What are you writing about now?

The plot of LOTR is pretty wild if you boil it down to its essential facts.

This is a report from an enemy spy returning to his immediate boss in Eriador (i.e. not Sauron), about what he experienced after participating in the failed assaults on Lorien.

As I travelled through Rohan and Dunland to make my way back to you, I heard many stories. I had to travel slowly once I was well within Rohan, for they were a nation at war and not friendly to strangers. Some were clearly the wild sort of rumours one hears whenever war ravages a land. But others were official pronouncements by the heralds of Rohan.

They claimed walking trees drove Saruman from Isengard and destroyed his army of man-orcs. Gondor captured the Corsair fleet of Umbar with an army of the dead, then destroyed Sauron’s armies before Minas Tirith, including the Witch King of Angmar! A new king of Gondor took up the kingship. And on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the same day the battle of the Ford of Celebrant ended, two half-sized men destroyed Sauron and his Nazgûl. The Towers of the Teeth and the mighty Fortress of Barad-dûr fell and were no more!

I do not know whether all this is true – it all sounds crazy-wild! But I do know the Rohirrim believed it.

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I wouldn't want to be the one reporting that whopper of a tale. Who would believe it?

I've been trying something new in the last few chapters. As you might recall, book 1 in my series is officially a translation of a collection of stories, letters, documents, songs, etc. Each of those would be "formally created" by the "historical" authors. These chapters are interviews of various participants. But, to avoid the standard interview 'ask and answer' format, I'm just having the person being interviewed do the talking. If the interviewer asks a question, I just write the text with the interviewee repeating the question.

Could I explain that a bit more?

Sure. In fact, I just gave you an example of how it works...

This little trick is REALLY simplifying the writing and letting it read ever so much easier. Decades ago, I wrote the first chapter of Book 1. In it, the person who ends up compiling the material in Book 1 is relating a story from their childhood to another character. The story includes conversation. So, I have someone talking (i.e., their words are in quotes) who is relating someone's conversation (which ALSO needs quotes, in this case, nested quotes).

I was inordinately proud of that writing. But it's very hard to read compared to regular story text. It really hurts your head when a character relates what another character says a third character said. Triple-nested quotes. Hurts one's head to write and to read!

This trick that I'm trying out removes the need for the nested quotes. Triple-nested quotes are pretty rarely needed, and they would now be just nested quotes. It's much easier to follow.

Thought I would share that in case it's helpful.

I'm going to go back and rewrite that original chapter and see if I like it better. I suspect I will.

***

I'm also trying something else new. I have a problem with my writing. I tend to wander between present and past tense. It takes a lot of work and concentration to avoid doing that and to fix it when I do it anyway. I've always admired situations where someone takes a real weakness and thru the magic of jiu-jitsu, they turn it into a strength. So, in this latest interview, the interviewee (an elf and a consummate bard) confesses they have this very same problem. When they formally craft a story into a song or poem, the very structure of the work and the discipline it takes to craft it enables them to overcome the problem. Plus, all the extraneous detail gets removed to focus the audience on the critical essence of the story or song.

The interviewee confesses that they are just as fascinated by all the random bits in a person's life as they are by the great deeds and are all too likely to wander and digress when they tell a story they have not formally prepared. In addition, being an elf, their memories are very vivid, as fresh as when the memories were made. So, when telling a tale that's a mixture of things that happened to them directly and things that their companions related to them (or are not particularly vivid, just background info), they unconsciously bounce between past and present tense, depending upon the nature of what they are sharing.

I decided to just run with it and see how it turns out. So far, so good, but it's still too early to know whether I should leave it this way or "correct" it to get all the verb tenses in agreement. If it works, it also gives me literary "cover" for when I get the verb tenses wrong elsewhere.

Oh, for fun, I'm leaving the digressions in, with the interviewee then realizing they've just digressed (again!) and kicking themselves for it.

