Now With Less Rust

Overall, it was a good week on the writing front. I haven't hit my 10k word goal, but I'm hoping by the end of the afternoon to be around 8k or more. Though it doesn't feel like my word selection is the best, the rust is coming off.

I'd be farther along if a bear hadn't shown up one night. I was with my word processor when I heard the sound of the garbage can being knocked over. Bears don't come around much, but I knew what that sound was. By the time I got a flashlight, the bear had taken a bag of garbage and run off into the woods with it. Fortunately, garbage pickup was the day before, and there was only one bag. I could hear terrible crunching noises in the woods. I set the can back up and went inside and went back to the computer. Then I heard the can again. The bear had come back for seconds. Seriously? Bears never come back for seconds. That time it was hanging around, and I was able to see that it was a big black bear, the biggest one I've seen in real life. The few that have shown up in the past must have been young ones. This one was a real bear. I growled at it through the screen door and started saying, "Hey, bear! Hey, bear!" to scare it away like they do in Alaska. The young ones run away at almost anything. This one moseyed away like he'd seen it all before. He was a real bear.

My big mistake was going back to the computer and telling somebody about it. That ended up throwing off my word count for the night. I ended up in a discussion in which the other person wouldn't listen to what I was saying or even think it through. Every time that happens, I always think of the same thing.

Proverbs 18:13 He that answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame unto him.

Firing off a snap judgment about something without thinking it through is foolishness. And that reminds me of another verse.

Proverbs 29:20 Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool that for him.

Those are KJV updated to modern English. How do you get through to someone when the other person rushes to a quick conclusion but refuses to think? I don't always get it right, but I at least try to think through what the other person is saying.

Book Stuff

The good news is that some of the current writing is writing itself. I've put a lot of time into plotting without micromanaging every little detail. On the one hand that lets things flow better than pantsing does. On the other hand I should have done even more. I have a good enough grip on the concept of what I'm doing that it's going fairly smoothly all things considered, but I can foresee having to sit down and work more on subplots and the events between plot points. Something a lot of people have trouble with is a saggy middle, the zone between 25% and 75%. The beginning is easy. The end is easy. Filling the gap in the middle is one of the harder things to do. Knowing that, I know I need to put more work into the middle.

I'm thinking about putting the B'vellah War book 2 back on Amazon. I took it down and reworked it a while back, including last year. I didn't want to put anything else up without a real cover, but I'm thinking about putting it up with the old one.

Have a great weekend.