This story (and all Ted and Jeds) originated because I was taking over the Northern New Jersey Grotto newsletter. It's ten pages a month, with roughly one trip report a month written for it. Sometimes the count went down to 8 or 6 pages, solely because there wasn't enough content to fill the space. If I wrote something monthly, the space would be filled and I'd have a deadline (which seems to be the only guaranteed way I'll write). And if people didn't like it, they were more than welcome to bump it out by writing trip reports or other newsletter content of their own. That was December 1999. Cut to the present, and it has not reached the point where people hate it so much that they write other stuff to displace it. I did the exact same thing with the college newspaper and Jack and Jill. And with a commentary section on a campus radio news program where I ended up writing about well over a hundred commentaries (as well as a series of fictional film reviews which was just confusing to the three people who listened). I've got lousy self-discipline, but I can write under deadline. So I find myself deadlines, then find a way so the stuff I want to write is stapled to that deadline. Most everything I've written has come about this way. When I started caving I knew there was plenty of fiction to be had from the caving world. There's a decent amount of stories with cave scenes, but nothing really about cavers (Nevada Barr's Blind Descent notwithstanding). I've got hopes of getting some grand adventure novels written about caving, but with the time and space limitations I had, I opted for short mysteries.
Simpson Cave is fictional, although its location and layout is pretty much based on Surprise Cave, just over the New Jersey border in New York. The Simpsons-heavy names of the cave parts came from Jewel Cave in South Dakota, which has some real creative names (a section called the Cash Register uses all money terms). I wanted to use real caves for the series, but I didn't know Surprise well enough at the time (while most other people in the grotto do, and would instantly notice any goof on my part). I've also found it to be a useful writing tool to be able to make up whatever the hell geography you want. Coincidentally, Surprise was the first cave I had been in (not counting two I did as a Weblos).
Keeping the caves fictional helps in conservation, but only if you assume vandals are reading Ted and Jed with a road map. Caving is sometimes secretive, especially to locations of caves with formations. Most don't have gates of any kind, so any jackass with a hacksaw and a flashlight can crawl in and saw himself off a 100,000 year old souvenir. It's not a huge factor here on the East Coast, where there's very little to look at and lots of muddy crawling hell to reach that little bit. But out west, vandalism is a very real concern. If Ted and Jed ever go to some formation-heavy cave in the southwest, the cave's fictionalness will be a moral choice in addition to one of convenience.
I tried every episode to work in a little of the theme of people getting too smart for their own good. It apexes in something like serial killers (most of whom are of above average intelligence) but also results in regular smart people who are miserable at the world because it likes terrible movies and music. Go on the Internet and you'll find a thousand of these guys. Aristotle said the goal of life is happiness, and if you get to an intelligence point where the smarter you get, the more miserable you get, it's become counterproductive for you.
There's a tiny mention of a loop trip that's possible in Simpson that I ended up not doing anything with. I got more and more of the layout of Simpson down as the story progressed, and I have no idea where that loop trip fits in my current mental Simpson layout. Oops.
I ended this on a goof, saying Jed's carbide lamp was sizzling, when I had previously said he had a Peztl battery light. I fixed it for the online version.
The first mention of the lightning got dropped in here. It comes up an awful lot in the story, just in case people don't know about it. It's scientifically possible, but I've never heard of anyone getting hurt underground from it.
I portrayed Ted as the reasonable person and Jed as the sorta stupid one, even though Jed is smart by most conventional definitions of the word. If you haven't met me, I'm more toward Jed than Ted. I didn't want to portray the "book smarts" that me and my novel-critiquing ilk have as superior to the "street smarts" that most cavers have. Hence, most every stupid occurrence can be traced back to Jed.
From here the episodes are roughly twice as long. For the first two, I was working with a larger font and using half of one page as the jump to another story. When I go over 1000 characters, I've usually shrunk the text to 9 point, which is borderline illegible, especially coming out of my crummy printer. But no one was reading it, regardless of font size, so it was a moot point.
A lot of movies are dubbed Drop a Quarter movies, since the entire movie could be avoided if a character just called the police. I didn't want this to become one, and at the same time I didn't want it turning into a police procedural. Other people know procedure much better than me, and there's no shortage of well-crafted police procedurals being written. So the cops are present, but never take a big piece of any episode.
Once a third speaking character comes in, the dialogue tags become somewhat necessary. I end up writing little stage scenes, imaging how the lines should be said, but leaving it up to the reader to put the inflections in. Believe it or not, those two and three word dialogue tags "Jed said," "I said, confused," do a lot of line expanding, and leave an issue that's thirty lines over the allotted space. I try to cut them out so the conversations still make sense.
A purely technical aspect of writing that a lot of old time writers goof on is letting the reader know who's saying what. I had a Moby Dick test in college where I was given a quote and had to identify the speaker. It was something like "This coffin belongs to Queequeg," only dripping with 19th centuryisms. I took a guess, and then after the test, I opened my book and hunted down the quote. After five readings, I STILL didn't know who said it (possibly Starbuck, Ismael, Ahab, or even Queequeg speaking in third person). It's just a skill thing that an editor would be able to add. Of course, I'm my own editor for this, so apologies aplenty for any time you don't know who's speaking. Most times I get dialogue tags or little movement descriptions that pinpoint the speaker, but sometimes they get overlooked. Pure sloppiness on my editor's part.