Having a little toast here of the heady Dorwinion vintage to celebrate finally publishing OTTERHEAD! It's a 28 page 10X10 full color illustrated work in the style of a children's book. (kind of an oversized comic). I just shipped off sixty freebie copies to all my statewide indy bookstores, all the local libraries, all the aquariums I could locate that feature otters, and several non-profit advocacy groups that work to protect otters. It has an ISBN number, a LCCN number, and is now listed in the interlibrary load system. And we created a new "BOOKS" category in the Shire Post Mint online store, listing it there along with a couple others of our own. Sold the first copy today to a customer at the gift shop! So... pretty happy about it, it's been a long road. It is a rather strange story, and there's a lot of hidden subtext, so I'm including a printed sheet introducing it that contains a little exposition to help folks understand what's happening.
***************************************************************************************
“Greetings Ye Travellers of Time and Space.
Well met are we in this Special Place.
Take your rest and we shall see
A vision of Long Ago, and Yet To Be.”

So begins OTTERHEAD, the narrator a strange elfin looking fellow with pince-nez glasses and a bookish charm. He appears to be overseeing Santa’s workshop. He consults the Omniverse Atlas, and we are shown glimpses of alternate timelines floating like Christmas tree ornaments in space.
We are then shown a more detailed view of a timeline in which the otters have long ago been lost. Humans still hang on, but civilization is crumbling, childhood cancer is rampant, the environment has all but collapsed, and the only civil authority left to hold the world together is Santa Claus. It turns out that we have underestimated Santa! He is far more than the jolly old elf of Yuletide lore. He is in fact quite a powerful celestial being capable of manipulating time and space in astonishing ways, but still, there are certain rules governing what he can and cannot do. To those of us whose job is to document the Omniverse, it is widely known that the greatest flowering of culture and art on this planet comes in a far future known as Otterworld. But that world can only come to pass if the otters can survive the environmental bottleneck caused by human civilization. Once the otters have become extinct on any timeline, the Otterworld future is lost and Santa can only help people manage the inevitable long slow decline into chaos. But Santa is a kindly soul, whose heart has ever responded to the blossoming love and sincerity of children, and so we find that there is one little girl whose heart is so unselfish, and whose love is so sincere that Santa grants her wish, even though it is technically beyond the bounds of the time-space rules under which he labors.
Her story is turned to song, the song to pictures, and during a chance time-space portal opening it is transmitted to earth, to our timeline, to this charmed moment before the collapse, before the potential loss of so much, while there is still time to do what is needed to save the otters before it is too late.

Will Whitfoot said:

Having a little toast here of the heady Dorwinion vintage to celebrate finally publishing OTTERHEAD! It's a 28 page 10X10 full color illustrated work in the style of a children's book. (kind of an oversized comic). I just shipped off sixty freebie copies to all my statewide indy bookstores, all the local libraries, all the aquariums I could locate that feature otters, and several non-profit advocacy groups that work to protect otters. It has an ISBN number, a LCCN number, and is now listed in the interlibrary load system. And we created a new "BOOKS" category in the Shire Post Mint online store, listing it there along with a couple others of our own. Sold the first copy today to a customer at the gift shop! So... pretty happy about it, it's been a long road. It is a rather strange story, and there's a lot of hidden subtext, so I'm including a printed sheet introducing it that contains a little exposition to help folks understand what's happening.
***************************************************************************************
“Greetings Ye Travellers of Time and Space.
Well met are we in this Special Place.
Take your rest and we shall see
A vision of Long Ago, and Yet To Be.”

So begins OTTERHEAD, the narrator a strange elfin looking fellow with pince-nez glasses and a bookish charm. He appears to be overseeing Santa’s workshop. He consults the Omniverse Atlas, and we are shown glimpses of alternate timelines floating like Christmas tree ornaments in space.
We are then shown a more detailed view of a timeline in which the otters have long ago been lost. Humans still hang on, but civilization is crumbling, childhood cancer is rampant, the environment has all but collapsed, and the only civil authority left to hold the world together is Santa Claus. It turns out that we have underestimated Santa! He is far more than the jolly old elf of Yuletide lore. He is in fact quite a powerful celestial being capable of manipulating time and space in astonishing ways, but still, there are certain rules governing what he can and cannot do. To those of us whose job is to document the Omniverse, it is widely known that the greatest flowering of culture and art on this planet comes in a far future known as Otterworld. But that world can only come to pass if the otters can survive the environmental bottleneck caused by human civilization. Once the otters have become extinct on any timeline, the Otterworld future is lost and Santa can only help people manage the inevitable long slow decline into chaos. But Santa is a kindly soul, whose heart has ever responded to the blossoming love and sincerity of children, and so we find that there is one little girl whose heart is so unselfish, and whose love is so sincere that Santa grants her wish, even though it is technically beyond the bounds of the time-space rules under which he labors.
Her story is turned to song, the song to pictures, and during a chance time-space portal opening it is transmitted to earth, to our timeline, to this charmed moment before the collapse, before the potential loss of so much, while there is still time to do what is needed to save the otters before it is too late.

