.)

• John leaves Captain Harlan Voss’s ranch and begins the return journey toward Fairview. (Reasoning: Act 2 ends here with the theft now known to John; the Seer’s ambush occurs on this return leg.)

Seeds (planted here, pay off later):

• Copy of the altered shipment verification records now in John’s possession.

• Connection between the dead guard and Captain Voss through shared verification duty.

• Casual mention that the Seer does not like Captain Voss (presented as one of many without highlighting its importance).

• Lone helper appearing connected to Voss (misdirection cleared in Act 3).

• Addition of Violet’s brother Deacon, who is also hunting the killer. His identity is revealed in Act 3.

Other Notes:

• The Seer learned the identity of the guard on shift only after the skim occurred, waited for his next shift, and sent his lone helper solely to kill the guard and alter the records.

• The gold theft remains officially undiscovered by the town, miners, and Captain until John makes the record comparison at the ranch.

• Early clues continue to point strongly toward Voss; nothing yet ties the Seer directly.

• The bar fight occurs because the Seer’s lone helper is actively trying to protect the tampering while disguised as a Voss associate.

• John still only gathers information and survives; the Seer’s ambush is triggered on the return from the Captain’s ranch (moving into Act 3).

Act 3 – Return, final pieces, confrontation & discovery

• John is ambushed and shot off his sled near the ravines the Seer warned him about in Act 1. He tumbles into a crevasse. (Reasoning: The Seer, monitoring through his lone helper, now knows John has proof of the theft and has visited Voss; the ravines are the perfect isolated spot to eliminate him.)

• John wakes, climbs out, and hears one man (the Seer’s lone helper) taking his sled back toward town. (Reasoning: This confirms the helper is still active and gives John a direct lead to follow later.)

• John hauls himself up and out of the main trailways as is his nature, and finally collapses in a cave, still wounded from the shot. Waking up he finds a fire by the man in the picture given to him by the miner. This turns out to be Violet’s brother Deacon. (Reasoning: This keeps him alive to reach the final confrontation while showing the cost of the ambush and introducing a second protagonist and more personal reasoning to find the killer.)

• Before heading to town John wants to know who would know he went to Voss’s place. Deacon says Voss has a lot of enemies, including mentioning how he moved in to the prime lakes years ago beating out many people who would have wanted it. It is revealed later that the Seer was the one who discovered the land first. (Reasoning: This clears the false trail from Act 1, reveals the depth of the grudge only now, supplies the final motive pieces, but doesn’t tie them together.)

• Walking back to his wrecked sled, he finds an identifying clue that leads him to his would-be assassin in town. (Reasoning: This gives John the final piece that connects the accomplice to the Seer before the trap.)

• John knows that they will try to kill him again, and lays a trap. Seer’s accomplice falls for it, and ends up dead. John identifies him, realizes connection to the Seer, realizes the Seer knows everything, and was the one who tried to keep him away from the outpost, and probably ordered his killing. (Reasoning: This is the moment all misdirection collapses and John gains certainty before the final confrontation.)

• John ties down spare guns and walks into the Seer’s office. (Reasoning: This is the direct confrontation point after all information is gathered.)

• The Seer already escaped down a quick slide escape, and heads out of town (Reasoning: The Seer realizes John now knows everything and attempts to reach and get out of the area with the evidence and start somewhere else.)

• John follows the Seer’s exact boot prints into the most unstable crevasse field. This is where he has set the detonation to take down the captain’s entire ranch and possibly the town of fairview with it, if things get out of hand.
  (I will come up with cool concepts on how John stops him later, but this the end of the rising action)

Seeds (planted earlier, pay off here):

• Violet/Deacon connection (rescue by Deacon and conversation about Voss enemies).

• Identifying clue on wrecked sled (leads directly to accomplice trap).

• Photo of strange man from Act 2 (revealed as Deacon).

• Ravine warning from Act 1 becomes the ambush site.

• Altered records from Act 2 prove the theft and explain the guard’s murder.

• Casual Seer mention at Voss’s ranch becomes the full grudge history.

• Public seed-herd admiration in Act 1 now shows the Seer already spending stolen gold.

• All early clues that pointed toward Voss now tie directly to the Seer’s darker plan.

Other Notes:

• The entire story remains strictly information-gathering until the final confrontation and chase.

• The Seer’s full catastrophic plan (planned lake collapse, withheld prophecy, total destruction of Voss) is revealed only through Deacon’s conversation plus the physical discovery in the vault.

• Gold is discovered exactly via the footprint chase into the ravines beside the new adjacent plot.

• No extra accomplices or subplots; the lone helper is the only other person involved.

• All misdirection is resolved in Act 3; the Seer’s darker tactics are now locked and catastrophic.

• Deacon’s rescue and conversation add the second-protagonist thread without creating new subplots.

Main Characters

1. John Halliday Role: Territory’s top bounty hunter (protagonist) Vibe: Stoic lone wolf with a quiet code / Dry-humored relentless professional (Locked)

2. Spencer Thorne Role: Town prophet and main antagonist (the Seer) Vibe: Cold calculating intellectual / Bitter frail old man hiding venom (Locked)

3. Captain Harlan Voss Role: Owner of the largest underground lake fishery Vibe: Arrogant self-made empire builder / Gruff but fair businessman (Locked)

4. Violet Kincaid Role: Young woman John meets in Act 1; sister of murdered accountant Elias and of Deacon Vibe: Quietly determined and grieving / Sharp and resilient (Locked)

5. Deacon Kincaid Role: Violet’s brother; also hunting the killer; rescues John in Act 3 Vibe: Driven hunter with family loyalty / Quietly dangerous and watchful (Locked)

6. Elias Kincaid Role: Violet and Deacon’s murdered brother (one of the three accountants) (Mentioned in Act 1 via Violet and the bounty letter)

7. Gavin Blackmoor Role: Bitter ex-trapper and the Seer’s lone accomplice (does all the dirty work) Vibe: Broken resentful man living for revenge / Silent dangerous enforcer (Locked)

8. Boone Dekker Role: Mining Settlement Foreman (gives John the records and photo in Act 2) Vibe: Gruff but protective / Nervous and self-preserving (Locked)

9. Jonah Quinn Role: Older Miner (recognizes John, calms the crowd, gives direction to Voss) Vibe: Grizzled veteran / Cynical with hidden moral streak (Locked)

10. Perrin Ashford Role: Receiving Agent (notifies Voss about John’s arrival in Act 1) Vibe: Nervous by-the-book bureaucrat / Quietly opportunistic (Locked)

11. Corbin Tate Role: Fairview Hotel Owner / Barkeep (useful for micro-stories and early gossip) Vibe: Talkative information broker / Friendly but calculating (Locked)

Supporting Characters

12. Jed Winslow Role: Bankrupt Small Fishery Owner (sold the adjacent plot and seed herd to the Seer; appears briefly in Act 1 during the public admiration scene) (Name locked)

13. Rafe Lockwood Role: Town Doctor (patches John up in Act 3 after the ravine ambush) (Name locked)

14. Gage Rawlins Role: Blacksmith / Sled Repairer (in Fairview; John gets gear or repairs in Act 1 or early Act 2) (Name locked)

15. Clara Bridger Role: Mining Settlement Barmaid (works in the bar during Act 2 fistfight; can slip John a quick warning or overhear something) (Name locked)
    

    

    
    

I started taking long walks through the many neighborhoods surrounding my house. I naturally walk at a very fast pace, so in order to slow down, I started smoking a pipe as I walked. Pipe smoking is a wonderful ritual that not many people agree with, but having a well-lit pipe to keep you company is a great way to slow one’s life down. It allows the soul to reach out, to examine the trees, the houses, the freshly mown lawns, and to quiet all the swirling noise going on inside.

On one of these nights, I set out from home around 10:30 with a certain destination in mind. Pausing to light, tamp, and relight the pipe, I continued down the driveway, and into the surrounding neighborhoods.

I’m not sure any man can walk down a nice neighborhood sidewalk, with no phone in his pocket, a nice pipe lit, and not find himself more calm than when he started. I was certainly enjoying the night, but considered cutting the walk short and going back home since I had forgotten to drink something before setting out. After thinking for a moment, I decided to continue.

In many great stories over the years, we see a temptation for the character to abandon what they set out to do at the beginning. Admittedly, this hits pretty close to home, I’ve always had trouble completing projects, regardless of whether the idea is good or not. This problem extends to my ability to reach the destination of my walk. Nevertheless, I decided to continue despite the thirst. Had I not continued on the walk, I would have never experienced what ended up happening**

Smoking Pipes is something I’ve come to enjoy the past couple months. When you have a nightly routine of smoking a pipe, it means you live within a context to do something besides work. Pipes allow you to consider whether your efforts are going to the right place, and to appreciate this exact moment in my life. I don’t tend to get that focused self-reflection in many other places.

The term context is very important to the point I’m trying to describe. In our regular lives, there are always a million things going on at once. The laundry always needs done, the bed made, dinner cooked, kitchen cleaned, emails responded to, projects finished, Kids taken care of (if you have them, I don’t yet). There’s always something executive that needs to be completed in the context of your daily life. Changing context is a way to move from life’s duties to something more introspective, creative, and fulfilling. This idea of setting context is also one of the core aspects of creative storytelling.

