Switched to the next scene to intro my hero in his new amalgamated form. He found something on the victims that makes him certain what looks like a weird cultish group suicide is in fact a murder, and tips him off to who the murderers may be.
I’m off my game tonight, though. The Air Force Kid is back overseas, and though this time no one is supposed to be shooting at him or shelling him or trying to blow him up (essentially his every-day job last time) he’s still in the desert, and I’ll be stressed until he gets home safely.
How were your words?
Aleksa gets the first hint that what she thinks happened to her assistant is not what happened at all. Small segment tonight—I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since last Friday, and I’m determined to get a full night’s sleep tonight.
So, with 21,184 words completed, I’m going to turn in.
The Air Force Kid has returned to base. I’ve been blue the better part of the day; I miss him already.
Good luck on your words, if you’re playing. I’ll check in tomorrow to see how it went for you.
I took last night off. No words. The Air Force Kid is home on leave before going back to the desert for another 6 months, and we sat up and talked and played video games and just hung out together until about 3:30 AM.
If you’re playing “Write a book with me,” here are a few options for the occasional scheduled nights when I don’t write:
- Write whatever you’ve chosen as your minimum word count.
- Use the night for planning upcoming scenes (write out index cards, look over what you’ve already written and take note of where you left various characters you don’t want to forget, or whatever you do to plan what comes next)
- Research some topic you’re going to need in your book, and take notes for JUST the scene where you’ll need it.
- Go to a movie, read a book, or study something else creative that folks have done, and ask yourself “How well did the creator do this, and why do I think that?”
- Take the night off, too.
Today is the AFK’s last night at home, but since he has to drive tomorrow, I’m guessing it’ll be an early night…and if it is, I’ll write. If not, I’ll post tomorrow so you’ll have a place to check in with what you did.
Good words last night, along with surprising action as my MC remembers something horrible that shaped her life, and decides to fight for survival.
I’m stunned to realized that working at this ambling, casual pace, I’m already over 20,000 words, and that if I were planning a normal-length book, I’d already be 20% done.
This is something I’ve forgotten over the years, and am delighted to remember. If you aren’t just teeth-grittingly desperate to get paid again, you can write even small amounts, and so long as you do it regularly, you’ll rack up an impressive word count in very little time.
What I’m doing now is amateur writing (amateur in the Latin root-word sense, amator, which means lover). I’m writing out of simple love of doing it.
This is the way anyone who loves to write can write a book. Last night I ended up working on website fixes, so only had about half an hour to actually write before I fell over in an incoherent blob right around midnight. There have been a couple of nights when I got my words in fifteen or twenty minutes, decided I liked my stopping place, and quit for the night.
Writing does not have to be an all-consuming labor of ten- to sixteen-hour days—something that’s beginning to edge its way back into my weary brain as personal truth, rather than abstract theory.
It can be play, rather than work. And you can still love the story that’s coming together.
And on that note, I have a long week planned next week. And my older son is on leave, and going to come visit for a few days before he takes off for another stint in the desert. So I’m going to knock off at noon and call it a day.
Have a wonderful weekend.
The Kid is home from the desert and got enough leave to come down and visit us for a few days before going on to a long list of other things he HAS to do. We’re having a wonderful time, and having him home safe, where we can talk about books and writing and movies and his very scary desert adventures, and some of the funny things that happened, is wonderful.
The Air Force has given him some real clarity, as has the time he spent under fire (much more than I thought). And I’ve discovered that he’s walking much the same path I walked. I worked ER for the clarity of mission, the immediacy of need, the fact that I had to be right quickly, under pressure, the fact that other people’s lives depended on me…and the fact that it mattered. He does what he’s doing for the same reasons, and now, offered a chance for an easier path and safety, he has discovered he doesn’t want to take it.
I understand that. I wish I didn’t, because then I could urge him to take the safe job.
But I do. So I won’t. I’ll worry. But I’ll also understand.
Aaaaaghh! I should have details, but I am so grateful for what I do have that I’m posting it anyway. Have not heard from the AFK in ages, because he’s been doing missions—he warned me in advance that this would be the case, and in theory I should have been at least relatively calm, because he has so far been okay, even while doing missions.
But I’m a mom, and theory falls down hard in the face of reality a lot of the time, and I have been…worried. I’ll leave it at that, because my kind of worried does not just drive me crazy, but also the people around me, and, well…yes.
I have been worried.
So.
We went out to dinner at Ryan’s yesterday and then, because I wanted to see Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary in which my personal interest was my distaste for the current trend to teach Darwinism as religion, we went to the movies. We have not been to an evening movie since the midnight showing of Transformers. This one was well worth seeing, but I still wish I’d had better timing in pushing to see it.
