Power Outtages Can't Slow Me Down!

Owing to a power outage, I didn't get as much work done on my snow day as I might. But I did put down Wuthering Heights long enough to hammer out some more writing in Chapter 5 and organize my notes and sketches of conversations into a manageable and coherent whole. The battery on my laptop lasts for about three and a half hours. And that's not a bad span of time for a writing session, but it's only midnight now and I find myself wishing I had at least another two hours of battery life to expend as I'm positively on a roll and hate to be kept from my writing when the characters are being so very cooperative.

I have almost 2,000 words of 5 written. I imagine it will eventually stretch to a little over 3,500 just as the previous chapters have done, so I'm about halfway there. This is good progress, but the hardest part still lay ahead, the stitching together of disjointed thoughts and making the actions and movements of David flow one into another effortlessly. I have a bit more research to do still, and a lot of passes with the editor's fine-toothed comb to smooth out my awkward phrasing. David is feeling particularly effusive in this chapter, which is turning out to be rather dialog-intensive. I am still honing the dynamic between he and his mother. It's a dynamic thing, Kathryn is always making adjustments for David's idiosyncrasies, so it's hard to give it a distinct label as being “nurturing” or “combative” and that translates into a lack of focus when I write interaction between them. I tend to wander and get lost in discovery rather than move the story along in a pointed manner. I just have to remind myself that I many tens of thousands of more words in which to explore Kathryn and David's mother-son bond.

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Our power is out for the second straight day, but I charged the laptop at work so I'd be able to get some more solid writing time. I was reading some more in Wuthering Heights before firing up the laptop, though, and got thinking about Claire and MarLo as opposed to David and Kathryn, so I started work on Chapter 6 instead of 5 tonight. All the better, as perhaps when I finish them, it won't be too many weeks apart. I had a bit of an inspiration for the opening of 6, and it merged so seamlessly with the short conversation between Claire and MarLo that I'd already written that I just carried on editing what I've already typed out. The end product is over 1,500 words, which is a healthy start, but what I'm most pleased with is that it's a solid 1,500 words that don't break between paragraphs waiting for me to go back and fill in a transition. Chapter 5 is all in bits and pieces that still need to be assembled. They're in the right order now, but transitions are such a trial for me. I can get stuck on a single transition for weeks at a time. So I'm very, very happy to have 6 being more cooperative in terms of cohesion. But then again, I wrote the Claire/MarLo conversation that opens 6 months ago, so it's been percolating for a lot longer than anything I've invented thus far for 5. Poor David. He's at such loose ends in his life, that it's a real challenge for me to fill his days with anything at all except staring at his chalkboard wall and thinking about how disappointed he is in his lack of inspiration. I'm glad to have Claire finally in his life. She'll get him moving in some sort of direction, even if it isn't the right one.