JT.

Oh that story is beautiful and awful both, @elle. A well deserved win.

I’ve now watched this and it is brilliant. Quality programme, as others have said, and you shine, @daedalus. I was spot on (as @richardb said) when I said I bet you were ‘engaging, knowledgeable and quietly authoritative’, before I had a chance to see it…:-) Really well done! x

Good to know! Coffman starters are great. Basically using a shotgun cartridge to start an engine, minus the lead shot of course. I don’t just do naval aviation btw, my last nonfic was a biography of a RAF bomber pilot, flying instructor and test pilot before and during WW2. Any technical queries, feel free to ask

Thanks Elle. These are good prompts. I’m very into settings, which I think comes from my previous life as a conservation ecologist – working in some amazing wild places. So I’ve always got to have a strong sense of the natural world that my story takes place in – weather, plants, animals, noises, tides, rock types … yeah maybe I go too far, but…[Read more]

Thanks Libby, that’s really nice of you. Glad you found it interesting and informative. I thought they struck the balance pretty well, and as you and Jane felt, did not overdo it with reconstructions. The little bits they did have (a snippet at the start of the Eugene Ely segment and some sailors running through corridors on a warship in the…[Read more]

Thanks Jane, am blushing now! You’re very kind

Yes, that’s good. Intriguing, suggestive and evocative. Well done, that’s a relief! 🙂

Very impressive, Daeds 🙂

Don’t change anything! Mr Sea is in Doha this weekend with instructions to visit the Museum of Islamic Art to take photos of their amazing collection of astrolabes. I don’t have any ideas yet, but I know an astrolabe will be involved.

I liked the prompts, Jonathan – their utter randomness and the idea. Stick with it. Nano will be a slow month, but we all might need a little breather mid month to keep ourselves sane!!

My inclination would be for you to leave as-is Jonathan. I’m sure you’ll get plenty of entries as and when. NaNo month is always a bit difficult for things like this, but I for one am keen to make sure I enter every Den comp

Sounds good. Plenty of things said and unsaid in there. Of course, now you’ve spent ages deciding on that, your editor will definitely want to change it again!!

That’s amazing @Daedalus!! SO exciting! Although not for him, obv. For him that’s the ultimate defeat *sobs offscreen*. And I love it when you realise something, and there’s that ‘well, yes, *obviously*’ feeling to it. Like that facet of your story was there all along, you just hadn’t spotted it. So good.

That works. Nice and simple!

Yes, it was a bit of a million candlepower searchlight moment. In a sense, it’s not that the MC doesn’t try to change, he just completely misinterprets the kind of change he needs. He (and I) had been thinking it was one thing, and it was actually almost the opposite.