What's Tunguska?

Taiga of Far East in Russia

Tunguska is the name of my work in progress. Today it has just bust the 60,000 word mark, though as usual at this stage in the process, it's pretty rough and ready. Or as they say, "a first draft".

I have nothing but admiration for people who plan where they are going and have meticulously detailed outlines. With Tunguska, I have a rough idea of where I want to be, and where I'm starting out from, but not a clue about how to get from A to B.

Unfortunately, in this story, my characters have the same problem. They need to get to Tunguska in a hurry, and they don't know where it is, even though one of them comes from there.

I should perhaps explain that this isn't the Tunguska in the real world, where a meteor air-burst flattened large areas of the Siberian forest in 1908 (unless it was aliens). The jumping-off point is a contemporary account by the local people that the explosion and subsequent devastation was caused by shamans fighting.

Shamans fighting!

I knew some shamans who had the kind of powers that could knock over several acres of boreal forest.

So that's Tunguska. Possibly quite a short novel, with a big explosion in there somewhere...

[Photo courtesy of borya from Wikimedia Commons, source https://www.flickr.com/photos/barthelomaus/229945110/ date 8 August 2006 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License; no endorsement by the author implied]