One of the answers every writer must have before seriously putting together any story, is what is the changing context that moves the character from the established setting?

Kurt Vonnegut described story plot as the change of a character’s Fortune, good or ill. The character’s fortune can start wherever the author wants; however, the context in which the established character’s fortune changes is one of the key points of any story. As an example, he often makes the graph below:

Colored lines represent different types of stories. You can see they can start in any manner possible to dream up by the author, but they all fit within this framework, where outside things are happening to the established characters that change their fortune for the better, for the worse, and everything in between.

If anything gets taken away from this, it’s that stories are about the force that moves the conscious being from an established baseline of fortune. This theory covers every story I’ve read.

Anyways, I was walking away from my house, looking at the moderately-sized puddles on the side of the road, considering drinking from them just a little bit to moisten my dry mouth, knowing what a terrible idea it was. The road I was walking down was full of nice houses, with beautiful landscape, and I was deliberately slowing my natural pace, taking time to examine the trees and houses as I walked past. It was quite a long ways, and I enjoyed being out by myself, contentedly puffing on the pipe.

Finally reaching my destination, my pipe was now about half smoked; a perfect time to start heading home. As I began walking again, a light rain started, and I covered the top of my pipe with two fingers to keep the water out as I continued smoking. Light rain is common where I live and it didn’t bother me at all, the walk was still going well.

At this point in the story, we’ve completed setting the environment, and baseline fortune of the character. The author (God) can make almost anything happen to the character (me), but what I have written so far is not currently a story. It’s a lot closer to a factual series of events, i.e., young man goes on walk, walk successful thus far. The context setting is not unimportant, however; there are many little things I’ve mentioned in the setting that will all come together at the end of the story.

As I was walking home, content, in my own little world, I began to notice the rain getting stronger. I had around a mile to cover to get to shelter, and the rain was turning into a real storm at this point. I began to notice streams of water running down the sidewalks and road, and walking through them was soaking through my shoes. The rain got even stronger, and my attempts to keep my pipe lit failed, the water was streaming through my hands.

The world was now completely different. It had gone from a nice night out to a torrential downpour, and I was still blocks away from home. As I was hurrying back, I noticed a stand of large trees, all with thick foliage. Stepping off the road and under the trees, suddenly the world changed back to the dry pleasant place it once was. I looked down at my cold pipe, and slowly relit it, the white tobacco smoke curling up through the branches above**.

These moments of rest are something we often see in stories, where the character can pause to get some rest and consider their current state just before the climax. It was really quite something, and I drew this exact distinction while smoking below the stand of trees, the pounding rain on all sides of my little shelter.

As in every story, the character must move on, and so I did, back into the downpour, keeping a tighter seal over the top of my relit pipe and walking the last couple of blocks toward my driveway. I was still thinking about that resting moment on my way back, when suddenly I realized something: I was currently living inside a real story, the exact thing that had me ruminating for months, trying to figure out how the writing I wanted to complete felt so far away, and yet now I understood. This is what a real story is supposed to be, and I was completely immersed in one at this very moment.

Spontaneously I stopped halfway up the driveway, the rain pounding on my shoulders, and just stood there, watching the water stream down the driveway, watching the sidewalk drain, just watching, wanting to stay immersed inside this story for as long as possible. I really had gotten my foreshadowed wish for a glass of water.

It was a great time to celebrate life, coming home out of the torrential downpour**, still hesitant to leave the story, I spent some more time on the porch before going inside to dry off, enjoying a bottle of water and finishing the last of my pipe.

While this was just a few paragraphs, we can all agree that there was a story behind my ill-fated walk that night. As the story progressed, we see the character’s state change from his established baseline, go down, rest, further down, then shoot up. If we were using one of Vonnegut’s graphs, it would look something like this:

(The baseline Characters Fortune could be lower, however we happen to be privileged, living in the greatest country on earth, so can’t really complain too much about that.)

This happened to also be a factually real event which was really significant. The context setting was the pipe smoking, the need for long walks, long months of torment making no progress on my book, the rainstorm, the tree shelter..** All these little things came together to create the self-realization that I was currently living inside a story, which re-established my good fortune. It was really quite something to see come together.

Authors note:
As of 3/9/26 at 1:13 AM, I still need to do a bit more editing, specifically introducing a couple more examples of how story plot works, i.e. the carrier bag theory, and others.
The main point is good however, that a well-set context (Setting, Scenes, Imagery) interacts with the story plot (Character Change) to create something worth reading.

Here are the big ones that keep showing up:

1. The Hero’s Journey (The Classic “Leave Home, Get Wrecked, Come Back Better” Arc)

We all know this one. Starts with some regular dude, in a regular location, Something big happens and they’re called to adventure. They freak out and say no at first. Mentor shows up, drags them along. Trials, big boss fight in the middle, they almost die, win the final fight, and come home a changed person.

2. Freytag’s Pyramid (Build Up, Explode, Wind Down)

Exposition → rising action (stuff gets tense) → climax (big confrontation) → falling action (consequences) → resolution (or catastrophe if it’s dark).

Romeo and Juliet crashes hard at the top. Most thrillers do this: slow burn, everything piles up, boom, then wrap it up quick before you get bored.

3. Three-Act Structure (Setup → Mess → Fix)

Act 1: Introduce characters, world, normal life + the thing that screws it up (inciting incident).
Act 2: Everything goes wrong, midpoint twist makes it worse, hero scrambles.
Act 3: Final showdown, resolution, new normal.

Pride and Prejudice, The Hunger Games, most modern novels honestly. It’s clean, it works.

4. In Medias Res (Jump Straight Into the Chaos)

Drops you in the middle of the action. No gentle intro. Then it backfills how you got here with flashbacks or whatever.

The Iliad starts with Achilles pissed off. Handmaid’s Tale throws you into the dystopia day one. Fight Club begins with a gun in your mouth.

Why it’s cool: Life doesn’t give you a prologue. You’re always joining the story halfway through. Makes the reading feel urgent—like you’re catching up on someone else’s emergency. Plus it skips the boring setup and gets to the good stuff faster.

5. Nonlinear / Messed-Up Timelines (Puzzles Instead of Lines)

Events out of order. Multiple timelines. Flashbacks, flash-forwards, unreliable narrators. Cloud Atlas, Slaughterhouse-Five, Pulp Fiction (book version vibes), a ton of literary stuff.

Why people dig it: Memory isn’t linear. Regret, trauma, anticipation—they all jumble time. These stories let you feel how connected (or disconnected) moments really are. It’s like the author saying “life isn’t a straight path, deal with it.” Forces you to piece it together yourself, which makes the payoff hit harder.

So yeah. Most books remix these handful of patterns because they tap into how our brains actually work: we crave journeys, tension/release, agency, chaos that makes sense eventually, and sometimes just straight-up confusion that mirrors real confusion.

What about you? Got a favorite structure that always gets you, or one you’re sick of seeing? Drop it below. I’m probably reading the same Tolkien passage for the 50th time right now anyway.

Method/attempt to kill John when he makes it back to town.

1. Shots two and three

   • Second shot: placed an inch from his right temple, angled slightly upward to blast the ice shelf that’s crushing the side of his skull. The muzzle flash lights the crevasse like a blue-white hell; the concussion punches his eardrum inward. He feels the shelf give, a sudden quarter-inch of space, blood and melted water pouring down his collar.

   • Third shot: mirror image on the left side, lower, just above the collarbone. This one is riskier; the bullet has to pass within two inches of his own neck. Ice explodes outward; a fist-sized chunk shears away and his head finally drops forward an inch. He can breathe without the walls kissing his cheeks.

2. Knife retrieval

   • Right arm now has a few inches of play. He bends at the waist as far as the crevasse allows (an obscene, slow crunch of vertebrae), gets his teeth on the cuff of his own coat, and drags the sleeve down to expose the boot top wedged near his ribs.

   • Knife is a short, heavy pig-sticker sheathed inside the right boot. He has to pry the boot down with his chin, then worm two fingers inside the shaft until he can hook the hilt. The motion feels like tearing his own shoulder out of its socket; something in there grinds and pops. Knife finally comes free slick with blood and melted ice.

3. Shots four and five (both used on the chest/rib cage pinch)

   • Fourth shot: muzzle pressed flat against the ice wall directly over his sternum. He fires point-blank. The bullet has nowhere to go but through; the shockwave lifts his whole torso a fraction and then slams it back. Ice turns to powder and needles; he coughs blood-flecked frost. The walls around his chest loosen by another inch—now he can draw almost a full breath.

   • Fifth shot: same wall, six inches lower, angled downward toward his pinned elbows. This one is pure desperation; the crevasse is so narrow the muzzle flash scorches his coat. A plate of ice the size of a dinner platter drops away; both arms suddenly have room to bend at the elbow for the first time.

4. Chimney climbing (the long, brutal middle)

   • One round left in the cylinder. He will not spend it.

   • Knife in left hand, revolver butt in right as makeshift hammer. He begins the chimney: back pressed to one wall, boots and shoulders to the other, inching upward inside the megaglacier’s throat.

   • The crevasse is not a clean slot; it’s a wandering fracture full of chokes and sudden bells where meltwater has carved hollows. Every three or four inches gained he has to stop, jam the knife into a seam, hammer a tiny ledge with the revolver butt, then lever himself higher.