Click to expand...

Congrats on a very tough job well done!

I attended a free 1 hour discussion of line-editing (what is it, when to use it in the editing process, and what features of AutoCrit supported it). In the process I was directed to a report I hadn't really looked at before.

It would do overall analysis of a story or do a chapter level analysis. I gave it a whirl. Turns out it did a pretty good job of summarizing each chapter and noting things to consider.

It barfed on a number of my chapters as it had a chapter size limit of 10,000 words per chapter and some of mine were (ahem...) significantly longer.

It got me thinking. So I googled for advice on how long chapters should be. Depending on the genre of the book, anywhere from 600 to 5000 words, with 2000-4000 being most common. ("Thrillers" were on the very low end of word length.)

So, I wondered, how long were Tolkien's chapters in The Lord of the Rings? Luckily, some wonderful person had already done those calculations!

https://www.jetpunk.com/users/baptistegorce/charts/chapter-lengths-in-tolkiens-books

Turns out that most of the LOTR chapters were in the 5000-10,000 word range. That explains why long chapters didn't bother me!

In Book 1, I have a lot of chapters in the below 5000 word range. And I have others that are ginormous. Some of those represent translated "Epic Tales" are already broken into Cantos, in effect, sub-chapters. But I have about 5 that are enormous beasts that probably do need to be sub-divided. I have one series of chapters that actually need to be combined into one chapter but left as sub-chapters. Why? Because I wrote them piecemeal over several years, before I started assembling things into a single book file.

I'm thinking I should create some super-chapters (for lack of a better term) for book 1. There's the Shadow War in Arthedain, the transition chapters after the string of losses, the Great Quest, and some chapters that close out the story and resolve what happened to various people. In theory, it could be split into several smaller books, but it was never conceived of as separate books, so I'm not gung ho on that idea.

I made a product improvement suggestion in the seminar that was well received. I suggested they have a drop-down box with the different editing stages listed in their suggested order of doing them. (That's because after you do some stages, you would need to do other stages AGAIN, and that's not fun, so it's best not to do them in the wrong order.) The drop-down box would tell the software which editing stage we're at and then the software could highlight the reports that are most useful for that editing stage.

Anyway, good luck with your writing!

Oh, I realized I had added about 45,000 words to Book 1 since I last uploaded it into Autocrit about 3 months ago. Woot!

Oh, one website mentioned that the average length of paragraphs and sentences had been dropping for some years and that fewer readers want to read long paragraphs.

I have a number of funny verbal stories I tell (mostly) to people who've never heard them before. I haven't changed how I tell them, but I've noticed over the last fifteen years that people's attention span is WAY shorter than it used to be. The web has more subtle influences on behaviour than many have realized.

david_wendelken said:

Oh, one website mentioned that the average length of paragraphs and sentences had been dropping for some years and that fewer readers want to read long paragraphs.

Click to expand...

I would be one of those readers. My brain skips over long paragraphs most of the time. I also can't handle it when there's no spaces or indents between paragraphs. It's probably that, as someone active on the Internet and social media during the formative years of my life, my brain became more visual, and it also has learned to skim and quickly search out what it considers more "important" information.

It could be my job as a tax preparer too. If I want to get through 1,000 pages of tax documents within a few hours, I have to quickly identify the important information and not read all the paragraphs of irrelevant legal information or whatever.

Unfortunately, this combination of my job and school and the Internet has made it very difficult for me to just sit down and read for pleasure. I have more fun writing than reading, generally. Again, probably because my job forces me to absorb hundreds of pages of documents every day. When I'm tired at the end of a work day, I need to get stuff out of my brain, not cram more stuff into it!

Maedhros_Nelyafinwë said:

I would be one of those readers. My brain skips over long paragraphs most of the time. I also can't handle it when there's no spaces or indents between paragraphs. It's probably that, as someone active on the Internet and social media during the formative years of my life, my brain became more visual, and it also has learned to skim and quickly search out what it considers more "important" information.

