Writing Progress

1500 words on Sunday that turned out to be deep character background/potential YA* rather than actually the book I'm supposed to be writing. About 1500 words yesterday, actually in the Disruptive Technology narrative - expanding the opening scenes in which my innocent protagonist gets pulled into a Homeland Security investigation because of her specialist knowledge - which with today's couple of hundred takes us up to 11,000 words. But today seems to be mostly turning into a research day. 

Googled so far:

King County Sheriff's Office Air Support Unit, and then an image search for cabin pictures of Guardian 2, the actual helicopter they're in. I didn't really get a lot of success with that last, but it's a Huey, and seating plans are easily googleable.

King County Child Protective Services - character background. Need to go back to that as I didn't get what I wanted.

Cis-platin related Ototoxicity - character background again.

Airfields in Seattle - I know the big ones, via work initially, but I'll need a private field at a couple of points.

And then I had to dig into Google Earth and look for a road suitable for the ambush site they're flying out to examine. Which turned out to be a real pain. I need several things out of the site - somewhere the ambush will work, which requires an open area, and who knew Washington state was so full of trees, somewhere the ambushees can evade the ambush, and all of it on terrain my protagonist will find difficult (because that lets me get a bunch of yes, I'm an amputee, get over it exposition in the first chapter). I found three places along US-12 east of Mount Rainier that would almost work, and for each of them I had to go down into Streetview to look at actual images of the terrain (amongst other things, you need Streetview to tell if the road is totally walled in with guardrails, which nixes going cross-country to escape). I did find one place they could probably evade across a weir, but getting my protagonist across that when she turns up to look around would be a pain in the ass. Then I went literally around the corner from that one, and realised that while my first draft has the access problem being the slope going downhill, the slope going uphill is just as much an issue, and if the road is sticking to the valley bottom, I really should look at that. And not only is there a handy-dandy ridge for the ambushed folks to get out of sight behind, and far enough from the road for my purposes, but there's a bluff overlooking everything that is a perfect spot to launch the ambush from. Mission accomplished, rewrite tomorrow.

* It's an idea I had at Christmas, but which didn't get written down, as opposed to the ones that did and spawned this whole project.