Nearby, beautiful, and abandoned.

It was so nice out yesterday that I drove to the Ochoco Mountains. Still too early. I ran into dirty snow and mud--primordial mud. Nowhere really to walk. Eked it out, but very unsatisfying.

Running into more people as the weather turns. Funny, I run into less people in mid-summer. But of course, it can be really hot out there in the high desert during the summer, so maybe I'm the only one willing to sweat.

I'm looking for an impossible place: nearby, beautiful, and abandoned.

If I had a pickup I could venture further into the wilderness, but I only have my Toyota with a front suspension that's giving out because of my rocky wanderings.


22,000 words as of yesterday, which is interesting because the original version only had 24K words in total and I have a long way to go before I catch up to that timeline. I'm guessing I'll get to somewhere around 35K words before I've re-envisioned all the scenes I originally envisioned. By the time I consolidate the two versions, I may be over 40K words, which is wonderful.

I have the main character connecting with some longshoreman Teamsters in a place called Ashton Harbor, (a made up place.) I decided it needed to be a port, but a small one. Did such places exist?

Well, I reasoned that there still had to be ports that didn't take the big container ships, but maybe smaller container ships. There still had to be ports that took in or shipped cargo outside of containers, maybe even ones who specialized in that.

So I went ahead and wrote the scenes.

Then I did the research, figuring I'd have to adjust to reality.

Turns out there are such things as "feeder" ships and "feeder ports," that do indeed deal in smaller container ships, which then go to the big ports. (55 worldwide.)

It turns out 10% of all cargo is still shipped outside of containers.

Which all fit just right with the scene I wrote.

Amazing how often that happens.