It could be my job as a tax preparer too. If I want to get through 1,000 pages of tax documents within a few hours, I have to quickly identify the important information and not read all the paragraphs of irrelevant legal information or whatever.

Unfortunately, this combination of my job and school and the Internet has made it very difficult for me to just sit down and read for pleasure. I have more fun writing than reading, generally. Again, probably because my job forces me to absorb hundreds of pages of documents every day. When I'm tired at the end of a work day, I need to get stuff out of my brain, not cram more stuff into it!

Click to expand...

I seem to be the opposite. I get very vivid mental images when reading stories, so I pay more attention to the picture in my head than to the text my eyes are reading.
Too much space between paragraphs can break my train of thought (like double space or more, not an ordinary gap like the one below).

I use this as an effect in my writing. I break up text when the 'subject' changes a bit (like when a character is remembering something from the past). And I also use larger spaces to indicate a longer passage of time, or to get the reader to stop and think about what they've just read before moving on to the next bit.
I tend not to break up text when an action scene is happening, since the actions described in each sentence are happening in quick succession, with no 'breathing space' in between.

Maedhros_Nelyafinwë said:

It's probably that, as someone active on the Internet and social media during the formative years of my life, my brain became more visual, and it also has learned to skim and quickly search out what it considers more "important" information.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure about the effect of the internet on my mind. I didn't regularly use the internet before 2016, as we didn't get wireless internet until then (because we moved to the city, and my brother and I now needed internet to do our assignments and homework in high school).

In fact, I think high school itself affected my attention span more, since I was used to focusing on my activities at home for hours at a time (primary school was a bit too easy for me, and I didn't really need to focus). Switching my attention to different subjects every hour was a bit difficult. I still don't use social media where you can quickly flick between pictures and videos, because that would give me a headache. Too much, too fast. 😂

My natural pace of thought and living is quite a bit slower than many people's, so perhaps this was a natural barrier against losing my attention span too much.

My middle-transition chapter naturally has three segments. I've finished the 1st and 2nd segments. Those are the hardest. The 3rd segment will be brief and shouldn't take too long.

I'm excited because I wanted to write the 2nd segment some 30 years ago and couldn't even get a sentence out. This time around, with my new and hard-won writing skills, I've pulled it off. Still needs polishing, but it's got the essence of the story I wanted to tell.

Yeah!

Sat down this morning to write the 3rd part of the last life transition chapter I'm working on. I realized that I just needed to get the character from place A to place B, no real character development was needed on the journey.

4 sentences later, it's done!

Had a chat with my son about the chapter length issue. He's super busy between his job, his wife and his kids. He said that he'll often force himself to stay up a bit longer to finish a chapter, but really long chapters don't work that way. That makes sense.

I'm going to take another look at the chapter / sub-chapter organization for Book 1 and see what shakes out. Might give me more ideas on how to write the ones that remain!

david_wendelken said:

Oh, one website mentioned that the average length of paragraphs and sentences had been dropping for some years and that fewer readers want to read long paragraphs.

Click to expand...

We live in the age of 'everything now.' Few want to wait. Fewer want to think. Fewer want to work.
Writing, if it's going to be successful to a broader audience, must take this into consideration.

For the same reason, classical music, opera, and the like are being considered 'old and outdated, no longer needed.' They take patience, thinking, and work (mental gymnastics) to grasp.

Sadly reading will also become a lost art should the world remain long enough. People will actually believe they can 'hear and remember' well enough to come away with what was said.

Half the chaos we now face, is because people "think" they get it, when what the got was completely different than what was presented. But no work will be invested to sort it out.

We "think" we know. Sadly, we simply do not.

I'm almost finished with one of my solo works, which makes it my first multi chaptered work I've ever finished!

My inspiration for writing this, or to phrase it better, what spurred me to write this, was a sudden argument between my parents.

I'm very sensitive to loud noises and arguments between anyone, but naturally, it affects me the most when it's between my own parents. Them not doing this that often makes me even more prone to get upset over it easily.

I wanted a distraction from my feelings, so I decided to write something. It's one of my works I'm very proud of, and hopefully you'll like it too, when I finally post the two remaining chapters.(Tonight, hopefully)

Tyelkormo the Fair said:

I'm almost finished with one of my solo works, which makes it my first multi chaptered work I've ever finished!

My inspiration for writing this, or to phrase it better, what spurred me to write this, was a sudden argument between my parents.

