Still Here

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of my death are exaggerated. In fact, I haven’t even been sick if you don’t count a wonky lower back.

But yes, I have been gone too long from this place, and I hope some of you agree. Electronic indications are that a few faithful readers have persevered. Beyond the United States, most of them are in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. That’s good. I spent a lot of time in those parts as a newspaper reporter.

So, get to the point. What’s my excuse?

Well, apart from black mold after Hurricane Irene, the arrival of crisp weather and associated bird dog duties, and continuing daily bouts of wrestling with The Moon, I have no excuse.

Ah, The Moon. Yes, there’s the real culprit. I’ve mostly used available time for The Moon, not the blog, although I did capitulate to the advice of the experts and activate a Facebook page, an act that required little time. 

So here’s what I’ve been doing.

It became clear that readers of the book would need to know things Main Character could not know. To fix that I had to shift the narrative’s point of view from one limited to him to one that writers call omniscient. (Don’t you love that concept?) This meant some rewriting of earlier material.

I also had to bring some other characters into the tale to dramatize actions that Main Character can’t know about. This meant inserting whole chapters in parts of the book I thought I’d finished.   

Third circumstance: the writing has outrun my outline. For some time I’ve been making up plot structure as I go. This has worked reasonably well since I’ve always known the general arc of the story. But it requires getting down basic structure—bare bones of the action—and coming back later to flesh it out with mood, description, characters’ reactions, explanation of motives, etc.

Too much information for you? Okay, I’ll stop now. But I did promise that this blog would be partly about writing the novel, and that is more about process than content.