Christmas Carol: A Short Story - Part XI

Entry posted by DZ-Jay September 29, 2018

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I screwed up. Not majorly, but I made a mistake in my story and painted myself in a corner. Darn.

You see (well, I guess "I" see, for I don't expect anybody else to be reading this blog. I do read it, so I'm just talking to the other "me" who's going to re-read this one later). Anyway, where was I ... Oh yeah ...

You see (tsk! tsk! tsk!), Carol found herself in the Candy Cove -- the last cave explored by the guy who made the map. He left it incomplete, and it's up to Carol herself to learn new details of it. One such details (and a rather important one at that), is that the cave has a tunnel connecting it to two other chambers. These two chambers are brand new to us all; they are not on the map, for nobody has charted them ever (well, perhaps the Ghost of Christmas Presents, who lives there).

The Candy Cove cavern is laid out like a snowflake: with a hub in the center, and six prongs stemming from it, each ending in a small room. Oh, and it's full of candy, hence the name. It turns out that one of those prongs does not end in a cul-de-sac as her unfinished map shows, but actually has an extended tunnel that leads to the next chamber to the east. The plan was for Carol to discover this new tunnel while looking around and continue on her adventure. It looks like this:

So, I came up with a clever device: while she's searching each individual room, when she came to this special one, she would notice a draft blowing her hair or something. She would then examine the walls and find a crack, large enough for her to slip through, et voilà: Carol now has a new area to explore.

Except that I let the "writing me" alone on the computer for a brief moment and he wrote that Carol searched the entire cavern for presents. DOH! :dunce:

Just as she expected, Carol found a stash of presents in each of the satellite chambers—along with plenty more candy—and just as planned, she brought them all to the central hub of the Candy Cove. She worked her way counterclockwise from the south-western chamber, all the way to the north-western one: the large room where she had originally seen the Ghost’s fabulous show.

Sure, I could excise that paragraph completely and re-write it. I tried, but the problem is that I like how it reads right now. To make matters worse, that special chamber with the new tunnel is not the first nor the last one. It's right in the middle. That means that either I figure out how to express Carol searching each tunnel randomly for that one to just happen to be last by pure chance, which sounds awkward; or any organized search clockwise or counterclockwise will have to be interrupted in the middle, which breaks the flow of the passage above. Darn.

So, I decided to keep it as is: Carol already finished searching the tunnels, found all the presents and ate more candy -- but she didn't find the hidden tunnel. How do I solve this? I came up with an idea which I think works, although seems a bit convenient:

Before leaving for the other caverns, Carol decided to go once more through all the little rooms shooting from the hub to make sure she didn’t miss any presents (and to pick up some more candy, by the way).

Yes, Carol just does a last minute check for presents and -- oh, look at that, there's a hidden tunnel in there! Let's explore it.

It'll have to do, at least for the moment.

Anyway, she'll find the tunnel which will lead her to the Snowflake Garden. This is the first time that Carol comes across the magical snowflakes that Santa warned her about. I don't know what I'm going to do with those yet; I have some ideas, but nothing concrete. In the game, they are just power-pellets, like in Pac-Man; but in this story, I think they need a bit more character. I'll come up with something.

On to continue Chapter 8, which according to my outline, puts me three chapters before the conclusion. Not bad. I think I'll make it on time.