Technical Difficulties

1,132 words.

So much for moving faster.

I need this scene to do two completely unrelated, but equally tricky, things. And I have no idea how to accomplish one of them. Which is, of course, the first one up to bat.

Ergo, I am calling it a night.

1,750 words.

And hey! I figured out why the bog bodies have to be in the book.

1,682 words.

Here, as with much of the rest of the nation, the heat index is abhorrent. Thank god for air-conditioning, whereby there is one room in the house that is still habitable during the day.

848 words

They're just going to have to have the other half of this Very Serious Conversation tomorrow, because I can't hack it tonight.

New words: 350

Not enough, obviously, but I did also get the minimum necessary continuity done in Chapters Seven through Fourteen so that the new scene looks like it was really there all along. Also, I found and fixed another glitch caused simply by the pace at which I'm writing. I forget what I've written and implement a second explanation for something that already had a (far superior) explanation. Also at least one place where I'd typed the name of one character while clearly meaning someone else.* It's a little embarrassing, but better to catch it when I'm the only one who knows.

And tomorrow, we can forge ahead unimpeded.

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*The worst example of that, in my personal history, is a European history test in twelfth grade, where every time I meant Hobbes I wrote Locke, and vice versa.

1,684 words. Part of a possibly inevitable mid-book retrofitting. (The freaky thing is, there was space for it. Like some part of my brain knew I was going to need to come back and put a scene in right exactly there.)

1,839 words for today.

My unreliable narrators are talking about unreliable narrators.

1,602 words

As per usual, I'd much rather be working on some other story. (Any other story would do, although the serial-killer-eats-vampire story is waking up again and wants some love.) But at least this one is cooperating, more or less.

Today, Chapter 13: 1,779 words

Mean things: Obsolete defense mechanisms. On the other hand, Felix actually got to buy some books this time.

No words today.

Or, rather, probably 200-300 words of a false start on Chapter 13. Happily, I realized it was a false start within 300 words (The false starts on The Mirador run into the hundreds of pages. Yes, really.), and thus spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to get from point A (the end of Chapter 12) to point B (the climax of the novel, which I do actually know!) in the approximately 77k left to me, minus however much I need for denouement and wrapping up and things like that. (You know you've reached a watershed in your novel when your remaining wordcount looks uncomfortably tight instead of agoraphobically vast. I'm not quite there yet, but I can feel the pole-reversal coming.)

And I have figured out, if not how to get from A to B, then at least from A to A₁. Which is better than nothing.

I prefer tangible progress, but I'll take intangible progress if it's the best I can do.