Forward progress

Your comments have been great. Not just because you're saying such lovely things, like you know my book will be good, yaddayaddayadda. But because you really understand the conundrum I posted, and you all had very sound and sensible solutions, except for Lali, who thinks I should model myself after Norman Mailer.

(OK, that's not really what she said.)

Anyway, you'll be happy to know that, so far so good. First of all, after digging seriously back into Hack after weeks of sort of desultory poking around, I realized that Chapter Seven is actually pretty much done, in a first-draft kind of way, and I had made more forward progress into Chapter Eight than I had recalled.

So that was encouraging. (Either that, or Riley and Boscoe have been getting on the laptop in my absence, trying to help me out.)

And second of all, I have been tamping down my feelings of guilt and sitting, butt in chair, laptop on lap, writing, while Doug (a) took down the tree (b) put away all the ornaments (c) cleaned the basement (d) did the grocery shopping (e) walked the dogs (f) took the dogs to the vet and (g) visited his mother.

When he came back from visiting his mother I considered raising a languid hand and saying, "Dahling, mix me a drink, I'm fah too fatigued to do it mahself," but then I thought that might be taking things a bit too far, so, instead, I made dinner.

But I got a lot done, over the weekend and this morning. Hours of good, if not completely steady, work. I dug out old clips from Russia that I had been meaning to find for, oh, four months or so, and I re-read them, trying not to cringe at my 1986 prose, and I rewrote sections of all seven chapters, and I pushed forward into chapter eight by another three or four pages.

It is January, and the cold keeps me happy to be hunkered down, writing. I know that when March rolls around, and the crocuses push their little violet heads through the soil, and the cardinals start nesting, and the light comes earlier and stays later, I'll have a whole new set of temptations to wrestle with. So the time to write is now. And thanks to you, and thanks to Doug, I am.

Maybe I'll post a little new section here for you, see what you think.... stay tuned. Oh, and the picture? Guv and me. I figured he'd be proud. He was a writer, too, you know.