It’s March 8th, 2015. I am nine full weeks into this hot mess. It’s time for the Week Nine update on my 1K a Day Challenge!

Days 60 through 66 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written. 

Stats for Days 60 to 66:

Day 60 – 1035 words
Day 61 – 1061 words
Day 62 – 1058 words
Day 63 – 1657 words
Day 64 – 1115 words
Day 65 – 1172 words
Day 66 – 1105 words

Total count for the year thus far is 91,858 words. Average daily word count is 1,391 words. Gridfall is at 88,947 words. Based on my projections for the story, it is 45% finished.

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Last week I talked about the friendly faction to the Rebuilders, the Everguard. This week I’m going to focus on something totally different, and that is mostly just worldbuilding for the world.

As mentioned previously, the alternate industrial path changed the development of key technologies, and thus entire disciplines were altered or left to founder.

The biggest of these is aeronautics and then ultimately astronautics. When it was first coming into its own, aeronautics was fairly bootstrap method. People were just experimenting, learning how to make it work, much like our own development. But just as it was becoming a discipline, with schooling and training and transport, the grid technology was discovered.

So much more efficient and viable than fossil fuels, combustion technology, and the electricity that followed, proximity power quickly became the standard before it became the only available energy source. There were detractors, of course, especially those in aeronautics and the fledgling space administration that had sprung up. The proximity power was, by its nature, tied to the surface. Any surface. It was wholly incompatible with airborne and space flight. And because the power source for proximity power was not mobile and rumored to be tied to the electromagnetic field of the planet, technologies that could not be worked with proximity power quickly fell by the wayside.

Of course, long into the reign of proximity power, people were still attempting to make sky bridges, scaffolds of grid that would skate airborne vehicles through the heavens. Most of these proved too dangerous, far too unstable, and without a way to mitigate civilian casualty on the populace below, they too fell defunct.

Personal gliders persisted, and zeppelins might still be seen, tethered by flexible grid-cable, like a dog on a running wire. Astronautics, flight and navigation beyond the atmosphere of the planet, is still pursued. But there are no artificial satellites ringing the planet. No global positioning systems that aren’t tied to the grid.

It’s a subtle difference, but it makes all the difference.

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And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.