   • Describe three distinct “stations” he fights through: a) A place where the walls bulge inward and he has to exhale completely to slide between them, ribs grinding on both sides. b) A short horizontal crawl where the fracture dog-legs and he has to drag himself on his belly using only fingertips and the knife like a piton, legs trailing uselessly until the slot widens again. c) A final near-vertical throat where the ice is so clear he can see trapped air bubbles like silver coins twenty feet above him—his only promise that the surface exists.

5. The moment of certainty (still inside the ice)

   • While paused in the last choke, knife buried to the hilt, arms shaking, he smells it: the faint, unmistakable bite of wintergreen chewing tobacco soaked into a wool scarf. The same scarf the man who hired him wore two days ago. Memory slams home—no guesswork, no suspicion. He knows the name. The rage that follows is so pure it steadies his hands.

6. Emergence

   • He reaches a place where the crevasse roofs over but has a crack no wider than a man’s fist..

Darkness, and the cold seeping in through his coat. Cold burning both sides of his cheeks, neck aching, his chest trying to fill with air but blocked by the endless ice pressing in from either side. He was upside down, wedged in an ice crevasse, arms pinned tight, head wrenched painfully to one side.

He tried to move. His head and torso exploded with pain. Gasping tiny sips of air, he felt warm blood running down the ice wall; the movement had torn open some wound that had clotted while he was out.

Deep in the narrow crevasse, it felt hopeless. No equipment, his cloak shredded and mostly gone, no gear he could feel. Guns? In this upside-down coffin he had no way of knowing if he still had anything at all. He opened his eyes slowly. Nothing but deep blue ice in front of him. The blood concentrated in his brain made his eyeballs throb like they’d burst, so he shut them again and focused on breathing.

In a spot like this, the easiest thing would be to give up and die. Nothing in John’s life was so precious that it demanded he fight this, but he was stubborn as hell. He’d set out to bring in that killer no matter the cost, and apparently he’d gotten a lot closer than he thought. Like the proverb says, the guilty flee when no man pursueth—or in this case, the guilty try to kill the man they’re afraid will catch them tomorrow, when that man never even suspected them in the first place.

He’d started a job, and he wasn’t about to let that son of a bitch get away with dry-gulching him. Rage flared, hot against the ice. He tried to move again and was instantly humbled by fresh pain.

A place like this needed thought, and thought was damn near impossible with blood pounding behind his eyeballs and leaking from his wounds. If he could just get right-side up, he could climb out. But the crevasse was so narrow he could barely twitch. If only he had a drill or an ice chisel to carve a little room around his head and torso. The image of chiseling gave him an idea: if he could reach his pistol, shooting into the ice might break enough away to let him move. But did he even have a pistol? His arms were pinned, yet when he worked them carefully he found he could shift them a little. The left was less crushed against the wall, more useful. He felt upward along his thigh for the tied-down holster. Empty. He forced his eyes open again, searching the blue gloom for the gun, maybe fallen nearby. The effort brought a headache that lasted minutes. When it finally eased, the left holster was still empty.

The right holster held the backup gun, usually secured with a leather thong around the butt—meant for when the left-hand gun ran dry and he needed a fast switch.

His right arm was more tightly wedged; he was jammed in a slight off-width. He drew his scapula hard left and gained another inch. Reaching downward, he felt the porcelain grip—still there, thong in place. He shifted his torso again, slow and careful, worked the thong loose, and drew the revolver clear.

For one reckless second he wanted to empty the cylinder in a frenzy, just to feel something happen. He forced the urge down. Precision only. Thick ice could ricochet, and every sliver he knocked loose had to help, not kill him. Twelve shots. That was all.

To flip himself upright he needed to haul his body up far enough to twist. First, blow out enough ice around his arms and head to get purchase, something to push against. His head was lodged tightest—no movement at all—then his upper chest and legs. One careful shot on each side of his skull, maybe, praying the bullet didn’t come screaming back into his face.

But even if he freed his arms, he’d still need real grip on the ice to pull upward. The pistol wouldn’t give him that. He’d have to reach the knife in his boot somehow.

The revolver was already cold as death in his hand. He brought it up slowly, angled the muzzle perpendicular to the wall just beside his left ear, took the deepest breath the crevasse allowed, and squeezed off the first shot.

I have a tough time finishing projects, likely because I generate too many ideas and keep trying to start on new ones as they come in. I’ve taken a much healthier strategy of writing them down and leaving them for looking through. Once they are written down and articulated properly, I will always remember the idea for the future.

One of the revelations I’ve had this week is on the nature of the language the characters use in this story. In building a new culture, which is essential for any new successful book in my eyes, there has to be clear inspiration: borrowing and altering words and phrases from existing dialects. This currently is going to have to be done in the editing process, and I may just build an LLM model with a decent amount of context detailing the English dialects I want to use. This isn’t actually that hard. I would like to run a couple simulations taking major pieces of dialogue from the book and generating different types of dialogue, to see which ones have quality and make sense.

I’m really excited about using some of the northern Canadian dialects—eh, bloody, bud, stuff like that. I’d also like to mix in some Scottish or Irish in there, but I haven’t decided yet. There’s also a list of slang specifically related to the state of the world, mainly centering around cold and warmth, ice and snow type things. Some of the things that really stand out in new stories is the language. I do really like Maze Runner slang: Slim it, Shuck face, Shank, Slinthead, Crank. Some interesting words with some potential for this context: Nip, Slip, Fog, Crack, Thaw, Melt, Slide, Skim, Sheen, Glisten, slush, chill, drip, frost, numb, shiv, bite.

An example of how some of these words can be added in the dialect: Out in the slip: away from the established townships, the lower levels of the glacier, where ice melts easily. Slide, like sliding into oblivion: a good name for a powerful drug. Need more insults. I’ll keep thinking about it.

A while back, before starting on John Halliday, I came up with some cool Cloak Ideas, similar to cowboy hats in the west: Crowned Cloak, Broad, Crested, Veiled, Rolled, Ridged. The Cloak is going to be really important out in the ice. Not only is it waterproof, but also anti-slip, so falling will arrest your slide. Also, I like the cloak vibe.

There’s many little things like that I need to get documented and organized better. I want a couple notebooks for key areas to think about for the next couple of years: mainly language, clothes, occupations, tools, and how they relate to each of the different cultures within the ice. Because so much of this new book is going to be exploratory—adventure in some sense—there has to be a wow factor as the reader goes through, something even I as the author can think back to and be like, dang, that’s pretty cool, I wish I lived there.

I will probably do another week of ideas, then go full organization mode and try to get everything fully documented and organized. That will include commentary on what needs changed on each of the scenes I’ve written so far: things that need added, things that don’t really work, dialogue that needs adjusted, action that needs to be added in; what the theme of each scene is going for; deleting any “and thens” in the story.

Anyway, enough procrastinating. Here is the Halliday scene heading back to Fairview. I am skipping the talk inside the Marshalls office, because that has further implications for the final reveal. There is going to be a couple of small details I don’t know what they will be yet. Here is definitely revealed the killer is a Sadist. This is a short scene, cause he gets shot closer to the mining outfit than Fairview.

Chapter 7:

The wind bit into Halliday’s torn cloak on his way back to Fairview. His cloak was in ribbons—cuts from the broken bottles in the barfight, further ripped and shredded from the grappling. The cold no longer crept in; it poured. Deep inside the glacier the tunnels swallowed every scrap of light; only the beam of his sled lit the blue expanse in front of him. He hunched lower, rammed the throttle peg, and pushed the sled faster. With the cold coming in like this, he would be cold no matter what speed he went; might as well be fast.

He thought back to the events at the mining outfit. Quite a rowdy bunch of knuckle-draggers, he thought; a good thing none of them banded together to take him out—just the trouble-hunters he had to deal with individually. The information from the Marshall had been concerning, to say the least. Sure, it was clear he wasn’t a suspect, but what about the cut-out eyeballs that had been stuck back into the sockets and frozen, and the knife driven down the throat? He had seen torture methods like this from some of the more savage tribes in lower Quebec, but for the tribes, torture was done to get information.

In this case, what information could a young scout possibly give? This kid knew nothing more than any other miner in the area. From what the Marshall said, he wasn’t high up in the outfit, and there wasn’t much information a killer could use anyway. But what would explain the gutted eyes, the tongue cut out savagely, the twisted screaming face full of pain—finally ended when the killer put a bullet through the front of his head, blowing out the back of the skull?

Maybe no questions were ever asked, and the man was killed because he was in the way of something. His tongue gone so screams stayed wordless, eyes cut out so there was no sight—only pure pain—until the bullet finally ended the suffering. He would be nearing the site now, this exact glacier vein, the scout’s patrol line, the only throat of ice between outfit and Fairview—a throat Halliday had now entered, a throat missing its dedicated scout. He was a fool; the killer hadn’t come for the scout. He had come for the tall stranger who came into town asking hard questions. He had come for John.

John came to the realization just as a cold dread shot through his system. The dark cave seemed to close in around him. As he turned his head to look back where he came from, a shot rang out. The sled veered left violently, and John felt himself falling from the sled, sliding on his shredded cloak at impossible speed along the trail, then falling, falling, falling, into the black, until he could feel no more.

