News

Hey, everybody. Jonathon and I are both sick with colds. You forget how really miserable they can be. I’m up trying to do a few pages just to keep the momentum rolling. I’ve found that for myself even a day with no pages can really hurt when the book is near the end. So I’ll struggle through a few. Even a page is better than nothing. Yesterday I managed eleven pages, after a week of two and five pages. I was very pleased.
You know how I say don’t rewrite as you go through your first draft, I still hold to that, but I found myself hoist on my own advice. Anita goes into the vampire lair with a police tactical team. As I’m trying to write the scene I hit three things in a row that I wasn’t sure of. I was almost sure, but not a hundred percent. But they were things that could have impact on the way I wrote the scene. For instance do we have flashlights or nightvision goggles. Right now we’ve got those flashlights that attache to the gun barrel, because the night goggles cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars a piece. Most police forces do not have the money to equip eight men with them. If when I’m finished with this book and I talk to my experts and they tell me that, well, actually, night visiton afterall, I’ll have to rewrite it, but if I’d tried to start interviewing people before the book was finished, the scene wouldn’t even be finished. So I literally wrote, NOTES; FLASHLIGHTS OR NIGHT GOGGLES. I have almost a dozen questions that I will be asking my expert, but until I wrote the entire scene I didn’t know what I needed to ask about. That’s one of the reasons I say do the first draft first, because for me, I don’t always know how things are going to happen until the scene is written. Notes don’t count, too often in the actual writing I find the scene turning in a totally different direction. Sometimes I go back later and rewrite the scene as I orignally intended, but most often, the new version is what stays. It’s fresher, more real, more true to something in the book.
Right now, I’m going to try and get a few pages of the aftermath scene. I was hoping we could skip this chapter, but it works better if Anita has her say to the police and everybody, rather than a few paragraphs of backflash later. I may try it both ways, but I think there’s just too much stuff to squeeze down into paragraphs. Pages, I think. I would love for this book to be shorter, but length is like heighth, you don’t get to choose. Gotta go.