Business Time.

I'm up (relatively) early today, it's almost 8:30am.

I logged almost 4K words yesterday. My goal today is to finish Chapter 3 - another 8K words.

I am reading a book that's changing everything: Scene & Structure, by Jack Bickham. Another in the Elements of Fiction Writing Writer's Digest series. Wow. Great stuff. I need to do some *major* reworking to my chapters and scenes to demonstrate cause and effect and really let the conflict emerge.

Yesterday I wrote the first scene in the novel where there's real person-to-person conflict (namely, a man goes to an appointment with a psychiatrist that wasn't his idea. His job told him to go because of his "anger management issues" or he would be fired). It was surprising how easy it was to write that scene, and demonstrate tension. It was easy to move the story from one line to the next.

Everything up to that point (the previous 13K words) felt like exposition. I'm going to have to work hard to go back and draw out that much tension in the previous scenes.

The main characters don't communicate with each other at all (and barely communicate with anyone else) for the first 50K words. Atypical, perhaps. I don't mind if this novel reads like Literary Fiction. I just don't want to lose anyone because I'm being unclear.

Or boring.

I'm having dinner with a friend tonight, going to see if I can convince him to teach me how to design web sites. Heh Heh!

Okay, It's Business Time. I've had my cheese sandwich, and I have a large cup of Functional Coffee here. I'm rarin' to go!

go me,

j.