Writing wilderness survival/action stories

Heh, so, neenaroo on Tumblr asked me if I have any tips for writing wilderness survival stories, and I completely overran the ask box and basically wrote a NOVEL about it (apparently I do!).

This is also posted on Tumblr.

I feel a little weird giving advice because I'm not really an expert on any part of this, including the writing part; I'm just a person who really loves stranding characters in the wilderness and having horrible things happen to them. :D On the other hand, I've written quite a few of these by now, so I guess I've sort of got a system.

Stories which are referenced below:
Running on Empty (SGA) (website link)
The Killing Frost (SGA) (website link)
Survivor (White Collar)
Black Water Rising (MCU)
Wing and a Prayer (MCU)

( Writing wilderness survival stories - long! )

So, a summary, in bullet points:

• Research
• Think about what your character plausibly knows and would have with them
• Do some kind of equipment inventory near the beginning so both the reader and your characters know what they have with them
• Keep making things slowly but steadily worse to increase tension (they lose stuff, they get hurt, more enemies arrive, the weather worsens, etc)
• Space out important events (make a list of possibilities if necessary) and save some of the worst stuff for last
• Throw curve balls at the characters every time a status quo starts to be established (rainstorm! lion! rocks fall, everyone dies!)
• Give them new stuff or new people whenever things start getting repetitive and/or you accidentally write them into a "but they could not possibly survive this" corner, but make them earn it and/or give it a major downside to make things more interesting.

And remember rules are made to be broken, and not all stories will have or need all of the above. :D

Tumblr whinging again

I haven't reblogged anything on Tumblr in a few days, and I noticed when I put my wilderness survival post over there that they have changed their reblog interface so now you can't edit what you're reblogging; it treats the reblog text as a unified block, so you can only reblog it as-is or delete the whole thing. (Dammit. I used to edit typos a lot, and/or quietly remove things I didn't want included.)

Still, that's not so bad -- I can see why they'd do it, at least -- but now, on a photo post it also treats any caption/attribution in the same way it treats other reblog text, which means you can remove the attribution with a single click ... and might, in fact, easily remove it by accident if you click in the wrong place.

How is it possible that every single "improvement" tumblr makes LITERALLY MAKES THINGS WORSE?