After a solar flare cuts contact with Earth, a researcher on the surface of Europa must journey to another habitat and find help.

Here's a link to a Google doc with the original work in better formatting. I've allowed anyone with access to comment on it, so please do. I would love to hear your thoughts better than RoyalRoad allows.

Important: if you read on the doc, thereisa nineteenth page. Don't miss it.

Fourteen Hours (doc)

Below is a reflection on the work. It may contain mild spoilers, so read at your own risk.

This was my final writing project for my entire high school career, and I felt that I wanted to let other people read it. I really enjoyed writing throughout school, and I'm super happy that the last thing I had to work on was a writing project. I spent way too long on this particular one and ended up nearly doubling the intended length (ten pages morphed into nineteen), but I'm super happy with it. I love how Ron ended up, although I wish I had fleshed out the way he actually acts during the run more, instead of leaving so much in the air.

Personally, my favorite part of the entire story is the change I made at the beginning of section 9 (after the[8] hours and [44] minutes[91.7] kilometerspopup). Prom was the night before I wrote that, so I'd spent the night from like one to five am drunk off my ass. When I eventually started writing the next day, I really felt as though I needed to describe emotion. I wanted to describe the turmoil a man might face. I wanted to describe love. So I, of course, jumped on my computer and started to think like Ron might in that moment. The man lived fifty years of life, and now he was on the moon of another freaking planet--he knew he was going to survive. He'd made it this far. Instead of worrying, he looks out at the ice. He enjoys the alien landscape in a way he hadn't been able to before, even when he was running a hundred kilometers through deadly cold with a pipe stuck in his side.

I'd tried to understand the man before that point, but I couldn't. I had made a character and tried to stick to it. After I dropped off two friends, returned a (very colorful) tux, and sank into my bed with a hangover, I think I brought that character a little bit out of the page.

Alright, now I've got to decide which parts of this reflection to omit from the version I give my teacher, then copy it all down on the drafting packet so I can pretend I was "just being sentimental" and that I "wanted it to feel more genuine" Instead of the admitting I plain forgot I needed to include one.