Today was a good writing day. I tore into chapter 1, tightened up the wording, gave it a cliffhanger ending. It's still quite long because it contains a lot of flashbacks, but I think they work well structurally. I also worked on the first 'Sphinx Scroll', the 'translation' of which appears in the book as a kind of prologue. It gave away a bit too much of the plot, so I cut out part of it and inserted it into a later instalment of the scroll translations which appear towards the end of the book.
So what's happening in the story so far? Archeologist Ruby Towers is having a bad day in Guatemala. In the middle of a civil war she is summoned to a new dig at the ancient lost city of Tikal (see picture above, taken on my research visit - you may recognise the scene from when George Lucas used it to represent an alien planet in one of the Star Wars films). Soldiers belonging to the rebel army take over the dig because their commander is interested in a large artefact that has been found. Ruby and her team are held at gunpoint, and things are not looking good. Her lover, Matt Baker, is a former special forces officer, and he's due to meet her today. He is Ruby's only chance of rescue but he's late.
While that is going on, Ruby's life starts to flash before her eyes, which really annoys her because she knows it's a cliche and she hates that kind of thing. She recalls a meeting with 'Ratty', an aristocratic fellow Cambridge alumnus who inherited a curious Mayan stele that seemed to depict things that were thought not to have existed in ancient central America, including paper scrolls.
So that's where I'm at right now. There are seeds planted in this chapter that have yet to grow elsewhere in the book, and I'll work that stuff out later. Looking forward to working on chapter 2 tomorrow. This really is fun - it's been so long since I've looked at this manuscript that some of the twists of the story actually take me by surprise.
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