Progress on Headshots

Last week I was in Nashville for most of the week, attending the IECA annual conference and presenting a paper there, “Who Pays the Fine?” It was a great trip, and I’m writing a detailed trip diary about it. It’s not something that I’ll publish, though possibly I might take some of it for a blog post. It’s just something I want to do, something I have to get out of my system before returning to work on Headshots.

And, that’s the subject of this blog post. I last worked on Headshots on February 23. I left for the trip on February 25 and came back just before midnight on the 28th. March 1 was moving day for my mother-in-law, with tiredness overcoming me and having no mind or energy to write, little enough to read.

Today is the day I planned to have a blog post here, but my blog post planning record is at work, and I’m at home on a snow day. Having shoveled the drive this morning, I came down here, uncertain of what to write. I just finished a travel log of my trip to Nashville, running on to seven typed pages. Next is this post, which I have decided will be on Headshots.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m slogging through the sagging middle. The idea came to me to make this mostly about baseball, since I had very little baseball action in the early chapters. The timeframe has moved into during the season, so I’ve written about Ronny’s comeback attempt. This has taken me through Chapter 18, and 56,222 words. Since I’m heading for around 80,000, and I think the ending action will take close to 20,000 words, that means I’m almost through the sagging middle.

But, I have other things to add to it. I have to add that Sarah gets kind of stir-crazy, hiding out at the farm, not being able to go anywhere without Federal protective agents going with her. I need for her to do something stupid to make her situation worse. I also haven’t touched on any Mafia/gang actions for a while. I can’t forget them in the midst of the baseball action. Some ideas have come to me for both of these problems. One is to give back story on the four main mobsters: Mancini, Russo, Cerelli, and Washburn. In both books I’ve said very little about what motivates them. Washburn and Mancini got a paragraph each in FTSP, and I think I gave some of Mancini’s back story earlier in this book.

Once I add those things in to the sagging middle, I suspect I’ll be somewhere around 65,000 words. So either the book will be a little longer than I thought, or perhaps the end game will be shorter. Either way, I’ll try to get back to this in a few days, or perhaps next weekend.

The end is in sight.

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