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I’ve spent two days fighting the book.  SKIN TRADE was going along great guns, then I just hit a wall.  I knew what happened next, or thought I did, but I was completely stalled.  Today, finally, two days into the struggle I had my "aha" moment.  I had broken one of Hamilton’s Rules of Writing.  What rule?  Thou, shall not have your villain be stupid just because it furthers your plot, makes your job easier as a writer, or is just nifty.  There’s a similar rule for heroes.  But villains especially are often given short shift on stupidity, as if being evil makes you stupid.  Always remember that bad guys seldom see themselves as bad guys, so their motives must make sense, at least to them.  I had this great climax in mind, and was well on the way, but I’ve got to back up.  I’ve got to have motive for my bad guy to trap the police where he traps them, and where he ambushes them two separate incidents.  He needs a reason to box them where he does it, not just because I thought of this totally cool way to do it.  Cool is not sufficient when death is the possible out come.  I forgot, for a few pages, that my villain has needs, goals, and what those might be.  So, tomorrow I have to jump back two chapters and rewrite.  I just do.  Deadline, or no, this is just not going to work.  My bad guy and his crew have to act like thinking beings, not just props for my heroes to fight their way through.  Also, I’ve got to redo the SWAT stuff in the last few pages.  Been talking to cop friends, and I’m too far off to wait for the rewrite.  I’ll do the last fine tuning after I talk to the last few experts in the area, but a brief talk with friends in uniform pointed out that I’d forgotten some stuff that I actually knew at one time.  Problem is that I haven’t used the tac team stuff much since INCUBUS DREAMS.  I did talk about SWAT stuff in THE HARLEQUIN, but we didn’t see it on stage.  So, I’m rusty.  As the old saying goes, "I’m not really an officer, I just write one in books."