[ --DIGRESSION FROM THE AFK STORY-- ]
I rate EXPELLED in two parts, first half, and second half, give the first half a C- for use of emotional manipulation and poor, poor presentation of the actual argument, and give the second half an A- for getting its head out of its ass and actually presenting the issue along with the consequences of the issue, while still unnecessarily defaulting to emotional manipulation when the arguments were strong enough to stand on their own two feet. I loved the moment when Richard Dawkins, evangelist of atheism, admitted that he could allow intelligent design if we wanted to posit that really, really smart aliens seeded the worlds with life…if THOSE aliens spontaneously generated. (Aliens, dude? Really? That’s the best you can come up with?)
For my money, the alteration of species over time via natural selection and punctuated equilibrium is well-documented in the fossil record, as well as through observable changes in species on the planet demonstrable in our lifetimes. The spontaneous generation of life from inert primordial soup has not been proven, and until humans can replicate it, claiming spontaneous generation of life as science without one shred of evidence is as ludicrous as claiming that God created the earth in seven days and all life on it in the last few. The instant you demand faith to explain what science cannot, and demand that all other possible explanations be ignored in favor of your faith-based one, you have a religion, whether you get all red-faced and stomp up and down and call it science or not.
[ --END DIGRESSION-- ]
Anyway. While I was watching the movie, I missed two calls back at the house from the AFK. Two.
So I know that he’s okay, and not one damned thing more. But I know that he’s okay, and that’s huge. Not just for me, but for my guys, both of whom I have been driving crazy by worrying.
Added some hours later:
The Kid just got through. They got hit this time out, but everyone is okay. And his biological father—the molester (felony, convicted, plea-bargained down from MUCH worse charges)—is not doing well, and the Kid is having a hard time dealing with it. This particular issue is a lot more complicated than it sounds. But basically, when the molester dies, it is the death of hope. Hope that the molester will say he’s sorry for what he did, that he’ll take responsibility, that he’ll, even just for a day, be the father and human being he should have been instead of the lying, abusive creature he was. The death of hope is not an easy thing to face. Not for any of us.
The Air Force Kid just called. He’s okay, which is huge for me. On a mission, no details given or asked for, but he did get a chance to check out the weblog and leave a couple of notes, so I got congrats from him on finishing the book. (He also got the first reader’s copy of The Ruby Key. I only got four of those, and with a husband and three kids in different places… well, you do the math.)
Anyway. Okay. Intact. Happy, even. This is big. And I got the usual “Hi, Mom!” from buddies in the background, and the sort of worrisome “We’re taking care of your boy….” with echoes of wicked laughter following. :D
He’s with good people, he’s glad to be doing what he’s doing, and glad he enlisted. And he added that the Air Force was the best thing he ever did for himself.
When you consider that he is way in the middle of harm’s way and under attack regularly, this is one hell of a statement. I’m so proud of him.
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. For me, I’m thankful this year that:
My 24-year-old daughter, who was rushed into emergency gall bladder surgery at O-dark-hundred on Thanksgiving morning, came through it okay, and that she had someone who cared about her who could be with her in the critical first hours after surgery, when I could not be there (one car, 1200-mile round trip, husband who had to be at work at 5 AM today because he’s the boss and this is Black Friday);
That my 22-year-old son has a buddy whose cellphone works all the way from the Middle East, and that he let my son borrow it to make a call home… and that my son didn’t call before I knew his sister was all right;
I am thankful for:
Cell phones, which have made it possible to reach people in places that would, just a few years ago, have been impossible;
For my big guy and my little guy, who reassured me that everything would be okay, and who turned out to be right;
And for six or seven pounds of potatoes, which took a real beating from scrubbing and chopping while I was waiting to hear how she was doing. Cooking is sometimes not at all about preparing food.
So. Heard from Air Force Kid, and he’s okay. That’s my huge news.
Big news is, the store is back up and running, and has two new goodies.
The small one is 21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing When Your Life Has Just Exploded, which I wrote in response to a friend who was beta testing the writer’s block course, but was trying to write after just coming off a couple years of major life upheavals. This is an area where I have lots of practice. I realized that a series of instantly usable solutions to specific writing questions would probably be useful, so this is the first in the CRITICAL SKILLS SERIES.
The next one will probably be 7 Steps to Getting the Book Written When You Have A Job, A Life, Kids, Three Pets, and You Want to Sleep AND Eat, Too.
And the final version of How To Beat Writer’s Block (And Have FUN Writing From Now On) is available now, too. It includes 21 Ways, and has gotten some terrific feedback from the beta testers (some of which I’ve included on the page.)
And now, because I’ve been working 14-hour day for the past two weeks, and more than that the past two days, I’m going to go sack out on the couch and take a nap.
Off tomorrow, back to writing Moon & Sun II on Wednesday.
The Air Force Kid left for the Middle East yesterday. Got a call from him—he’s arrived safely, and is inprocessing.
My nine-month-countdown until he’s due back in the states starts now. I know it will probably be longer. I’m just hoping it won’t be much longer.
In the meantime, he’s with good people.
