And not a pink rabbit in sight, let alone banging a drum.\u00a0 No, the new book is now at 68,000+ words, despite a real solid computer scare Sunday\/Monday (now resolved, and no files lost.)\u00a0 It demanded that I do my daily words Monday after getting home from the computer fixit place and reconnecting everything and doing other stuff that needed doing, though never all of it.\u00a0 And then today\u00a0 gave me the first 2000 word day in many many months.<\/p>\n
So what do we have here besides no title yet (anyone got a clever idea for a title to follow Cold Welcome<\/em>?)\u00a0 Well,\u00a0 this is about where mid main draft *should* be,\u00a0 and it’s feeling like set-up is all there, and the various gears are beginning to mesh with one another.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a “loose” first draft (technical term specific to this writer)\u00a0 which means there are gaps to be filled and also long talky sections that need to be snugged in…right now they’re like a piece of draped fabric that is blowing in the wind more than the designer thinks is appropriate.<\/p>\n For instance today: I got involved in the second work period with a character needing to convey some information to someone else, but in the middle of that the person the character was talking to needed to make a secure call to someone else, and the character (the first one)\u00a0 started watching some kind of ball game and eating bar snacks provided by the second character, and suddenly it was all falling apart like a badly made sandwich, bits of story and character slithering out to land inartistically on the floor.\u00a0\u00a0 The character is sound (has been around long enough to know that) and necessary (the person who *would* have that particular chunk of information the second character needs) and the reason the second character is in that place makes reasonable sense (I thought it was perfect<\/em> sense when the scene of information sharing was in the setup phase, but maybe not?), and the motivations of A, B, and C were driving everything strongly until.\u00a0 Until what?\u00a0 That ball game and those bar snacks.\u00a0 (And I spent some time imagining what kind of bar snacks they would have on that planet in that era.)<\/p>\n So the bar snacks and the ball game, which were OK earlier as background window-dressing when A went into a local dive for a beer because that’s what A did after work almost every day, are not OK in the other scene and will have to come out or…be fixed somehow.\u00a0 I’m not in love with them; they’re a way to occupy A while B makes that secure call.\u00a0\u00a0 A could watch the news, or a favorite drama series, or maybe there’s a chess set in the room and A could fiddle with it but doesn’t know how to play….something.\u00a0\u00a0 A isn’t the type to eavesdrop, but is becoming anxious now that the information’s delivered and B is taking it so seriously–A has to have something to distract A-self with.<\/p>\n I can’t stay up tonight to mess with it, as I have choir tomorrow and will need to head for the city in early afternoon if possible.\u00a0\u00a0 Choir means a late night with the long drive in and the long drive out after dark and lot of intellectual energy spent reading unfamiliar music under an exacting director.\u00a0\u00a0 And tomorrow should produce its own squirt of words added to the file.\u00a0 Editing, I remind myself, comes later.\u00a0 First create the stone, then carve the sculpture.\u00a0 Ideally, create the stone already pretty much in the right shape.<\/p>\n The Plot Daemon is fairly happy with the Captain right now, as long as the Captain stays out of the boiler-room and doesn’t ask awkward questions like “Yes, but what happened next and next and next and next?”\u00a0 One next at a time.\u00a0 One day at a time.\u00a0 One layer of stone created where it seems like it needs to go.<\/p>\n There should be another Interlude later this week, if all goes well.\u00a0\u00a0 A few characters are feeling aggrieved that they’re being put in peril but not paid the same as the principle characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And not a pink rabbit in sight, let alone banging a drum.\u00a0 No, the new book is now at 68,000+ words, despite a real solid computer scare Sunday\/Monday (now resolved, and no files lost.)\u00a0 It demanded that I do my daily words Monday after getting home from the computer fixit place and reconnecting everything and Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10],"tags":[7,21],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}