Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I proceed apace, copy edit now at 69-72% complete (no graphic), depending upon criteria.

Given that positive progress, and multiple walks in wind and sun, my mind has been turning to the next story to obsess me. I wrote two excerpts yesterday, plus a brief reminder to myself of my aspirations.

I often write out conversations when I’m finding my way into a new story. No attributions or descriptions, just words back and forth, conversation feeding character, revealing conflict. Slowly more details emerge: where, and who is talking, why they have come to that moment, how it might resolve this time, in this version. It tends to the highly florid first time around, the equivalent of an actor chewing on every bit of available scenery. And why not? This is the writer at play, having fun, sketching out moments that may never be used, but will still inform, however subtly, what may happen along later.

I have two future novels that started as such conversations, and the world and the story grew from them. This one is different. The world, its cosmology and characters arrived first, but I have been thinking about how my narrative approach will be different this time around, how the crude structure of the book will be a departure for me from what has come before, and one of the two fragments I wrote yesterday begins the process of discovering the vernacular of this world, and how people live and interact there. There is so much to share, and so the work of finding ways to have episodes serve multiple purposes begins: to tell the reader about cultural attitudes, about character, about motivation, to foreshadow conflict and provide historical context, all in one short exchange. And then to do it over and over again and have it seem entirely natural, while remaining engaging, to enchant the reader into turning the next page.

Not an easy task. And these little scraps I have written are sketches of perhaps one or two things I want to incorporate, not the finished manuscript with five or more purposes running through each scene, complementing and competing with each other, providing internal tension and the drive to read on. That is a long way off. But this is a fun part, spitballing ideas to myself, modifying early ideas into something more concrete. Being is becoming (according to Heraclitus anyway), and a book only becomes through writing. This sounds insanely obvious, but pre-writing fragments does help the book come into being for me, even if the fragments are all discarded later. From the vague fog come shapes, ever more solid, pinned down by words on the screen or page. Those words will help to guide the more formal planning, to inform decisions made by me, by the characters, the antagonists, the bystanders of this world, and why they all act as they do.

I think I’m in love. This is what a new book is like. Love’s sweet possibilities. Making the first meal, sharing the first joke, the first secret. The hard work of maintaining the relationship, of staying steady in a world of adversity, that’s for the future—for now I can enjoy the limerence of new ideas and sensations, the excitement of discovery. Later will come the job of making sure everything works in harmony, the nuts and bolts of the writing, the slog of the parts of the book that are just less exciting than this start. Hence the sweet melancholy of this phase, knowing that is to come. For now, anything is possible, one dreamy conversation at a time.