I had written all of Jack and Jill without giving any of the characters a last name. Here, Ted and Jed finally get theirs: Schiffhorst and Halpern. They don't mean anything: I just thought they sounded like real last names. Considering how flakily I gave them their first names, they should be glad the last names didn't rhyme as well.
There is no Garden State Grotto. Real area grottoes (my area) are the Northern New Jersey Grotto, Central New Jersey Grotto, and Met Grotto for the city. No one is modeled after any real person: that would be cheating, and would also stand out like a rainbow afro to an audience who know themselves better than I do.
There were three or four little errors in this one I fixed, 'we' instead of 'he' and open quotations and goofs of a single character. When I see them in books, I just give a little snicker, "whoops, the editor's kicking himself," and then I move on to the next line. When I saw it with mine, I assumed everyone reading it would firebomb my house for being so incompetent. I got a wicked double standard going on.
The dog walking through is Alex's dog, and the chain dragging behind is the same one that gets used later.
I put the map in there confident that it would not be a plot point. I was aware it smacked of plot point, but I figured a mystery ought to have red herrings to disguise the real plot points. In the back of my head, I held onto the map as a backup, in case something needed explaining I hadn't counted on. And sure enough, the map helped me out a few episodes later.
Hopefully I'll be able to stay away from the Jessica Fletcher problem, where EVERY WEEK another acquaintance gets bumped off. It'd be down to once a year for Ted and Jed, but that's still one more cave crime a year than anyone I know is currently solving.
I was hoping to bring the claustrophobia back for the climax of this, but there just wasn't room for it. Dang. Maybe next time.
I sweated a lot to get this one right. When I reread it, it doesn't look like it took much of an effort, which I guess is a good thing. Surprisingly, I can't find any plot holes in this chapter to apologize for. I figured this would be the big one, but it's relatively tight.
I guess it's rather asinine to start writing a mystery and then have chapters like this where it could all fall apart. But it didn't fall apart, so I didn't learn my lesson, so I'll keep doing it.
The ending, however, I should have put somewhere else. I raise big clouds of suspicion over the whole cast, and then immediately blow it down a few paragraphs later with a surprise confession. I would have liked longer in the car with Ted and Alex, but the space only allowed so much to write. Here's the big advantage to plotting the whole thing before you write.
Yes, Jed was stupid to not call the police when he figured out the murderer. And in not looking at the driver's seat of an unknown car. But if he wasn't stupid like that, the story would be over, and the last three chapters would be more phone calls and polite apologies, with no guns or caves or lightning.
Some of it fell into the unfriendly category of the villain explaining the plot before the hero escapes. Hopefully people are so familiar with this cliche by now that they forgive me for having Alex do that.
If anyone knows what really happens when a car goes from R to D in mid-acceleration, please tell me. Give it a try next time you're in a rental.
With this issue, I started printing out the newsletters not from my printer at home, but from my brother's computer at work. He works two buildings away from me and has Publisher (my layout program) so I send it over there and get a much better quality print than from my crummy inkjet (which has had a broken toner cartridge for four months now, and, so long as Jeff's printer is generous, will never be replaced). The downside is that moving a file from one Publisher edition to another changes the line counts. So every page shrinks a little, and multi-page stories end up with an inch or two of blank space following the last paragraph. After spending so much time cutting and trimming to make each chapter fit exactly, I almost get physically angry when I realize I'm going to have twenty lines of unused space I could have filled with copy.
Getting Ted and Jed inside Simpson with Alex gunning for them was another big hurdle to get over. Any normal person would avoid the enclosed space and go in the large open direction where telephones and cops are. But it had to be done, so I made it a short justification and moved on.
You know how twenty pages of a thriller can be confusing legalities being fought over, usually resulting in a cop being able to work on his wife's murder or a lawyer being allowed to represent the defendant when his same firm is representing the prosecution? Same thing. Wouldn't happen in the real world, but in concession to the real world, you go through the unlikely rigmarole that gets you from point A to point B. Some people hate getting bogged down with it, some people think you haven't explained it well enough, some people will accept it matter how much or little work you do, and some people will hate it no matter what. There's bear traps in every direction, so you have to go in the direction you want to the most, watch your footing, and try not to piss people off.
Leo was scheduled to be an appearing rather than the unseen character. But by the time he got around, there was a lot of business to take care of each episode, and introducing a new character (not to mention a second hopefully believeable villain) would make it way too top heavy. So he became a shadow figure, just driving the Ferrari. It ended up looking like that was Leo's intent from the beginning. Which I guess means that it worked.
The epilogue could have gone a little smoother, especially the end conversation. Same story with so much other stuff in the book: not enough space, not enough time to write. I wanted to bring up the intelligence theme, get it into a few easy sentences, but the dice didn't roll that way.
Hopefully the dialogue and the novelty of caving made up for anyone who got disappointed by wanting the perfectly plotted Agatha Christie novel underground. I think the writing got better as it went on. The last few chapters I'm positively unashamed of.
I probably should have held the dead body plot point for another story. At least it turned into the focal point of the plot, like it would in a real life situation. There's so many books where the protagonist casually wades through fresh corpses without a second thought. I don't want the series to ever get to a point where Ted and Jed are killing nuclear terrorists who are hiding out in caves. They're sport cavers, not secret agents. Once you leave the point of them being real people, they turn into action figures going through increasingly ridiculous plots just to keep the reader interested. Nothing wrong with stories like that (I've got more than a few in me) but I don't want that to happen to Ted and Jed.