Outdoors, it’s celebrating spring. The dogwood is in bloom, and I’m editing book two to my publisher’s comments.
It’s a bit odd that it’s so springy out, when one timeline in the book is set in autumn. Another is set in spring, but spring in England. That timeline shares the bluebells and the blue skies but not the dogwood.
Here is Potato with the latest New Yorker, giving her opinion of the literary establishment. Unlike me, she and her sister consume magazines starting at the corners, leaving frilled and bitten edges like lettuce.
I incorporated my beta readers’ comments into book two. This has been a hard last bit. Snow stayed, hard-crusted on the ground—we still have icebergs of it dotted across my backyard. Winter also stayed, with short days, and Daylight Savings was just an insult. I am prone to seasonal affective depression, but usually not so bad as this year.
In the foothills of the Cascades, outside Seattle, we’re having the snowiest February of the last fifty years. I’ve been able to do my dayjob from home. I’m very lucky for that.
I have a bit of a religion about snow.
Even when I moved to Seattle, years ago, snow was rarer here than in the Midwest. I wrote three short stories in a row about snow. I’ve written a couple of stories about (not quite) freezing to death in the snow since. The second book in the septet, The Deer Stalker, has a significant set of scenes set near Snoqualmie Pass, in the snow.
This year, my neighborhood has gotten nearly no snow.
But this evening, it’s snowing.
It had to wait to Imbolc, but it’s snowing.
The stuff in the air in the photo is flying snowflakes.
Last night, I finished a draft of the second book of the septet, weighing in at about 78,500 words. I wrote 9,600 words just Saturday through Monday!
I’ve now written 24,000 words, give or take a hundred, in four weeks.
I feel the arc of the book bending to a close, though there’s still a lot of scenes to write. I’m not a tight outliner; I keep a flow chart and notes, but I try to give the characters free rein if they want to take another path.
We’ve turned the wheel of the year past winter solstice. Today is a brilliantly sunny day: time out of time, definitely a December day and yet all sun.
I’m surprised and excited—all the people I asked to beta-read my second septet book agreed! I feel like a very lucky writer.
Now I have to finish a draft of the book. I hit my goal last week of 6,000 words. Now there’s this week, and then three more weeks to go.
This upcoming month is a make-it-or-break-it writing period. I have about 30,000 words to write to finish a draft of the second book, to meet the timeline I agreed on with my publisher.
For the last three weeks, I had to hold off daily writing, first for the retreat, then for deadlines at the day job.
But now I’m diving in again. Wish me luck.
Hekate Soteira means Hekate savior. The Neoplatonists saw her as the mediator between the realm of the undying gods and that of mortals. Celestial in this aspect, she forms a boundary between the worlds.
I’m about halfway through the septet’s book two, which has the working title The Deer-Slayer, and I’m about to throw my characters off the edge.
There’s a dictum in fiction that you have to get your characters in trouble as quickly as possible. That’s the inciting incident—something that disturbs the life of your protagonist so that person takes a different track. This disruption falls at or toward the beginning and starts the mechanism of the narrative.
But there’s also that point where a trouble brewing all through the story finally boils. This isn’t the climax, but rather where the rising action (in terms of the five-act structure—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) kicks into gear.