Once again, I’m batching it, at least through tonight. Lynda is in Oklahoma City, helping tend to grandchildren and visiting a friend in the hospital there, someone she went to church and school with in Meade Kansas. So it’s been quiet around the house. I often don’t turn the TV on much, preferring to read or write in the silence. Some writers say they do better with noise around, either background music or street noises. I think I do better in the silence.

For all the peace and quiet, I didn’t have as productive a week as I could have had. For the week I added over 8,000 words to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, bringing the total words to a couple of hundred short of 35,000, on its way to around 85,000. That sounds like a lot of production, and I suppose it is. If I could do that many words every week I’d be done with it in six or seven weeks. Done with the first draft, that is.

However, I could have written much more. I allowed the spam problem on this blog take at least a day away from production and I tried to figure out what to do. A lot of that time wasn’t figuring time, however, but fuming time. Fuming and wasting time, feeling sorry for myself. Another day I was too tired to write. I sat at the computer for a couple of hours, but got nothing written. A professional writer should be able to fight through the tiredness, and a produce through perspiration when inspiration fails.

Part of my slowness was that a couple of these chapters were something I was writing up to, but hadn’t figured out exactly how I’d do them. One was the first Mafia-induced distraction in the protagonist’s life. I came to that chapter with no plan. I was able to write it, and I think produce a good chapter, with a twist or two that didn’t come to me until during the writing.

Then there was the chapter where the protagonist’s “girlfriend” shows the readers that she isn’t what she claims to be. I had sort of been dreading that chapter, knowing it had to be in the book but not sure how to write it in a way that my mother would approve. Well, not my mother. She didn’t put many restrictions on her reading. Let’s say in a way my mother-in-law would approve. She doesn’t want to read things the least risqué or lurid. As I was writing the chapter, I found a way to show what I wanted to show without being at all explicit. I wrote that chapter over the weekend, and I’m pleased with it as it stands. I’m sure I can improve it some in rewrites.

Yesterday I wrote two chapters, over 3,500 words. The second one is a critical chapter where the girlfriend has her first plot point, the event that causes her to embark on the journey that will bring her through her character arc. Those that teach writing talk about the two plot points the protagonist should go through that leads him into the stages of his journey, but I’ve not heard them talk about plot points for characters below the protagonist-antagonist level, but it seems to me such events apply to them as well.

Anyhow, said girlfriend has begun her character arc. Tonight, plans are for the protagonist to have his fourth “strange thing” happen to him that is really a Mafia-induced event. It’s a big one, done under the noses of three people who are supposed to protect the protag from such things. I plan for that to be only about 1,000 words, though we’ll see how it goes. I’ve thought of one change I need to make in an earlier chapter. I’d love to have enough time to get into another chapter, where the “good” Mafia Don is able to add some protection for the protag in a way that nobody would suspect him.

One thing I did, on Friday I think, after I was too tired to write a second chapter, was to develop an outline for the rest of the book. I had an outline in my mind, even down to thinking through a scene here, a scene there, but I had nothing in writing, nothing that told me, “Okay, you’ve finished this chapter; what comes next?” Now I have that, and it’s a good feeling. It shows me that my thoughts on the length of the book are about right, and that the plot is about right. All that’s missing are the words.