I'm very sensitive to loud noises and arguments between anyone, but naturally, it affects me the most when it's between my own parents. Them not doing this that often makes me even more prone to get upset over it easily.

I wanted a distraction from my feelings, so I decided to write something. It's one of my works I'm very proud of, and hopefully you'll like it too, when I finally post the two remaining chapters.(Tonight, hopefully)

Click to expand...

Congrats!

Well, looking over the chapter structure of volume 1 with fresh eyes was well worth it, and that's after just a few minutes!

The parts of the book I had written in years past was a set of stories. They built upon one another but weren't properly interlocked as they would be in a book. So, when I started up on this book again, I grabbed all the stories in proper order and inserted them into one big book file. I made the title of each story a chapter heading. Then I looked over the chapter headings and created new headings to represent the material that needed to be written to complete the book.
Seems straightforward.

Except the material was written over many decades. My skill at writing longer stories improved with practice. Tyelkormo the Fair just celebrated his first multi-chapter story today, and rightly so for it's a big deal! I remember when I went from paragraph-long character sketches to single scenes, to a full story, and then to a multi-chapter story. And that's what I have in the existing chapter setup for volume one.

The reality is that quite a few of the stories should really be sub-chapters of an overarching portion of the tale. There's a "Great Quest" in the middle of the book. It was composed of many separate, independent chapters (because it was written in parts over many years). They really need to be gathered up under a master chapter. So I did that and titled it, "The Great Quest". I didn't like it as a title, but it would serve as a placeholder until I found the right one.

I've mentioned writing a set of three "life transition" chapters as the main character switches from her old life in now-fallen Arthedain to Lórien. In the transition chapter she realizes the bad guy is back and his agents are spreading word poison to corrupt the free people's culture from within. She runs into an agent that's obviously doing just that, he knows who she is and is immediately afraid of her because what he's doing has put him in her crosshairs. She sends the agent back to his master (it's not possible to send him to where he belongs) with words said in anger. She tells him to tell his master she is "coming for the children of his lies."
It's after that life transition that the great quest starts in response to events outside her control or awareness until too late to stop them. This part was started decades ago. The bad guy, unable to strike at her because she disappeared for many years and then returned to Lorien, strikes at those he can reach who are dear to her and useful to Gondor. He has an agent infiltrate the household of her friend, seduce the nanny, and steal away with the nanny, children, and wife." (The revenge gets ever so much worse as the bad guy's plan unfolds.) It's a wonderful case of the subconscious at work, because I didn't consciously come up with that challenge about the children of his lies. And that's the new title of the overall chapter that covers the quest, "The Children of His Lies"

Now I need to get back to reviewing the rest of the chapter structure!

That was a good exercise! I went through volume 1 and created a set of master chapters and then assigned other chapters to them. I pulled some items out of the appendices because now I had a better place for them to fit in thematically.

Didn't do a darn bit of good on the original problem, that of "David's chapters are too darn long!" But, hey, it's still progress!

Then I went through each sub-chapter and tested it for word count. If it was really long, I thought about where it could be split. There was usually a "right place" to do that. I have a couple of ToDo markers in the text with a note to de-spaghettify the split chapters (because sometimes some bits need to be moved from one to the other). It's really the same exercise I did when I split big paragraphs into tighter, smaller paragraphs. I'm pleased with the result.

I think I have a clearer roadmap for moving forward.

Writing update on my end: I've unfortunately been continuing to neglect my fantasy novel and feeling guilty about it, mainly because I've been finding it much more fun lately to write Silmarillion fanfiction. But, writing is still writing, right?

(Note to my friends who are on the IC&SF private message: Don't read this post till you've read the chapter, mmkay?)

So today, I finished a chapter of my fanfic "Ill Chances and Strange Fates." It's the second complete chapter I've written so far. I don't work on it super often because I prioritize RPs with other people.

The work has that title because it is taken from a HoME quote. The full quote: “Marriage, save for rare ill chances and strange fates, was the natural course of life for all the Eldar.”

I used that quote in the title because the whole fic is exploring why Maedhros didn't marry, especially since that wasn't the common path of life for Elves. For a while now, probably close to a year, I've had this OC named Aranya growing in my head, and she's basically the protagonist of this fic. In some of the RPs I've written on this site, whenever Maitimo was hurt and being cared for by healers, I was constantly imagining him falling in love with one of them. Eventually one of those random healers took on an identity of her own and became Aranya.