Chapter 6:

Only a handful of men were in the bar as John entered. One table had a game of poker going, and most of the men were nursing warm drinks, lost in their own muttered conversations. A glowing potbellied stove sat in the corner, driving the day’s chill out of any man who entered. The foaming mug of ale set before him warmed his hands and tasted good. A long ride back to Fairview waited for him tonight, but for now, sinking into a chair by the crackling stove was all he had the willpower to do.

John’s mind drifted back to the twisted face of the frozen corpse at the outpost. The killer had dragged the dying man inside the outpost building for questioning before delivering a final bullet to the head. Looking around from the outpost clearing, John had spotted multiple firing positions—caves and nests carved into the ice and piled with sandbags, dug by the miners to fend off roving militias that ventured this far north. Yet the man had been ambushed, likely shot down from their own shooting nests. The marshal’s two deputies would return to town soon with a clearer report on where the killer came from, and John desperately needed that information before heading back to town. It seemed men out here struck and killed without reason, and the sooner John could wrap up his case, the better.

A group of men began filling the bar—young, wild-eyed men drinking mugs of ale, roughhousing, and having fun. John made a point of ignoring them, but he caught the occasional knowing glance his way. Heading out now, in the eyes of the miners, was considered downright irresponsible, and he was sure to stir up trouble on his way out. As time went on, the glances came more frequently; sooner or later, one of these men would start pushing, and John didn’t care which. A wiry blond-haired kid with a bandana tied around his forehead looked a little too sure of himself, touching the single pistol in his tied-down holster. The ratty kid smirked at him again, even as John met his glance. The kid seemed keenly aware of the gun on his hip, as if he’d just put it on a moment ago. John finished his warm drink and stood up; the right thing was to try leaving before someone got hurt. It was always better to give these men an easy choice to avoid a fight. John stepped toward the door, and immediately, the yellow-haired wiry kid and a couple of drunks blocked his path.

“Going somewhere, mister?” The kid was jumpy and looking for a fight. In a mining outfit like this, he’d get fired for killing a fellow miner, but outsiders were fair game for anyone to push around. Some young kids like this one thought their status among the older men was gained by being known as a fast hand. Kids like these were the worst kind.

“I’m heading out of town at the request of the marshal, and I’m telling you now, don’t fucking start it.”

“Start what?” The shit-eating grin was impeccable, and John was barely restraining himself.

John took another step forward, and the room began to clear out. The kid’s hand hovered over his pistol.

“I heard you reported Grayson’s body, thinking you’re something special. Nobody else was out in the slip that night. You expect us to believe you didn’t put the bullet in him?”

There were a couple of onlookers and men listening through the doorways for John’s reply.

“There were multiple men out in the slip this week, and the marshal’s men are looking over the scene now. They’ll see the killer’s prints from the cave network, while mine only came in from the road. Back in town, they know I only arrived yesterday, so there was no way I could’ve killed him.”

The evidence was almost too clear, and the kid couldn’t say anything else without sounding stupid. There were only two ways out of calling someone a murderer: back down from the accusation, or kill. His face wavered for a second, then the grin returned.

”You calling me a liar?”

Even as John started to reply, a flash in the kid’s eyes warned he was already starting to draw. The gun came up, spitting flame into the ground, and John felt his own pistol fire three times, center mass. The kid folded onto the ground, coughing out the last of his life onto the frosty floor, fingers clawing into the ground as blood pooled around him.

John stepped over the pooling blood and out the door in disgust, just as the marshal and a couple other men came running towards the bar. John finished reloading and dropped his pistol back into its holster.

“It’s over now, marshal, some yellow-haired kid tried his best and got a couple of shots off into the floor. He’s not gonna make it.”

The Marshall glanced from the kid’s body to John “All the same, you’d better clear out tonight. They knew this kid was bound for a bullet, but they don’t take kindly to losing someone they know, no matter how foolish.”

John was already untying his sled. “I was gonna head out after this anyway, but I want to speak with your two deputies before I leave and see what they found with that killing at the outpost.”

The marshal nodded, and the sled’s engine roared to life, a crowd of men had gathered around the body, watching. John muscled the sled around quickly, and sped toward the marshal’s office.

So I’ve been thinking about the occupation of the killer this past week, and I’ve cooked up something cool. In each town, there will be a guild of Seers. There are at least one in every outfit, and at least two competing guilds in each town. Seers are constantly monitoring and testing the ice around the towns, monitoring glacial movements, predicting and preventing anything from happening to the towns and the surrounding roads and settlements. Towns often see the Seer’s guild symbolically as a parental protector, and intellectual thought leader, because the glacial movements are so common, predicting them is crucial for any surviving town to thrive.

This settlement is in northern Alberta, so the meltwater and underground river movements aren’t as crazy as down south when Summer months can get near 32F. There are still glacial movements to worry about, and a town like Fairview typically has two Seer guilds. This killer is average at his job, seemingly intelligent, but a secondary to the other Guild in town.

I want to spend some more time building his secret life. These happen overtime, lies building on lies, and with the help of townspeople turning a blind eye, overtime he becomes more and more bold. John is following a trail of murders, and he really has no way of proving the killer is in Fairview, but he’s just using a process of elimination.

In his conversation with the killer, he will be mentioning his trip to the mining camp, where he is travelling on a different lead, and to seek more information. He will get multiple peices of information, all of which should be used on his route there. On the way back though, there will be one peice of information that the killer added in that diverts Johns path to the ambush site. John doesn’t have a way of knowing that he didn’t need to take the slight diversion, until a other clues lead him to suspect the Seer. Once he starts to suspect the Seer, he will realize that key peice of information from the killer was the reason he went a slightly different route, and was then ambushed.

The continued writing this week will be relating to the fighting inside the mining camp specifically. A little bit of a chronological jump from where I left off, but John starts in the bar assuming this is after visiting the sheriff.

I was visiting Powell’s City of Books the other day, walking through the aisles, picking up books at random, and flipping through them out of interest. I came to the conclusion that all these books are the same. All the books across genres were written in the same way, using similar language to describe the events of the story. Granted, I was choosing books that I knew were going to be particularly middle of the road—no Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Neumann, Eliade, I was looking at the cartoonified modern book covers with some insignificant person on the cover, the completely insignificant titles, the uninteresting settings, uninspiring characters, and clichéd plot.

When flipping through, I noticed the language is all the same. Speaking mainly about narrative works, the language is very similar.

1. Overused dialogue: Said, replied, asked, whispered, shouted.
2. Basic action interaction words, opened the door, ran down the street, entered the room, sat down in the comfy chair.
3. Mundane Description, The sky was gray and raining, the house was old and dirty, the room was small and dark.
4. Uninspiring internal states, he was angry, he thought about ___, her heart raced.
5. Even the sentence structures are boring, there’s no rhythm, (noun) did (action) (adjective) (Object).

The same plot structures, that were once good, but have been rewritten so many times anything new coming out is completely mundane.

1. The “chosen one” Hero’s journey, where a person is picked for some reason—think hunger games, divergent, the giver, half of all YA fantasy. We could have stopped at Harry Potter and the world would be better off.
2. All the romance “plots,” love triangles, enemies to lovers, loving vampires, etc.
3. Some character that was supposed to be dead actually isn’t dead this whole time.
4. Evil villain explains his entire plot instead of killing the main character, leaving just enough time for him to escape.
5. Person gets powers and becomes good at everything.
6. It was all a dream.
7. Flashbacks that no person would ever have because that’s not how flashbacks even work, people get visions not a full description of everything that happened in a 10-minute timeframe.

These structures can be done correctly, but they have been rewritten so many times, the reader can easily recognize what kind of story it is, which kind of ruins the point.

I don’t even have a single finished product, so all I can say is I’m trying to avoid recreating the overused plot structures, and uninspiring descriptive language. Authors sometimes use the terminology “With a twist,” meaning it is essentially the same as another book, but slightly different in some way. The problem is you can only twist a plot so many times, before writing anything new becomes impossible.

One of my favorite series growing up was Artemis Fowl, which Eoin Colfer described as Die Hard with fairies. Looking back at it, the plot was still really good, I really liked the world building of the LEP recon, and the magical underworld, even though the character development of Artemis for example was very clichéd. Supergenius knows everything is very classic. My sense for why I liked that series so much was the immersion. I was there with Artemis and Butler, setting up the trap at the ancient Oak tree, with Holly as she woke up alone in the underground concrete cell, with Butler as he almost dies and comes back to defeat the troll, watching the Bio-Bomb as it sped towards Fowl Manor. It was really the immersion that carried the story. I as the reader, got to live inside that interesting world as the events unfolded.

Coming away from that, there is very little to do with the character that I go back to, Artemis is just overly smart teenager, and nothing more really. Butler is just big strong guy, also clichéd. What drives the story is really the reader’s immersion in the events of the story.

I really like this idea of immersion, taking the reader into this new world you’ve created for them, building visions in their mind as they work their way through the book. These visions I often refer to as themes, can be about almost anything, but come from straight out of my subconscious, and are recorded in my notes.

