29 Apr 2012

TSJ #37 – Tom Swift and the Sunless Ocean

Posted by joncooper

This afternoon I didn’t have much to do, and I had a crazy idea: why not write a Tom Swift story? That is, why not write a complete Tom Swift story in one afternoon?

So I did, as a challenge, just to see what would happen. The result is here:

Tom Swift Jr #37, Tom Swift and the Sunless Ocean

For the record, every bit of the story was conceived today, after lunch. The book title and chapter titles came from my book title generator; I just tried to craft the story to include whatever the chapter title happened to say. I did absolutely no thinking about it earlier; writing the book didn’t even cross my mind until I was eating lunch today.

I did not start out with a plot, or even knowing what was going on. I just sat down and started writing, and wrote until I ran out of time. The end result is what I uploaded.

It needs editing – badly. But editing it will take days, and I wanted to see what could be done in a single afternoon. The result is at least coherent, and comes in at just under 10k words – about 1/3rd the length of a normal TS story. Chronologically, it takes place after Claytronic Stones.

I literally did not know what was going to happen until I wrote it; I had no idea what would happen in the next chapter. I have not gone back and tweaked it. I will, later, but I wanted to share this with the group.

It was a fun challenge. Writing a mini-book in one afternoon is completely different from writing one over six months. You don’t have time; you just have to sit down, go with it, and hope for the best.

Anyway, since it was a Tom Swift story I thought I’d pass it along. Enjoy!

(And please, don’t be too hard with it. I will eventually edit it and turn it into a polished story.)

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