Saturday’s Views

Yesterday — Friday — it was sunny and Stupid Warm for this time and place.  Today — Saturday — we return to the script as written:  cold rain out of a grumpy grey sky.  This will continue through the night.

So, not a good day, really, for views.  Despite which, I will be over there in the Comfy Chair in the window of my office with the third section of Salvage Right, my notebook, pens, and notes.  The time has come to tidy up the plot and see which expectations bore fruit, which are trembling on the edge of revelation, and which were — um — not such good ideas, after all.

As I prepare to go down into the interstitials, Salvage Right weighs in at 73,000 words.  This actually doesn’t tell us as much as you might think, though my sense is that there isn’t a lot of weeding to be done — which is to say, I expect to be adding words, not subtracting.

For those who collect Process, I remain very pleased with the Just Write What You Know method that I adopted for this book.  I’m usually pretty much a linear writer — starting at page one and writing on through.  Which is fine, except for the tendency to get bogged down in bridges and technical bits, which leads to Writer Frustration.  Writing the scenes I know provides a great sense of forward motion, I haven’t lost my excitement for the project, and the result is a lot less chaotic than I had feared.  Apparently, my back brain knows what it’s doing.

So, that.  Time to go to work.

Here, have a snippet:

Jen Sin raised his hands, showing empty palms. “Yes, I heard. Forgive my lack of appropriate consternation. This is not a regular environment. Strange things happen here.”