The Never-Ending Edit

gday gentle readers  

I'm still only in chapter 2 (scene 11 of 1302) of the trilogy and still finding non trivial problems about a rate of one per scene.

The latest is a distance/time problem.  My heroine must catch a marching army before it reaches a certain point some 500 miles away. She has been delayed and I put this though into her head.
 

"I will have lost a whole day; the contingent will be gone, hard to catch even with a horse."
A bit of basic research however shows a marching army even with horse and carts can travel at 3mph.(18 miles per 6hr day)  My ultra fit well-trained heroine I let travel 5mph (about half the speed of an Olympic Walker over 30 miles) or 30 miles per 6hr day - as if she would only do 6 hours a day when she is desperate to catch them.

But that means she will catch them midday on the third day when they've only gone 45 miles nowhere near the 500 mile cut-off point. Even if I somehow delay her for 3 days she will still catch at the 135 mile point - still well short of the mark 

Did she just think, 'even with a horse' perhaps she isn't as well trained as I thought. To make it work I have to speed up the contingent, slow her down, delay her 12 days or rearrange the geography yet again. 


Let me add that this was not just a throw away thought, it was designed to show she couldn't catch them and hence was forced onto a dangerous less-well travelled path. I just didn't think it through: My map wasn't to scale, I didn't consider the relative speeds of the contingent and my heroine. 

It will have to be the delay, in the context of the remaining 500,000 words, the other solutions are no longer negotiable. It will still be a hefty rewrite because on her journey out she crosses paths with others in a critical sequence which precipitates the hero's journey.

This all came about because my map was upside down 

I'm Australian ergo southern hemisphere ergo if you go north it gets hotter. Naturally I wanted this for my world but my original map had the adjoining enemy continent south of my hero/heroines homelands.

The southern continent got so big during the telling of the later part of the tale it necessitated turning the entire map upside-down and that's when it all started going wrong. I've spent several days redrawing all the maps to fit the completed trilogy. It's a little more sophisticated (a.k.a. creeping elegance) than those drawn a decade ago. 

Created in a FractalMapper8 ~ http://www.nbos.com/

Oh well, back to plotting board.

until my next post ooroo

RoB

p.s. Later that same night. On thinking about it a 12 day delay will work nicely but it requires a brand new scene (#1303) in a story that hasn't had a radical change since last millennium.