While writing this, I took a look in my themes folder and found a good one that might shed some light as to what I mean. The title of the Theme is “Knew the symptoms.” This is referring to the experience of someone who knows they are dying, in the throes of addiction, or disease, and there is nothing they can do about it. They logically know what these symptoms mean, before the inevitable happens. Its a powerful vision when articulated properly, and I can never do it justice, but visions like that happen occasionally. This one in particular happened while I was driving to work a few months ago. When I mentioned immersing the reader into the new world, I don’t mean merely a new physical world, Narnia for example, I really mean into the experienced world.

In the Maze runner, when Newt is screaming, begging Thomas to kill him, he is experiencing the actual hell of living inside your own mind, not in control as you destroy everything you see with your fellow cranks. The reader is immersed in Newt’s experience, not really in the dystopian hellscape around them.

This idea of immersion inside the experienced world is really powerful, and goes to the core of what good stories are really supposed to be about. How well does a story pull off the immersion, how well does it do the experience of the character, and how well does it do the world building? Anyways, back to writing my own story, that does none of these things at the moment. I will get there one day. Probably not with this story, but this is meant to help with the worldbuilding and language for a different story I want to take a couple years on. The plan is to finish this short story this year, and spend 2 years writing the story I want to actually publish.

In the editing process, I want to rewrite this story with a new created english dialect, I have some of the wording put together for later, but I’m focusing on getting the plot correct first.

Chapter 5:

The endless caves of ice had a way of pushing a man to his destination. The twisting, warping tunnels, forever closing in around Halliday and his sled, were pushing him to go faster, each bend in the cave he took almost sideways, rocketing through the developed trails towards his destination. Eventually, the work of the massive industrial shavers ended, evidently the miners didn’t plan on being in this area for more than a few years. This land was as a much lower elevation than where he had been in Fairview, and his ears were in the transition period, hurting, but not popping yet. Glancing around, he began to notice more intersections from adjoining cave systems, as well as peculiar air pockets pockmarked in the ice, extending from the floor, as if the air was trying to work its way higher and higher, and the pressure was slowly moving the ice out of its way until finally, it would reach the surface. John looked back in the direction he had come, only his own sled’s track was present on this trail, evidently no miner had passed this way in a couple of days, and the frost had been allowed to creep in and fill the markings made by a passerby.

About 10 miles left before the settlement, he would have to dismount and start on foot soon. Most mining settlements had one or two scouts roaming the caves a couple miles down the trail, the purpose was to get back to the settlement if any danger was approaching and warn the miners, so they could assemble into a significant fighting force if necessary. These scouts, John knew, would often set up a permanent spot watching one of the main trails, a couple miles out of town. They key for the approach would be to act nonthreatening and alone, and making it clear his only purpose was to trade with the mining settlement.

John dismounted and slid his blades into place, dropping into the trail basin with the precarious pack, hefting it to his shoulders. He approached the likely area where the scout would be camping quickly, flicking the walking attachment in and out expertly anytime he took a step uphill. Sutble changes in the trail told him he was nearing the location of the scout’s hideout.

Ahead of him, the trail rose abruptly for a couple hundred feet, the top of the incline was a full barrier. It was unusual, a full security checkpoint for this miner’s camp seemed like overkill, apparently they were keeping security tighter around these parts.

As John hiked up the hill, a growing sense of unease began to fill the cavern. No sound came from the checkpoint, no moving about, the gate was still locked. Lifting his pack over the gate, John stepped around to the man door, cracking open the door, gun in hand. The man lay facedown in a frozen pool of blood, his limbs stiff it had been some time since this gate was operational, at least a few days.

(More has to be added here, what exactly John does with the body I don’t yet know, I originally had John approaching and making coffee for a sleeping scout, but that was boring, and there had to be some significant upset in the miner’s camp on John arrival anyways. It made more sense for him to find the ambushed scout, haul him into the outskirts of town, get into someone’s house, and make the coffee in there. The scene starts off again when John is in town, after dealing with the body, he finds a house on the outskirts and enters it to get out of the biting cold.)

There was only one room in the place, that served as a kitchen, living room, and bedroom, a single gangly fellow, wrapped in a dirty burlap sack, sleeping off whatever festivities he had partaken of the night before. A loud wet snore echoed up the tunnel to the cave entrance, and John stopped trying to sneak into the room. The chance of waking anyone up was low, this man was clearly incapacitated.

John laid his towering pack onto the ice, and dug around for his stove bottom and fuel. The ride had been grueling, as soon as the developed trail ended, he’d been jounced up and down and sideways until his back and behind were badly bruised, his tongue tasted of blood. Taking care not to wake the drunken man, John built up a sizable fire, putting coffee on to boil, and sat back, considering. In his pack, he had brought many trinkets, tools, and tequila for the miners, a pelt of sealskin the miners would use for insulation, better flooring, liners for their waterproof jackets, and any other waterproofing-related use they could think of.

The coffeepot was starting to steam, not quite there, but John poured a cup nonetheless. It was just about strong enough to grow hair on a man’s chest, really make his eyeballs open wide. Another sizable scoop, that would make it just about right. The fuel was scarce, so when the coffee had finished, John replaced it with a frying pan, and began frying frozen strips of bacon. The crackling as the bacon fell on the pan woke the sleeping man, and he came off his bedroll with a shout.

Throwing his dirty sack aside, he jumped up, his half sleeping, drunken body shot full of adrenaline, eyes rolling. He ran at John, panicked, and stepped near the coffee pot, slipping comically on the ice, landing hard, and scrambling up. John’s chuckle filled the cavern.

“What’s the matter there friend? You seem to be a little unsteady..”

The scout was breathing hard, still staring wildly at John’s nonchalant figure, warm in front of the fire.

“Come and have a seat by the fire, coffee’s hot, and we’ll have a long ride waiting for us in an hour or so.”

He tried to make his voice nonthreatening and friendly as possible, but there were a myriad of reasons this man might just try killing him then and there. Shifting his coat slightly, John deliberately exposed one of the guns in his left shoulder holster, making sure his hands appeared far away from the firearm.

His beady eyes darted down to the pistol, then around his vest, evidently noting several other gun profiles through the blue cloak, and the single tied down pistol. The thoughts of killing this apparent trespassing saddle tramp left him gradually.

There was a common courtesy among men in the north, if you saw any fellow with more guns than limbs on their person, you tended to me a little more polite to said gentlemen. This man was no troublehunter, and he stared at John and his pistols warily.

“Just what you think you’re doing, sneaking in here? This is trespassing, I might have grabbed for a gun, or my lance.. Who do you think you are anyways? Coming in here uninvited..”

“I was told this was all property of Crawfield, its no more your property than mine, no offense…” John shifted onto his other side to warm it up better. “But I wasn’t sneaking, I opened an unlocked door, dropped my pack to the ground, and lit up this fire here. I even boiled a pot of coffee for us, supposing we can come to some agreement.”

The man’s breath jittered with suppressed shivers as he stood over John, his sealskin undergarments exposed to the cold outer air, the once warm burlap sacking in a heap on the ice. He stepped a little closer to the fire, reaching for his pack, putting on his insulated pants and outer coat quickly.

John purposely made no move to complicate the situation, this man was no fighter, and the adrenaline was already wearing off. He was coming to accept the new status quo, and would be unlikely to try anything rash so quickly. The bedraggled man in front of him was the worst kind of miner, a brooding, conniving manager, he would try to stick a knife in John’s back sooner or later.

“I came rode out here last evening from Fairview, selling the goods in my pack here. I’ve got tools, one doublejack, bits and the like, a pelt of skin, and some other odds and ends. I heard you were a wild bunch, and I’m not one to judge another man’s ways, but I’d like to sell my goods without getting my hide stretched, so maybe you could help me out, give me directions on where I should be going to sell this load of gear.”

The coffee and frying bacon evidently looked inviting, and the man could see no reason not to drink his fill. He slowly reached for the pot, filling a cup with the black steaming coffee.

When most of your day is spent in front of a computer screen, improving your experience turns out to be very important.

Arguably the most important principle for heavy computer use is visual fatigue, where you spend extra time staring at the screen searching, finding and moving your mouse to find a particular button before selecting it. This happens when reading emails to find the right one, scanning search results, checking video titles, filling out forms, etc.

I tend to think of integration with a computer as how quickly a thought can turn into an action on the computer. If I decide to search for info on a particular topic, I want to get there as quickly and with as little effort as possible. Normally it would look something like: Ctrl + T which is set to my M4 macro, then typing in the first letter of the autofill, or, tab twice, and arrow keys to go through my bookmarks quickly. That’s a lot different than moving your mouse to see where it is, moving it up the the + button, then clicking it, then clicking the search bar, etc.. I try to avoid clicking with the mouse when possible, and when I do click, I usually try to do it quickly.

Something that helps a lot when you do need to use the mouse, is zooming everything in, usually 130% to 150%. This makes every button easy to click, with almost no visual fatigue, because in most cases I don’t need to position my mouse perfectly—it’s just a flick to the general area of the button.

Having precise mouse movements is overrated, because nobody is precise all the time, and there will always be slight corrections to where your mouse needs to be.

I estimate that saving even half a second every time I click something has saved me somewhere close to a hundred hours per year. That may not be completely accurate—I probably click well over 10,000 times a day, and that adds up quickly. Your average office keyboard warrior clicks like 4k to 7k times a day..

