Last night I found many reasons to be upstairs and not writing. Finally around 9:15 p.m., with all necessaries and unnecessaries completed, I went to The Dungeon and began writing on China Tour.

These were scenes interspersed with scenes I had already written. I decided to follow one couple through an intense 24 hour period and write all those scenes consecutively, even though they wouldn’t appear in the book that way. By doing so, I think I wrote more efficiently, not having to go back and think about what I had written before tracking the other couple. I took that couple through that critical period, to a point where they were apart from each other. Their next scene will be when they join each other again.

Sunday I began working on the scenes for the other couple. Their time is not all that intense, at least not physical danger like the first couple. They have a different kind of relationship crisis going on, with kids in the middle. I found it somewhat difficult to write these scenes, and on Sunday only wrote around 1,000 words in three hours. I couldn’t concentrate.

But by the time I got to the computer last night, I had been over these scenes in my mind. I opened the file, went straight to work, and in just 90 minutes pounded out about 1,900 words, bringing the total to 38,700. After I left The Dungeon and went upstairs to do a few things before going to bed, I realized I had left a critical part of dialog out. I’ll try to insert that tonight.

All of these scenes were basically unknown to me two weeks ago. Even as recently as three weeks ago I hadn’t figured out how to put the first couple in physical danger, and I had no idea how to put the second couple in the relationship problem. But as I write one scene, the next one comes to me. Then another and another.

I’m writing the action that happened on September 18, 1983. My intention was to go day-to-day all the way up to September 27, with the two climax scenes happening on September 26. If I do that, however, I run the risk of a couple of things. One, it might get boring, because I don’t know that much is going on of interest to the average reader. Second, it might run too long. That’s a surprising statement as just a couple of weeks ago I was lamenting that the book seemed to be trending shorter than I had first expected. I’ve now come full circle and think maybe the length will be just right.

I think what I’m going to do is skip some days. I’ll finish September 18th, right up to lights out (a long, long chapter). Then I may skip ahead to Sept 21, and figure out some action in Chengdu. then I may skip ahead to Sept 23 and a scene I’ve planned all along for Xian. Then it will be on to Beijing for planning on Sept 25 and the culmination of the two quests on Sept 26, and the denouement on the 27th.

BUT, for the next week or two I don’t know that I’ll get much writing done. We’ll be traveling for Christmas. I don’t write well on the laptop, and I don’t know how much time I would be able to devote to it. So I’m going to print out the manuscript as it now stands and edit it on the trip. If Lynda is interested, I’ll have her read it and make sure some of the, shall I say, edgier scenes in it get the spousal blessing.

Hopefully I’ll check in here a few more times before the end of the year.