Last night I added 900 words to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. The brings the total word count to a little over 53,100. Only 22,000 or so to go. At 5,000 a week I’ll be through with it in early October. Of course, I’m not sure I can really do 5,000 a week, every week for a month. We’ll see.

My writing last night brought me to a point where I caught up to a scene I wrote over a year ago; might even have been two years ago. That scene came to me one day. I wanted the protagonist to have a difficult encounter with the reporter who had befriended him, but who was really just out for a story. He wasn’t really a friend.

In that scene, the reporter tells Ronny that his family was involved in a financial scandal related to his college baseball scholarship. The reporter produced the documentary evidence to Ronny, and said the story would run in the next day’s paper. The scene ended with Ronny tearing out of the Cubs’ players’ parking lot, making a cell phone call.

Those 900 words I wrote last night filled in the gap between the story before it and the scene. How did it work out, joining writing from a year ago that depended on all the writing done in the last year? Not too bad. I realized I had to use names differently in speaker tags. I needed to add the part of the reporter having the documentation with him, and Ronny taking it with him. But all in all not bad.

I’ve got one more scene written ahead, where Ronny’s girlfriend learns there is a Mafia plot to hurt or kill him, and where she needs to warn him. I wrote that about a month after I wrote the other disconnected scene, but I won’t have the book to that point for a few more chapters. How will it fit together at that time? Good, I think. At least if this last one is any indication, writing ahead didn’t hurt me.

I have two or three other scenes swirling in my head, about the late chapters in New York City: Ronny on the Brooklyn Bridge, events inside Yankee Stadium, his girlfriend arriving at Yankee Stadium and trying to warn officials. So far I’ve resisted writing them. If I can keep to my production schedule, I’ll be writing them in less than a month. The scenes are impressed upon me, and I won’t forget them. I wrote the other scenes early because I was afraid I would forget them.

So, things are coming together for the young Mr. Thompson and his super right arm. Stay tuned for more updates, either here or on my Facebook author’s page.