Knowing all the keyboard shortcuts is very important, too. Alt+Tab to switch between windows, always Ctrl + F searching for content on the screen, Windows+Shift+S for screenshots, using Tab/Shift+Tab when filling out information online, Ctrl+arrow keys to move your cursor around quickly. Alt+F4...

There are a million ways to improve efficiency on a computer, and the key is to get fast enough that the communication with the computer doesn’t break your train of thought. Having a nice keyboard helps out a lot as well, I went from an 80ish words a minute to well over a hundred depending on the context, just from getting a nice keyboard.

I saw some guy the other day zoomed way out on his email, hunched over trying to find something, squinting at the screen and thought I’d write something to clear the thoughts out. Its all unnecessary extra work for the most part..

Chapter 1:

The mining settlement of Fairview sat quietly in the frozen Albertan wasteland. Only a few men and women seemed active on the street as the stage slid up to the mounting station. The usual passengers began disembarking from the wide double doors: Walter Jackson, the town powerman returning from Edmonton; Bert Peterson, the mining executive; Miss Clara Austin, who ran the town dance hall; and two of her girls. The stage clerk looked down at his receiving papers, making the usual markings as he always did, but stopped abruptly and looked up, startled.

A tall, dark man stepped off the stage after the others, an imposing figure sporting a reinforced blue-crowned cloak. He moved quickly, heading directly for the office door.

Glancing back down at his receiving papers, the clerk gaped at the name of the passenger: Mr. John Halliday, in town on business. Reaching for his computer, the clerk began to type out a message.

The door hissed, and the dark man entered the room, walking right up to the clerk, who stopped typing his message.
“Morning, friend. I believe there’s a package for me that arrived yesterday.”

“Um, yes, yes, sir. That must be in the back. Let me just go and get it.”

The clerk stood up awkwardly and stepped into the back room. A little too quickly, the dark man noted, almost as if...

He stepped around the desk, glancing at the computer screen—classic passenger transport and financial software, but… With a few quick keystrokes, a new page opened: messaging software with a half-typed message, “Halliday the bounty hunter came in on the stage! Arrived with…”

Halliday stepped back around the desk, amused, leaving the message open. It was addressed to a man named Dutch Vanderbilt, evidently someone who liked to know who came and went in this small town.

The clerk returned, hefting the package in his two skinny arms and heaving it onto the counter. “If you could sign for it here…”

“Thanks, friend. I’ll be staying at the hotel. Is there a machine shop in town? Somewhere I can get a set of blades and a sled?”

“Yes, sir!” The clerk looked at him wide-eyed.
“We have two smithies and one machine shop. Both are down the street, past the saloon and the dance hall.”

Halliday seemed not to acknowledge. He slid a short lever down on the inside of his boot, and a thin blade extended from the front to the heel. He double checked it, sliding his hand down the blade, before repeating the process on the other side. Halliday straightened, picked up the package with ease, and stepped to the door.

“Thanks, friend, and give my regards to Mr. Vanderbilt.”

The clerk jumped, his eyes bulging, ready excuses already spilling out, but the door was already hissing shut.

Halliday stepped onto the street and pushed off, sliding past the general store and the dance hall. A scraping sound and a spray of ice shot up as he came to a stop in front of the hotel. Checking into his room, John opened his package, pulling out a long fixed-blade knife, which he strapped onto his belt, a few letters, a box of Churchills, two twin pistols, five extra magazines, and two sealskin holsters.

The pistols were sleek, 22-shot, short-barreled, with built-in silencers, lest a shooting blow out the hearing of the entire damn town. The holsters were slung low, with a short rope tying them to the leg, made for a quick and easy draw. Halliday finally began to relax. He knew by now the entire town had heard of his arrival, and if anyone wanted to test him, they were welcome to try.

Opening the letters, he skimmed through the first, noting the few details of the six shootings that had brought him to this forsaken town. Two of the shootings, it seemed, were over business disputes—a dealer not delivering the full package of slide, and distributors getting high on their own supply. The other four killings, however, seemed to have no reason at all. All in one night, four unrelated men, all forced into a fight and gunned down, each with a final shot to the head. There were similar incidents in the past, but this one was different. John had scanned the security footage multiple times, and while the shootings weren’t caught on camera, he believed he knew which man had done them. He had seen him board the stage north. It wasn’t much information to go on, but the north stage hit every town linearly, which made it simple for John to stop at each town and check the footage for the man getting off (arriving not on a stage they’d have his info.). Nothing so far, yet Fairview was the last town on the stage north, and here was where the man had to have disembarked.

The second letter, from a girl back in Montana, was an elegant, descriptive letter filled with longing, asking Halliday to return to her small town. She was an intelligent girl, very pretty; long dark hair and wide blue eyes, but these sorts of things never worked out. He was a bounty hunter and a detective who would never be comfortable staying in one place. Yet she would inevitably find another local man to fall in love with, as they always do. All the better, a young Mexican once told him, to ride off into the sunset before things get too serious, that way the princess won’t ever see you as her lousy, no-account husband. (Why?)

John dropped both letters into the fireplace and watched the flames curl around each page until there was nothing left but white ash. He would start on this case in the morning. Taking out a Churchill, he snipped the end and tested its draw before torching the end in the fireplace and lighting up. Just right. He pulled up his computer HUD. It was time to do a little looking into a man by the name of Dutch Vanderbilt.

Chapter 2:
The town was finally beginning to liven up as Halliday stepped onto the boardwalk that afternoon. The false-fronted buildings were rimmed in frost, butted up against the towering walls of ice. The Melting Pot Bar across the street from the hotel had men going in and out constantly, and a train of toboggans was parked outside the general store; two men with white leather overcloaks were wrestling a particularly awkward piece of strut metal into one of them.

Halliday crossed the street toward the blacksmith’s shop, sliding across the ice, following the sound of automatic hammers and the blowing hot air from electric furnaces. Inside, Old Jim Hendricks was bent over an oddly shaped circular piece of metal, attempting to close the circle and tack-weld it in place. As John Halliday shut the door behind him, Hendricks’s grip slipped, and the circle sprang back open. Hendricks dropped the piece of metal to the floor and kicked it across the room.

“No machine built yet that can turn a 8 mil peice of 1018 into a good enough circle, and this old man has to suffer every time someone needs one. What can I do for you Stranger?”

John spent some time surveying the shop with a critical eye. “Nice place you have here, a little messy, but I can tell when someone knows his stuff.”

“Been working in this business for 23 years mister, I’ve just about got it so’s folks’ll come to me for just about everything.”

“I don’t doubt it friend, I can see you have enough set aside for some 1095 in your stockpile there. I need a set of blades, the finest steel you have. Blunted tip if you can muster it, My boots have a 10 milimeter fitting. They should be fast sure, but I do a lot of scrambling when I’m out and about. And a good pair of spikers to go with them. I can assure you the extra time will be well worth it.”

Old Jim raised one eyebrow.

“Thats a steep demand friend, and some damned good steel I’ll be banging on. Who are you anyways?”

“I thought you’ve heard by now, that shrimp of a clerk down at the station sure likes to tell people bout all the unsuspecting men who come in on the stage”

John set two gold coins down on the table. “You’ll find out who I am soon enough, there is something you might be able to help me with though.”

He paused, and the blacksmith looked up, curious. “Maybe I can, what is it?”

“I’m looking for a man, his name is Dutch Vanderbilt?”

“Dutch … Vanderbilt?”

His face went from pleasantly curious to stone cold in a matter of seconds. John was caught offguard by the instant change in demeanor.

“Yes, a friend of mine did some business with him back in the states, do you know where I could … “

From stone cold to angry, just as fast as before.

“You’ll have to ask someone else I don’t know where he is.”

“Do you know what he looks like? Maybe his hair color, or..”

“NO! And don’t ask me again, and don’t come into my shop ever again, I don’t have time to make a new set of blades either, you’ll have to buy from the store.”

Halliday carefully leaned back against the wall, he stared at the man for a long moment before speaking.

“Alright then,” Each word was said deliberately, a clear threat behind them. “I won’t bring him up anymore, but it seems to me you had all the time in the world to get a fine set of blades fitted for me, and I was fixing to pay you well for your work. Now I think maybe I’ll forget about you just said if you forget about what I said. I’ll be back for the blades tonight, and you’ll be payed well, as long as I receive the product I’m expecting..”

John stepped back to the door. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement, no hard feelings, I really do need a set of blades,” he said.

Old Jim grumbled and turned back to his forge. John slipped out of the door, making sure to close it quickly.

The cool air washed over his face, turning his breath into puffs of fog as Halliday strolled down the boardwalk. Why had Old Jim changed so suddenly at the mention of this Dutch fellow? Was he protecting the man, or was it fear of something worse? And that clerk at the stage station—he’d been relaying information to Dutch out of obligation, or something more sinister? Something wasn’t right in this town, and Halliday was beginning to see that the pieces just weren’t adding up.

Chapter 3:
John strolled down the frosty boardwalk, the ever-growing crystals crunching under his leather boots. He thought back to the Vanderbilt file, dug up from an acquaintance back in the meltland. A clean record, for the most part: no business ownership of any sort, no fingerprints, no felonies. Only a single police report, out of the Boston Settlement back east, with nothing of significance—just a minor vehicle wreck. He noted the model of sled: a 3062 Qualinus, brand new at the time, a hefty chunk of change to lose, even if it was his fault.

