#and it's mostly foreshadowing bc [giant hook yanks me away from tumblr]

[tragedycoded]

Am now cursed with knowing the version of the story I have is better than the version I had outlined and needing to immediately get it out of my skull and into the word document.

I'm going to yap real quick. I'll try to avoid finale spoilers but that's always the part of the story that comes to me the clearest when I know I've got a winner so oops~

So I'm going to reskin my characters and hope no one notices (if you read DMLS you're going to notice.)

The novel takes place in 1995, when lovers Paul Cody and Ezra Hayes are scuba diving on vacation and decide to check out a sinkhole that was discovered a few months earlier.

There was no cave diving certification back in 1995, but I've decided Cody is a recently retired Air Force pararescuer. I think he's going to be my math teacher. He and Hayes have been together for a long-ass time, so Hayes may as well be qualified to do cave dive/body recovery. But he's not a professional diver. He doesn't do shit for work. This is it. He fucks around all day. He's done almost a thousand dives because he decided scuba diving kicks ass sometime in the 1980s. Guess who Hayes is a reskin of.

While they're on their first dive of what they're hoping is going to be several that vacation, they find the body of a young man who went missing earlier that summer.

That would be Kurt, the marine botanist. Spoiler alert, he was actually the last to die, and he's tied for dying at the deepest depth.

On Kurt's body is a tablet with a note that says (paraphrased) "DON'T GO TO THE LIGHTHOUSE."

Since they aren't equipped to bring up a body from depth (they've only got the air they need to go down 130 feet and come back up, and they don't make it past 100 feet before they find Kurt's body inside a huge sinkhole) they come back up and report the body to police. The police don't have a dedicated dive team (it's the '90s) and they aren't going to go out there to recover "a bunch of tourists."

Cave diving is fucking dangerous even today but 30 years ago they were lacking a lot of the high-tech equipment that divers have today. I need to confirm they didn't have dive computers that would tell them how deep Kurt came from. How far down Kurt went will be a realization Cody has in the finale.

Cody, being a fucking boy scout, is like Well he wasn't dangerously far down, if we plan to make a deco[mpression] stop on the way up it'll be fine.

B Story, aka "SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER!"

When they get back down there to retrieve the body several days later, he isn't where he was. The two men realize a shark or a current or something must have knocked him down off the shelf he was on, and he's fallen deeper into the sinkhole.

This is where most of the pre-midpoint happens: they realize the body has sunk deeper, they can't go after him right that second, and then Cody starts to show signs of nitrogen narcosis at around 130 feet. His reasoning is impaired and for about 30 seconds he's fixated on the idea of continuing to descend. This is a setback. His tolerance for nitrogen is decreasing. They have to be very careful when they're putting their air mixes together which means I HAVE TO DO FUCKING MATH.

Knowing he has the skills necessary to bring back this young man's body, and also possibly locate the other five members of the party so their parents can have closure, Cody agrees to coordinate with the local police to go back down into the sinkhole.

I'm folding a lot of things to keep this yappening moving. Cody and Hayes are probably going to argue and then fuck nasty before going back down there. They also have to show the reader I did my research by talking with dive store staff and police and the kids' parents and their dive support etc. etc.

Hayes, who has a natural resistance to nitrogen narcosis and doesn't trust he can get a body into a bag at serious depth after the last time, insists on going with him, and Cody calls his best friend (who is a diving instructor/Hofer expy) to discuss the problem he's going to have bringing a body up from that depth. Bestie goes "WHAT??" and helps him plan for the dive; Hayes's sister also hears about what they're doing and flies out so she can be dive support for the rescue operation.

This is necessary so that they can get all the air mixtures they're going to need to survive potentially hitting a depth of 230 feet. They're already pushing it going over 165 feet. Nitrogen narcosis can occur at depths of 33-100 feet.

They meticulously plan the dive and how to bring Kurt's body back up. They agree on what to do if they find the other five divers, and agree that once they bring back Kurt's body, this is the last deep dive for Cody for a while, possibly permanently.

At the midpoint, they go back down.

This is where I'm cutting myself off, because that's the whole point of the story. From there it's 35k words of heavy metal guitar noises. Underwater.