I am two scenes away from finishing Gamble‘s zero draft. Yesterday 3k fell through my fingers, and a number of problems were solved simply by saying fuck it, let’s ride down the hill and see what happens. The entire thing is a mess and full of brackets with notes like “what car was he driving again” and “this needs to go two scenes back”, but that’s usual. The uglier the zero is, the better things tend to go later.
Just have to get all the ugly out of the way early, I guess.
The firs are inky shadows as the sky grudgingly begins to take on some light. Boxnoggin was content with a bare modicum of cuddles and chest-skritches this morning, but also clearly impatient to get to the morning’s work. Which for him, right now, is napping. Soon enough he’ll be strutting through walkies, seeing what changed on one of our various routes since the last time he strolled past. As soon as we’re home he’ll shift to his major daily concern–protecting the house while I mutter and tap at the desk, creating whole new worlds.
He has absolutely no idea of what I do to bring his kibble home; his concerns are much narrower in scope. This makes them correspondingly more intense, perhaps. He takes Doin’ A Protec very, very seriously indeed. I think most of his anxiety comes from that, and the rest from the broken wiring inside his head that fuses and sparks whenever he sees the twitching of anything cat-sized or smaller. We really were the home of last resort for him, poor thing.
Anyway, I got Gamble‘s hero shot, and his too-clever-by-half wordplay with the heroine earlier in the book is going to come back around to bite him. Said heroine is very tired right now, but she’s about to get some reasonably good news–it’s not entirely good, because of how events have transpired, but it does solve some problems and brings the narrative to a fitting resting point. The situation will be back in equilibrium at the end of the book, and that’s all I ask for.
I may go on to write Grey and Jackson’s stories, though the latter unnerves me and I’d prefer not to. But we’ll see what the editor says. I know she wants another Ymre and maybe (maybe, don’t get your hopes up) some more Watcher books. The latter have some leeway because of the timeline; the original quartet was set in the early 2000s, Mindhealer just afterward, and Finder a little later. Since they’re in the same universe as the Society and Valentine series (Rowan and Delgado’s adventures are the early 90s, Danny’s are about 600ish years after the Watchers, with Selene almost a century and a half prior to Japh knocking on Danny’s door) a lot of the heavy worldbuilding is already done. I know exactly what advances are made in Watcher combat sorcery and in the world at large further down the timeline, but I do have to decide how closely I want to hew to our own recent events.
The answer is “not very closely at all, I am exhausted”, but that naturally presents its own set of problems. I’m sure the Muse has her own plans and I’ll just have to wait and find out what they are. As usual.
Anyway, thinking about that is a good way to fritter away the energy I need to bring this goddamn book to conclusion. Rambling with Box will give me time to sort out any remaining problems, so when we get home I can pour another jolt of coffee from Boris’s thermal carafe and get the waking-up-in-the-hospital scene done. I think the heroine’s bestie is about to threaten the hero again, with predictable consequences. The hero really does need to articulate a few things for his buddy.
…yeah, I’m more than halfway in another world, and struggling will avail naught. I just have to get through attending to Boxnoggin’s morning needs, then I can settle down and get this splinter of a book out from my skin. Another one will push up soon; I wrench them free as soon as they rise. Each time I’m afraid I won’t finish another, that I’m done, that I won’t have the endurance to get through one more spelunking expedition and drag something from the cave into daylight.
I’m happy to be wrong. Still, I could do without the fear. The only way out is through.
Guess I’d better get going, huh?
