Interesting. So tomorrow, I’ll pursue the conversation further, and find out why she responded as she did.

293 words.

How did your writing go?

I did 3588 words on Lesson Four of HTRYN today, and was pretty happy to get the 287 I managed on Dreaming the Dead.

I’m not exactly enthralled by what I got. But I’m dead tired, and I got something. I’ll leave it at that.

Hope your fiction was more fun.

Her life, derailed when she was fifteen, has taken an odd turn suddenly, and she discovers that she has something to live for—that her life has become valuable to her again.

569 words.

How are you doing?

The news on my brother-in-law, by the way, is there is no news. He’s in a holding pattern now, where the hospital with the doctor who WANTS to do his surgery suggested he go to a bigger medical center, and the bigger medical center said he’s not a county resident and he’s self pay, so no chance.

At this point, he’s controlling the seizures pretty well. In theory, he may be able to get the surgery in January.

My Writing

Last week went OVER seventy hours working on Hot To Revise Your Novel, including working all morning today.

Next week, I think, will be more sane. A lot of what I’ve been doing is one-time stuff associated with setting up the How To Revise Your Novel course software, the course forums, adding a NaNoWriMo forum to HTTS, testing things, creating workgroups….

A lot, of course, is writing the course and interacting with my two beta students, so even once everything is set up, I’m still going to be logging some serious hours. And once the Early Birds hit How To Revise Your Novel at the end of November or the first part of December, that’s going to require some additional time, too.

But, to get to the point, I wiped out around 3 AM last night without ever getting to my fiction.

I’m not going to write tonight. Today is my Official Weekend, Dammit^TM.

But I’ll be back tomorrow night. With fiction.

How did you do yesterday? How are you doing today?

The world stopped. I leaned on the guitar I was trying out and just watched this guy, and listened. His hands were liquid, boneless, the notes perfect, the whole piece played out into the stillness like the magical gateway to another universe.

When the last notes shivered into silence and I realized there weren’t going to be any more, I asked him the name of the piece (I’d never heard it before).

I’ve remembered his version of it forever. I’ve never heard a better rendition than his, and I’ve listened to a lot of them.

Tonight, that guy and his guitar and Moonlight Sonata found his way to a street corner in New York City, where he enchanted Aleksa, before he passed on a message she needed to hear.

I’ve been hanging on to that moment the majority of my life.

It was something sacred then. It came out something sacred tonight.

413 words.

You?

I’ve heard knees creak, heard the sound bone makes on bone when weighed down by muscle, skin, sinew, and fluid. It’s a distinctive sound—nothing else compares.

So that detail slipped in as I was writing, and then the question followed:

What if the sound Aleksa hears from his knees isn’t that sound?

Tiny detail, tiny question…but the man escorting her to the train station came alive for me when I suddenly got the answer, and understood what it meant.

I stopped at 300 words exactly.

How did you do?

I deleted the last two paragraphs, re-wrote them to change the neighborhood through which she was driving, and suddenly the identity of the person on the phone with her became suspicious, the instructions she was being given became frightening…

…And as I realized she was in real trouble, and getting in deeper by the second, she came up with a cool-headed way to save her own neck from a danger that hadn’t even existed last night. The solution flashed on me as I was writing—as quickly as the problem had tempted me to write it, and it’s just beautiful.

So tomorrow night I have something cool to start out with, and something scary to continue—and all because the neighborhood she’d previously ended up in was simply too nice.

I got 520 words not including the two paragraphs I deleted and re-wrote. Good writing night.

Coming up with any cool twists on your story?

Tomorrow, I start writing Lesson 3 for HTRYN, and my beta testers start the course. I’m excited about that, too.

But tonight I flew through the words for Dreaming the Dead, and in my passage found the tracks of who a woman might become when she has walked through hell.

How about you?

My first publisher, Jim Baen, who died on June 28, 2006, paid me a visit.

Now, I’m not pagan, Christian, or otherwise religious in any way, shape, or form. I’m not a believer in things. I’m not a fan of faith, which to me is the denial of the provable and rational in favor of the unprovable and irrational.

I do NOT, however, think that humans are just animated meat. I think that we are creatures of energy AND flesh, and that when the flesh falls apart, the energy goes on.

In what form this energy that we were goes on, I don’t know. I have some speculations based on areas of science I follow, but they’re only that, and worthless beyond my own personal interest.

However, while I’m waiting for scientific proof in either direction, I’m willing to play with my theory, and consider it as rationally possible as the theory of oblivion at the moment of death, which does not deal in any fashion with what happens to the energy of life.

I’m willing to consider that, along with the possibility that my subconscious had a brilliant idea while I was sleeping and found a way to make it unforgettable, I also could have experienced something real on October 28th of last year.

Either way, it’s Halloween, traditionally time to acknowledge the dead, and I would like to take this moment to set out a metaphorical place at the table for Jim Baen.

I’m still writing the book that came from that dream. The idea I got that night is still something that at times leaves me trembling with the potential power of the story, if I can only find the craft within myself to realize that potential.

And whether the idea came from Jim, or whether my subconscious used him as a highly effective attention-getter, he is in my thoughts today. And whether the experience was real or metaphorical, I offer my thanks for it.

And I miss you, Jim.

Aleksa is on her way into deadly trouble, while fleeing deadly trouble—her problem with the rock and the hard place is that both of them are careening straight at her.

So I got 479 words, and I feel like I took my first deep breath in a week.

How are you coming with your story?