My friend on-line friend and fellow writer Veronica commented on my last post. That spurred me on to post this new update to my work on China Tour.

I’m taking a semi-vacation. Last Saturday we began babysitting our two grandsons. Their parents spent a night here, then went off for three days r&r away from home and kids. I took three days vacation to help my wife, so with the Thursday-Friday holiday I’ll have the whole week off. Their parents just arrived from their trip, my mother-in-law is here, so the house is pretty full.

I decided that I would take the time off from writing: no blog, no novel, no writing resources to study, no research. I would concentrate on the grandsons. However, it occurred to me that I could get up at or near my normal time, 5:45 a.m., and do some writing while the house was quiet. I managed to do that on Monday and Wednesday. I worked on China Tour. On Monday I had a hard time with my computer, due to virus checking and automatic updates and recovery of documents from a power interruption. Then, since it had been a week since I’d written, I had to reread the about ten pages to get back into the plot. Wednesday—today—was better, with no computer problems and being fresh into the plot.

So I began to write this morning. It’s a scene I really hadn’t thought through before, at least not in detail. It’s at the point in the novel after a major switcheroo had taken place. But the words seemed to flow. I typed from about  6:30 to 7:30 a.m., and checked the word total for the day. It was about 1,200 words. Not bad for an hour, in a previously unplanned scene. The total word count is now over 19,000.

I’d like to keep that up. I know I won’t get a chance to write on Thanksgiving Day. I’m the main cook, so I’ll be busy probably from 6:00 a.m. on. Then there’s the traditional Thanksgiving Day long walk, preventing the tryptophan from doing its work. Then rest, leftover, dessert, etc.

The kids got back this afternoon and told us they will have to leave on Friday instead of Saturday. Hate to see them go. It’s been a good time with Ephraim and Ezra so far, and don’t like to see it cut short. But I will also enjoy having time to get back to work on my book. Hitting it hard on Friday-Saturday-Sunday, I’d like to get to somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 words. Right now it appears the book is running short of my projected word count of 75-80,000. I really want a book that long to fit in with genre expectations. The length required for this next section, which is mostly unplanned, will let me know where I’m going to finish up at.

So stay tuned. We’ll see what the next few days bring.