No account of Vanderbilt to go on; he got the feeling these townspeople weren’t going to offer much about their secret goings-on. But there were other ways to get this kind of information, mainly in the mining settlements out of town. The miners out this deep were a bunch of ice-rats, diving in the slush, pulling up whatever junk they could find. Intimidation from a town hundreds of miles away wasn’t going to do much for them. John considered his options: he could keep asking in town to figure out what he could; he could take that clerk outside and reconfigure his face until he got some answers; or maybe he could take a pint of tequila out to the mining settlements, let the long-awaited burn loosen their tongues.

He was beginning to draw more attention walking down the boardwalk. Glances from passersby lingered when he looked away, immediately turning to apparent blindness when he turned.

Walking past the Tailor’s, he noticed a shy face behind a veil of long dark hair looking across the store and through the glass over to where he was walking. A tailor, he thought. Now that’s something I might just pay another visit to when all this is over. My cloak is in need of repair after all. He made sure his gaze penetrated the frost and glass until she knew he was staring right back at her. She turned away quickly, ducking behind a line of sealskin. (why??)

Halliday chuckled and continued down the boardwalk toward the home side of the small town. A series of archways marked the entrance to each residence; he knew there would be caverns and bunk pods multiple stories deep inside each archway. Steamer chutes were visible through the ice, piping hot air up to the power plants near the surface. As a boy, Halliday had worked as a sweep inside the steam chutes, climbing inside and resealing leaks, checking the density of the outer material of the chute all the way up and down. The memory clung, still vivid in his imagination.

When a man works for long enough in a trade, he begins to notice the work of other men doing the same work: areas where the other man does something different, taking note of quality work and mistakes that may be present. John scanned the chutes now, smirking at the overuse of the bubbling putrid sealant used to cover the many leaks that compound over time. One chute, however, was devoid of sealant—very unlike the other homes. John walked closer. Either the chute was just installed, or whoever the occupant of the home was had used 8-mil stainless steel for his damn steam chute.

Upon closer inspection, the chute seemed to reflect the deep blue back out, indicating polished stainless, not the crinkled aluminum with the outer coating.

Looking around at the house, every other detail began to jump out, screaming hand craftsmanship, quality materials, intricate design. Someone had spent years on this dwelling, sparing no detail. The numbers in the address plaque on the door were lined in columns of two, each one a different type of metal: 294779—29, 47, 79, the atomic numbers of copper, silver, and gold. The two copper numbers had ionized over time, turning to a solid blue-green. Straightening, John took another long look, then started back for the restaurant, a certain feeling of respect for whoever put this masterpiece together.

Chapter 4:
Every settlement out in the ice was different, it seemed, but they all needed the same basic things; Power from thermal vents deep in the earth, or nuclear powerplants far away, running conduit for hundreds of miles until they reached the designated settlement. Most towns were set up similarily, false fronted buildings, and a boardwalk to keep out of the ice, standard tradesmen, blacksmith, sled mechanic, farmers, electricians and whatnot, all of it was needed for any two-bit town to keep working. The other thing all towns needed, was industry. There had to be some export, some reason for the people to be living there in the first place. Down south, the export was manufacturing, thermal powerplants, rooted deep in the earth, with their factories sitting above, making every good, tool, and toy known to man.

Up north, deep in the continental glacier, the industry was mining. A town like this probably supported a dozen mining outfits, and all their men, who evidently weren’t around on weekdays, and only came to town at end of the month when they go their paycheck, there they would spend it all on booze, women, and gambling, and maybe some extra gear if they had anything left over.

These mining outfits had to travel far from the towns, as the supply of silver, gold, copper, and scrap metal would dry up quickly, and the company would move to the next location. The earth under the glaciers was often under immense pressure, creating a mess of meltwater, and half frozen ice for the miners to work with. Many of them died, but the companies that needed the raw materials so badly were willing to pay whatever it took to get them, and when anyone becomes willing to pay whatever it takes, only the dregs of society are willing to do their bidding. The wild young men of the north, who chased cash, booze and women, lived like dogs, diving in the slush day after day after day, and had no concern of anyone in the town and any of their influence.

"Hardly even allowed in polite society,” John mused, that was the type of man he was looking for. These boys wouldn’t care at all some sidewinder in town is trying to scare everyone into secrecy, and would beat the brains out of anyone trying to nose in on their business. That was a good sign, but John had no illusions on the type of undertaking this would end up being. Wild men like this were unpredictable, but this seemed like the best way to get some answers on the goings on in town.

John consulted his HUD, searching for mining companies in the area, coming up with several options. Many required going back on the trail the stage came in on, which was a no go. A single entrance and exit was just asking for something to happen, maybe this Vanderbilt guy gets antsy, and starts killing would-be detectives for getting too close. Or maybe Vanderbilt had nothing to do with it, there were so many questions, John put them out of his mind for the time being.

92 miles north was Crawfield and Co, most of which was developed trail, but the rest was a slippery scramble up and down a network of caverns, cave veins, and cliffs.

John needed his new skates, and a sled that would go climb any wall, maybe he’d get lucky if he asked nice enough..

It was evening as John strolled back into the warm red glow of the blacksmith. John closed the door, taking a look around for his new blades. Hendricks glanced up, and pulled a box off the table, hefting it onto the counter, with a thump. “Here you are Halliday, a new set of skates, 1062 steel, and I sharpened them for you to 270 grit, don’t think you’ll be needing any more than that.”


John thanked him, and took the box of gear, and stepped outside, carrying it across the street into the hotel.

Assume he tests his new blades, resharpening, and builds his kit for the trip to the miners cabins, resume when Kit is put together, John is walking out to his sled from the hotel, carrying his bags.

John stepped back to the boardwalk, looking up and down the street, just a few onlookers, the townfolk had become aware of his presence, and the word spread quickly about who he was.

As requested, the mechanic, who owned, rented and fixed all the sleds in the region, had his own sled warmed up and waiting in the parking station to the left of the street.

A young boy was checking the oil pressure, pulling the dipstick and reading the results on the front screen. John looked on, amused.

"You might want to start testing the hydraulic steering before letting anyone out on those rigs,” John said, and the boy looked up.

"Mr. Sanderson taught me only to do the gas, oil, and the engine check, mister, why the hydraulics?”

"On a long journey like the one I’m taking, the increase and decrease in pressure can cause problem if the hydraulic pressure isn’t exactly right. It may not cause any issues for years, but overtime the stress will start leaks in the seals.”

The boy looked back at the sled, "How do you check the hydraulic pressure? I’ve never done that before..”

"Alt 6 on the control panel, only after you opened the diagnosics, here..”

He showed the boy the correct keystrokes, and the desired reading came up. You see the pressure here, its just a little over what it should be, Sanderson probably overfilled it, anticipating leaks, but when you do it right, the leaks won’t come for some time.

He reached over the main hydraulic line, loosening a screw on one of the fittings, letting a little of the fluid drop onto the ice.

"See?” He said after rerunning the diagnostic, “That’s about right, and be sure to scrape up that fluid off the street..”

The boy looked at John, curious, “You said you were going on a long trip, where do you plan on going? There’s not many settlements around Fairview, except the..”

John smiled, “Except the mining outfits, yeah, I’ll be heading out to Crawfield and Co tonight.”

The boy’s eyes widened, “That’s dangerous mister, Ma says those miners are a rough lot..”

"Your Ma hasn’t told you the half of it, don’t say you heard it from me, but I heard every night, they cut the wrist of one of the miners, mix the frozen blood with vodka, and drink it to ward off spirits and bad luck. Right here,” He showed the boy his wrist, sliding his hand across. “They’re a crazy lot, plumb crazy..”

"So why do you have to go out to them, can’t you wait for the end of the month, and ask one when he comes in?”

"No time, and I can’t explain why, maybe you’ll find out when this is all over.”

The boy thought for a moment, “When you go out there, you might want to save a couple of your cigars for the Mr. Judd the Foreman, he comes in every month and buys a package at the general store, but I’ll be they are all gone within the first week.”

Halliday smiled, “That’s good advice, I’ll take a couple extras, what’s your name kid?”

“I’m James Mason, my Pa runs the general store, and I help Mr. Sanderson after school.”

"Well James, you’re good thinking on your feet, take this silver dollar for your troubles, I’ll be heading out.”

The boy took the coin, and walked back toward the machine shop, smiling.

John turned back to his sled, taking one last look at the diagnostic on the screen, then hefted his duffel bag, and tote of gear onto the back platform, swinging one leg over, and settling in for the long haul.

The cold air cut at his face and gloves, as he rode down the main street, south out of town, the ice turned from smooth resurfaced street, to the rough, shaved and cut ice of the trails outside of town. It was always just out of town that the roads were so bad, once you were far enough away there would be less chopped slush to plow through, and the tunnels would be back to reflected lines of deep blue.

John pulled his visor closed, and cranked the heated handlebars and seat to full. This would be a long one.

