1900 words. Almost to 70k!

I’m reaching the parts where it takes the most effort to interlace things properly. Everything’s been leading to here, all the characters need their callback, each plot thread needs a final stitch. There’s a bit more conflict, a brief plateau, and then a decent denouement to launch into the 3rd book yet to come. Maybe 10k more. Maybe less. And the whole thing is still very all second draft, but the more I do now, the less I do later, so there was a fair amount of window/wall staring while I was choosing my next scenes carefully today.

I feel weird showing you all mostly the top-half of the duck, all serene and floating, without any of the furious paddling underneath. But I still feel really good about things. I get panicked a lot — i know exactly how much work i have left myself for later, with my “wittier” “duplicate sentiment” “were they holding keys?” notes left to fix — but i also know i’m doing something i haven’t seen before here, in a good way, with real characters. I’m still in the flow.

The Happening of yesterday was in regards to the health of a family member. As of today they are better. And that’s far more of a “you shouldn’t see them making the sausage” thing for me, than writing is for probably anyone who reads this blog. (Waves to lj friends, who all write.) I had this problem two years ago with a health scare of my own. You can’t be on the inside of a hospital for very long, and continue to think things happen for a reason. I know that i don’t, which can be hard. It’s nice to have a rudimentary rudder, even an imaginary one, to guide yourself through life. I believe in a very attenuated version of karma, in that shitty people eventually get surrounded by the consequences of their actions…but once you’re in the hospital, all of that goes out the door. (Unless you’re famous, and need a liver transplant, and then you just move to Tennessee, where money can buy you whatever organs you desire.) All my knowledge of the wrong people, wrong place, wrong actions, wrong medication, wrong doctor, wrong nurse, wrong procedure, all the opportunities for failure that i know of because I see them at the hospital in one form or another most shifts — yesterday they just walked through my personal door. I’m immensely glad that family member is OK now. But if they’d continued to deteriorate, and someone else had told me that things happened for a reason, i would have had to cut them.