It was an interesting night.

First off and totally unexpectedly, I got 287 words of actual draft. So HAH! Happy about that.

Second, I got out one of these neato little pre-ring-bound index card thingees I’ve had sitting in my office for the last few months after I found it at Office Depot—because I am a total office supplies ho, so I bought it even though I didn’t have a use for it at the time.

The thingee has about a hundred index cards in it, spiffy little plastic covers front and back, and dividers to separate it into three sections.

Dug out a Uni-Ball Vision Needle pen. (Look. This shit matters. When all that stands between your sanity and the Infinite Abyss of Screwed-Up Noveldom are office supplies, you want to have some nifty ones on hand. These are +7 Nifty, with a serious Anti-Abyss buff.)

Wrote my title on the front page: The Howling Redo of Despair and Agony: A.K.A. DTD, Section 2 — Fall.

Seriously. Those are the exact words on the cover card. Never let the Infinite Abyss think you take it seriously.

Drew my pen, aimed it at the notebook, and as quickly as I could keep the pen moving, ten very good scene sentences poured themselves onto the paper. Cardstock. Whatever.

So it was, in fact, a damn fine writing night. I’ll shoot for another ten scene sentences tomorrow night, and that will cover (PLUS three) my existing problem scenes. And, with my fingers in contact with the real—pen and paper, NOT pixels—my mind offered up a solution that will allow me to use a whole lot more of the words I’ve already written than I thought possible last night.

Sometimes, tapping the damn keys is no substitute for the physical act of writing. If this computer had a return bar I could slam from here to Newark every time I needed a carriage return, it might be different. That’s physical writing, too.

But anyway…

How are YOUR words coming along?

As expected, I got no real words tonight. I did get several chapters of untangling done, in simple line-per-scene style.

I’m going to have to toss stuff. I think I’ll have some I can keep, too, though.

And I’m fried, so I’m going to go to bed.

Hope your words are going well.

My spontaneously-generating red-head from a few chapters back walked into my scene tonight, suddenly making perfect sense in the story, and dropped a bombshell.

Actually, she took a deep breath, I glance over at my word counter, and discovered that I’d hit 499 words.

So she’ll drop her bombshell tomorrow night. But in spite of being dog-tired and not EVEN in the mood to write tonight, I got the words, and once I got rolling, they were a hell of a lot of fun.

How ’bout you?

Started into my second round of “who is this character beneath what we see” tonight, with Sam Jones, my detective.

The man who was Sam shed his underpaid-cop life and went back to his real home tonight, to an old friend and bad news—as bad as the news that had him packing his identity in mothballs when last I wrote him.

It went well. Got 512 words. Would have stopped at 500, but I really needed to finish the thought I was working on.

And I’m set up well for tomorrow’s segment.

How did it go for you?

I had to ask myself, “What happens when my hero hides a terrible truth? And how could she tell a lie about this, and still remain heroic? Why would she lie? What is she hiding?”

Tonight I started in on adding to the section I finished last week. She’s getting deeper on me…my objective is to continue to keep her someone people can relate to. And she has to remain heroic—I loathe antihero protagonists, and have no wish to turn her into one. (Antiheros are not lovable rogues, incidentally. They’re protagonists who commit villainy, while their authors make excuses for them. Stephen R. Donaldson’s despicable Thomas Covenant was a true antihero.)

So…I got 440 words, and could have kept going, but I hit a decent break point and quit for the night.

I know where I’ll pick up tomorrow, and why. I’ve found the core of her darkness, and how it’s shaped her into the woman she is. And I’m growing to understand how she will come to make the choices she does later in the book. I’m pleased with what I got tonight.

You?