Chateau Lloyd

My latest project on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is moving at a crawl. 

Actually, that's not true - the pace is a crawl, but it's moving in fits and starts.  A week ago I cranked out more than 3,ooo words in a single evening.  Since then:  nothing.

I admit, part of that was Halloween, which takes up extra time.  A week from now I might have written 10,000 words.  It's hard to say.

What makes this project different from the others is that it isn't escapist.  It doesn't take place in outer space or on another planet.  It's based on real-life experience.

On the one hand, that makes it easier to write because I know how it's going to end.  I know pretty much everything that I want to happen.

Which is also the problem, because I can't really surprise myself with character development or some new plot twist that reveals itself to me as I write.  That makes it inherently less creative.  My imagining is operating under constraints I haven't faced before.

I imagine this is one of the things that bedevils the writers of historical fiction.  You have to get the details right or the thing won't work. 

The plus side of this is that you don't have to think of everything - reality did that for you.  In a sense, my new book is historical fiction, it's just that the "history" was only eight years ago.

Still, looking at 2010 vs today, it's an interesting contrast.  I don't think the world changed that much in eight years, but my understanding of it has.

One big difference is the oil industry.  Back then people seriously believed that the world supply of oil was past its peak and we would be facing ever-greater shortages.  I actually reached out to a web site called The Oil Drum which was dedicated to tracking this.  Many of its commenters were petroleum engineers and industry specialists who pondered how to adapt to the coming scarcity.

It turned out that they were wrong.  The Oil Drum itself shut down in 2013.  The link above goes it its archive. 

But in 2010, theirs was a popular view and national policy was being made in accordance with it.

All of which to say is that certain futures can change remarkably fast, leaving us to look back only a few years later wondering "what were we thinking?"