No account of Vanderbilt to go on; he got the feeling these townspeople weren’t going to offer much about their secret goings-on. But there were other ways to get this kind of information, mainly in the mining settlements out of town. The miners out this deep were a bunch of ice-rats, diving in the slush, pulling up whatever junk they could find. Intimidation from a town hundreds of miles away wasn’t going to do much for them. John considered his options: he could keep asking in town to figure out what he could; he could take that clerk outside and reconfigure his face until he got some answers; or maybe he could take a pint of tequila out to the mining settlements, let the long-awaited burn loosen their tongues.

He was beginning to draw more attention walking down the boardwalk. Glances from passersby lingered when he looked away, immediately turning to apparent blindness when he turned.

Walking past the Tailor’s, he noticed a shy face behind a veil of long dark hair looking across the store and through the glass over to where he was walking. A tailor, he thought. Now that’s something I might just pay another visit to when all this is over. My cloak is in need of repair after all. He made sure his gaze penetrated the frost and glass until she knew he was staring right back at her. She turned away quickly, ducking behind a line of sealskin. (why??)

Halliday chuckled and continued down the boardwalk toward the home side of the small town. A series of archways marked the entrance to each residence; he knew there would be caverns and bunk pods multiple stories deep inside each archway. Steamer chutes were visible through the ice, piping hot air up to the power plants near the surface. As a boy, Halliday had worked as a sweep inside the steam chutes, climbing inside and resealing leaks, checking the density of the outer material of the chute all the way up and down. The memory clung, still vivid in his imagination.

When a man works for long enough in a trade, he begins to notice the work of other men doing the same work: areas where the other man does something different, taking note of quality work and mistakes that may be present. John scanned the chutes now, smirking at the overuse of the bubbling putrid sealant used to cover the many leaks that compound over time. One chute, however, was devoid of sealant—very unlike the other homes. John walked closer. Either the chute was just installed, or whoever the occupant of the home was had used 8-mil stainless steel for his damn steam chute.

Upon closer inspection, the chute seemed to reflect the deep blue back out, indicating polished stainless, not the crinkled aluminum with the outer coating.

Looking around at the house, every other detail began to jump out, screaming hand craftsmanship, quality materials, intricate design. Someone had spent years on this dwelling, sparing no detail. The numbers in the address plaque on the door were lined in columns of two, each one a different type of metal: 294779—29, 47, 79, the atomic numbers of copper, silver, and gold. The two copper numbers had ionized over time, turning to a solid blue-green. Straightening, John took another long look, then started back for the restaurant, a certain feeling of respect for whoever put this masterpiece together.

It seems a bit self-evident: if the subject is in a thunderstorm, the rain is pouring down, and the roof is leaking, I would assume the internal state of the subject is in a certain way—maybe in an irritable mood or a bit chaotic—trying to fix the damn leak so the floor doesn’t mold and rot.

I start by describing a warm day, with a group of friends swimming in the river. The reader’s perception can be played with, maybe enhanced or broken. Imagine within the group of friends, the reader discovers a young woman who seems great on the outside but is actually suicidal. This breaks the perceived unity of the friend group, and by extension the setting itself. Suddenly, the reader is in a completely different place, because nothing was as it seemed. In some sense, the writer is building the setting similar to how they would build a character, then playing with the feeling of the setting to further progress the story.

Imagery can be overdone pretty easily. The quality of the imagery needs to be good enough where a few sentences can properly describe the setting to start—as long as it is done right—then subtle descriptors are placed throughout the scene as it progresses to further enhance the scene or adjust it if needed.

I have tried to do that with this short story I’ve been freehand writing. I will do better imagery in the first few chapters to better describe the world, but on the surface, Fairview seems like a regular ice town, going about everyday business—though some of the behavior of the people seems to be off.

The plot starts out with Halliday arriving in the town, noticing a few weird things from the people in the town: first, the clerk at the station is sending word of his arrival; then, when John mentions the name of the guy the clerk was talking to, the blacksmith is suddenly very angry at him.

We have the preestablished notion that the townspeople are truly afraid—of who is not yet clear—whether Vanderbilt is the man they are afraid of, and how he fits in with the man Halliday is chasing from Montana.

I do need to add the information John discovers in the hotel relating to Vanderbilt, which should provide direction as John leaves the blacksmith. That info should also make logical sense for needing a set of blades/skates.

Someone in the town has everyone scared, and none of them are going to talk, so John needs to make it to a homestead or mining outfit out of town where people aren’t as concerned with the fearmongering. I’m cooking up a nasty ambush as he starts back, knocking John out and tossing him down an ice cavern.

I’ll also include direct interaction with the bad guy before John leaves town, who can hear John say where he is going and set up the ambush. It makes logical sense, but more importantly, it establishes multiple characters in the reader’s psyche to set the town setting when he returns.

That’s enough plot progression for now; the key details when John gets back to town have yet to be worked out.

Probably 5 or 6 chapters here. I will think about the plot some more.

Someone in the town has everyone scared, and none of them are going to talk, so John needs to make it to a homestead or mining outfit out of town where people aren’t as concerned with the fearmongering. I’m cooking up a nasty ambush as he starts back, knocking John out and tossing him down an ice cavern.

I’ll also include direct interaction with the bad guy before John leaves town, who can hear John say where he is going, and set up the ambush. It makes logical sense, but more importantly establishes multiple characters in the reader’s psyche to set the town setting when he returns.

Thats enough plot progression for now, the key details when john gets back to town have yet to be worked out.

Probably 5 or 6 chapters here, I will think about the plot some more.

I’m not writing down specific areas to be changed yet; that will come later. In my folder of things to be revised, it’s more about general ideas relating to the plot and characters at this point. Eventually, after going through everything, I’ll be able to pinpoint the areas that need adjustment and fine-tune everything, but not yet. Also chapters are very short, Its mostly one scene per chapter at this point, may be combined later.

Strikethrough for the stuff that needs taken out, italics for the stuff that will definitely be changed.

Halliday
Chapter 2:
The town was finally beginning to liven up as Halliday stepped onto the boardwalk that afternoon. The false-fronted buildings were rimmed in frost, butted up against the towering walls of ice. The Melting Pot Bar across the street from the hotel had men going in and out constantly, and a train of toboggans was parked outside the general store; two men with white leather overcloaks were wrestling a particularly awkward piece of strut metal into one of them.

Halliday crossed the street toward the blacksmith's shop, sliding across the ice, following the sound of automatic hammers and the blowing hot air from electric furnaces. Inside, Old Jim Hendricks was bent over an oddly shaped circular piece of metal, attempting to close the circle and tack-weld it in place. As John Halliday shut the door behind him, Hendricks's grip slipped, and the circle sprang back open. Hendricks dropped the piece of metal to the floor and kicked it across the room.

"No machine built yet that can turn a 8 mil peice of 1018 into a good enough circle, and this old man has to suffer every time someone needs one. What can I do for you Stranger?"

John spent some time surveying the shop with a critical eye. "Nice place you have here, a little messy, but I can tell when someone knows his stuff."

"Been working in this business for 23 years mister, I've just about got it so's folks'll come to me for just about everything.”

"I don’t doubt it friend, I can see you have enough set aside for some 1095 in your stockpile there. I need a set of blades, the finest steel you have. Blunted tip if you can muster it, My boots have a 10 milimeter fitting. They should be fast sure, but I do a lot of scrambling when I’m out and about. And a good pair of spikers to go with them. I can assure you the extra time will be well worth it."

Old Jim raised one eyebrow.

"Thats a steep demand friend, and some damned good steel I'll be banging on. Who are you anyways?"

"I thought you've heard by now, that shrimp of a clerk down at the station sure likes to tell people bout all the unsuspecting men who come in on the stage"

John set two gold coins down on the table. "You'll find out who I am soon enough, there is something you might be able to help me with though.”

He paused, and the blacksmith looked up, curious. “Maybe I can, what is it?”

“I’m looking for a man, his name is Dutch Vanderbilt?”

“Dutch … Vanderbilt?”

His face went from pleasantly curious to stone cold in a matter of seconds. John was caught offguard by the instant change in demeanor.

“Yes, a friend of mine did some business with him back in the states, do you know where I could … "

From stone cold to angry, just as fast as before.

"You’ll have to ask someone else I don’t know where he is.”

"Do you know what he looks like? Maybe his hair color, or.."

"NO! And don’t ask me again, and don’t come into my shop ever again, I don’t have time to make a new set of blades either, you’ll have to buy from the store.”

Halliday carefully leaned back against the wall, he stared at the man for a long moment before speaking.

"Alright then,” Each word was said deliberately, a clear threat behind them. “I won’t bring him up anymore, but it seems to me you had all the time in the world to get a fine set of blades fitted for me, and I was fixing to pay you well for your work. Now I think maybe I’ll forget about you just said if you forget about what I said. I’ll be back for the blades tonight, and you’ll be payed well, as long as I receive the product I’m expecting.."

John stepped back to the door. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement, no hard feelings, I really do need a set of blades,” he said.

Old Jim grumbled and turned back to his forge. John slipped out of the door, making sure to close it quickly.

The cool air washed over his face, turning his breath into puffs of fog as Halliday strolled down the boardwalk. Why had Old Jim changed so suddenly at the mention of this Dutch fellow? Was he protecting the man, or was it fear of something worse? And that clerk at the stage station—he'd been relaying information to Dutch out of obligation, or something more sinister? Something wasn't right in this town, and Halliday was beginning to see that the pieces just weren't adding up.