It’s been more than a week since I’ve written here. So busy, so lazy, so uninspired.

I’m down to the last three chapters in China Tour. This is the point where the action should get fast and furious, the conflict be greatest, the hero become the hero, and then have a quick cool-down to the end of the book.

Randy Ingermansson, a novelist best known for creating a system of novel writing called the Snowflake Method, discusses how to begin a book. In the opening, he says, introduce your main character and plunge him/her into conflict. Then, as the book goes on, raise the stakes in the conflict. Make it harder to achieve aims while at the same time make the consequences of failing to achieve aims more disastrous.

This is what the American reader wants. Whether it’s the same in other countries I don’t know. But books that follow this “formula” seem to be the ones that sell better. In real estate it’s location, location, location. In novel writing it’s conflict, conflict, conflict.

The conflict could be physical danger, emotional turmoil, or just about anything. Frank Peretti’s early and best known novels were about spiritual conflict.

I’ve read some novels, however, that were so full of conflict I was tired of it half way through. One book that struck me this way was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I need to first confess that I haven’t read the full book yet. I read some kind of abridgement to it, and listened to an audio abridgement, and read some of the book. Tolkien’s writing style isn’t my favorite, and I’ve had trouble getting back to it, and back to The Lord of the Ring trilogy, which I also started and didn’t finish.

In the abridgement, Bilbo never seemed to get a breath to just be a hobbit. I was tired for his sake by the time he got to the forest elves (I think I’m remembering that correctly). I would have liked a little more balance between conflict and resting. Oh, well, that may be just me. The popularity of the book indicates millions of readers don’t agree with me.

In China Tour, one of the couples has reached Beijing and the other will in the next chapter. The remaining two aims, not necessarily in agreement with each other, is to see the Bibles delivered to the persecuted Chinese Christian, and to make contact with the Chinese dissident and put him in CIA custody for extraction from the country. That was supposed to have happened in a rural province in the south, over the border to Vietnam, but the tourist couple got in the way of the spy couple, and the plans got blasted to smithereens.

I have the means of extraction figured out, the location, and how the principles will achieve it. I don’t know if the conflict is high enough or not. I’ll know that tomorrow or Sunday when I actually write it. I know for sure that I haven’t raise the stakes of failure sufficiently. Just this morning, however, I thought of a way to do that. It will happen in a chapter already written, and I’ll catch it on the first round of edits.

So, for the next three writing days I will be trying to create conflict. A strange position for a lover of peace to be in. Wish me luck.

On February 7, Lynda and I began a long road trip to San Diego. The main purpose was to attend the Environmental Connection 13 conference, the annual conference of the International Erosion Control Association. I moderated a panel discussion on low impact development, and presented a half-day course in specification writing for erosion and sediment control works. We included three vacation days, plus the weekends, and so were gone for 12 days.

During this time I did very little with writing. I brought the printed manuscript of China Tour with me, intending to edit it, or thinking that possibly Lynda would read some more in it. All I did was read and handwrite some edits on the first chapter. I also kept up with a couple of writing blogs, though not rigorously every day. I worked on re-formatting a Thomas Carlyle book that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. That’s actually quite enjoyable and relaxing.

But we’re back now. It’s time to get back in the saddle and get to writing. China Tour lacks only three chapters and maybe 8,000 words from being finished. Then of course will be comprehensive editing. My cover designer is lined up, and we’ve had conversations about the cover. A marketing plan is rolling around in my brain. Right now I’m hoping for a book launch in May, though whether that’s early or late will depend on a number of circumstances, most importantly the birth of grandchild #3, granddaughter #1, currently “scheduled” for mid-May but anticipated earlier just like her next older brother.

Last night I finished a chapter in China Tour (or, as I might rename it, Smugglers and Spies). It’s the chapter for September 23, 1983, when both couples are in Xian, China, but don’t run into each other.

I don’t want to give away the plot—not that anyone thinking about picking up the book in the future is likely to come here and read a spoiler—so I won’t say too much. The tourist couple and the CIA agent couple find themselves in places of extreme tension, sexual temptation. They are supposed to be working on a plan to get the dissident out through Beijing three days hence, rescuing a botched operation. But instead of sticking fully to business, they are thrust into the sexual temptation.

I’m writing the book in multiple third-person point of view. That is, the narrator is inside one person’s head at a time, one of the four main characters. In one chapter I have one other POV, a Chinese agent’s. Writing in this manner you have to keep track of whose POV you’re in, and limit observations to what they sense and think.

The alternative to this is to write it in third-person omniscient. This is when the narrator has a God-level view. He can be in anyone’s head, see what anyone sees, tell the reader what anyone is thinking. Herman Wouk used this POV in his classics The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, as did James Michener in Centennial.

I like the omniscient POV, but publishing industry insiders say it is less favored by the average reader nowadays. So, I decided for simple third person for China Tour.

The scenes I wrote last night and over this past weekend required careful attention to make sure I didn’t “head hop”—that is, begin a scene in one person’s head and end it in another’s without a good reason to do so and a logical transition. The scenes from last night weren’t that hard. The four main characters were all in different places. But the ones from the weekend were difficult. The two couples were together, and the scenes were short. I was in the agent-husband’s head, then the tourist husband’s, then maybe the agent wife’s, then the tourist wife’s. Back and forth from scene to scene.

I don’t really know if I got it all right. I’ll be re-reading them over the next two weeks and seeing if I kept the POVs pure. It will be an interesting exercise, and the most complicated use of POV I’ve used up to this point in my writing career.

The book is now 61,000 words. I have four days of it yet to write (Sept 24, 25, 26, and 27, 1983). The last day will be the denouement and should be short. The 26th will be the longest. Right now I don’t have a clue what I will write for the 24th and 25th. I think they might be short as well, maybe 1000 words each. So right now it looks as if the book will be close to 70,000 words. I think that’s a good length for a spy novel.

I don’t expect to be writing much new material over the next two to two and a half weeks, and business and pleasure will have a hold on me. But I will have a lot of time to think through these last four days of the book, and plan what to do next.

The book launch? Right now I’m guessing around April 1, 2013, but there’s the finishing and the editing and finding and replying to beta readers and final corrections and formatting and working with a cover designer and uploading. So we’ll see if I can keep to that schedule.