Aranya is a fascinating character with a strange duality between being a sweet, caring healer and a rather intense individual with a ruthless sense of justice. I figured you don't willingly bond yourself to a Fëanorian if you're not a little bit unhinged. She started off in her life not really liking Fëanor because she saw his harshness and perceived he was rather hard on Maitimo, having nearly impossible expectations on him. Over the years, she becomes increasingly hardened as she sees the wars in Beleriand, and the brutal torture Maitimo went through. She's not really bothered by the kinslayings because, especially as her worldview becomes more cold and callous, she sees it as justice. With everything Maitimo and his family suffered, why can't these other people just give them the ships or the Silmarils or whatever it might be? That's her mindset.

She never harms anyone herself because of her oath as a healer to do no harm. This gives her a parallelism with the Fëanorians.

And all these darker mindsets are a very deep layer of her character. She is a genuinely kind person who was the main one responsible for Maitimo healing from Thangorodrim. She's just angry at all the hurts she's seen in the world and biased towards the Fëanorians since she loves them so much.

The first two chapters I wrote are more lighthearted, focusing on her studying temporarily under the House of Finwë in Valinor, and helping Maitimo recover from a bad horse riding accident. This is her first time really interacting with the Fëanorians, since she's just been seeing Maitimo at secret picnics in the woods this whole time.

And these two chapters have been a really interesting study on different perspectives. Two characters will experience the same thing and see it in completely different ways. For example, there's this one conversation between Fëanor and Maitimo where Fëanor is questioning Maitimo about why he lost control of his horse, informing him that he'd be missing out on this council meeting where he was supposed to give a speech and so on. In Fëanor's mind, he's just being a good dad by making sure that sort of accident won't happen again, and Maitimo will continue to be an academic high achiever. But this conversation immensely rattles Maitimo because I write him as an emotionally sensitive people-pleaser, and he thinks Fëanor is mad at him and disappointed in him. He'd better not fall behind on his studies even though he has a concussion, because if he falls behind, Fëanor will see him as a failure.

These two chapters are full of little conflicts like that, where two characters see the same thing in completely different ways.

And in the end of the second chapter, Aranya makes an utter fool of herself in front of Fëanor. This was necessary for not only her developing maturity, but also serving as an explanation as to why Fëanor doesn't think she's suitable to marry his firstborn.

I'm not sure how long this fic will be. At this rate, it will be long. I intend to take it up to the (temporary) end of her story in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. I hope to start publishing it on AO3 once I have enough content to post regularly.

This was a long analysis, but it's one of the main things I've been working on, so I hope you guys enjoyed it!

@Maedhros_Nelyafinwë , thanks for sharing!

Knocked out two small chapters today in volume 1. One is solid. The other has the right material but the tone is a bit off. I'll take another go at it soon. But I'm glad I got the essential material down, it's easier to fix tone than it is to fill a blank page!

Progress!

My brain was mulling over what to work on next in Volume 1 and it was tired, so I opened up Volume 3 to do some light editing.

Cleared out 120 issues out of 921 that Grammarly found. And, whilst doing that, I realized my last 3 chapters had introduced the appearance of an inconsistency, i.e., the appearance of a plot hole. Cleared up the confusion in about 5 sentences.

Just figured out how to proceed with the next chapter in Volume 1. I originally wrote that material as an adventure setting for other referees to turn it into an adventure in their own campaigns. Now it needs to be part of Volume 1, so the way the material is presented is horribly inappropriate for the book. I've got two different ideas I'll test out over the next week. In the first, someone has been tasked to understand how Angmar was able to mass its armies in 1409 so close to those of Cardolan and Arthedain, and how did they manage to capture and destroy Amon Sul (better known to LOTR readers as Weathertop). They've spent the last two years attempting to find that out. The answer for Amon Sul is treachery. Brilliantly conceived and executed treachery, but treachery none-the-less. I'm undecided on how the army got so close, but the treachery allowed the siege equipment to be very close at hand.

I'll either write it as a report on what happened, or I'll write it as a report that's structured like an operational plan for such an operation. I.e., like a RPG game adventure only in letter format sans game terminology. I think I'll try the latter first. If neither works, I'll try again!