New look to the blog

You know how folks decide to put up a website and three or four weeks later ... Shazamm ... there's a website?

It's taken me a little longer.

Ok. Much Longer.
But I'm getting reasonably close. Couple of weeks now, I think.

Anyhoo ... I've changed the face of the blog so it'll look sorta like the rest of the website and everything will be symmetric and pleasant when the website goes live.
(Cue to spooky music and someone shouting, 'Give my creature life!')

So what am I doing this week?
I'm settled down firmly on the first draft of MAGGIE ...


Rough Draft of MAGGIE ...

37000 / 130000 words. 28% done!

Which is less progress than it may look like,
and less progress than I should be making,
but we're headed in the right direction.

Can I speak up about Nora Roberts here? Or is that name-dropping and crass?

I saw Nora Roberts at a panel she gave at RWA National. It was one of about four workshops I actually got to attend in the whole four days. I had no idea National was such a madhouse.

But I picked well. It was useful as well as decorative.
N.R. said her working method was to write her first draft right from beginning to end, not going back to fix anything. Just laying it down.

"Oooooh," says I. "That sounds good. I can do that, too."
It kinda 'clicked'.

The meter shows my progress, NOT on the story, but on the First Rough Draft.
(Which is a really, really rough draft.)
When I get finished with that first draft, I'll be about halfway through the writing.
Maybe not quite halfway.
And this is not counting research, which I have, like, the Baltic Sea still to go through, teaspoon by teaspoon.

This zipping-to-the-end approach feels comfy, natural, satisfying, fruitful. If it were food, it'd be pumpkin pie.

I've been trying to find an efficient modus de writing. I'm optimistic. This might be it.

Where I am right now in the story --

Adrian has just crawled his secret and unregarded way out of British Service Headquarters in Paris, headed for the slums of ... someplace in Paris. I haven't looked up where the slums were. OK.
Adrian is -- putting it in modern terms -- pursuing his own agenda.

We're in his POV.

Re Adrian POV -- this is challenging because
a) Adrian-at-twelve doesn't sound like Adrian-at-twenty.
b) a long stretch of Adrian POV gives him more weight in the story than I really want him to have.

But my plot demands it.
If I could just learn to plot.

So. Next.
I have to balance my people here. I can't do too long a straight run of Adrian because this is Doyle and Maggie's story and the secondary characters are not allowed to run away with the reader's sympathy and attention.

So I now need a strong vignette of Doyle -- which I have in my head. And then I need one of Maggie -- which I haven't the least idea of what it is.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie ... tell me what you are doing.
If you don't, you're going to sit there with a hairbrush in your lap, looking at mirror, thinking about things.
We don't want that, do we?