Aside from dietary hardship, dreaming nightly of a medium rare ribeye and a double Dewar's, subsisting instead on cheap cold cuts and canned mackerel, the work of Finding Flopsie proceeds apace.
Conceived as two stories told from two wildly different POVs (his and hers) there was macguffin hooey to keep them incommunicado, which is damn near impossible in modern life. I solved it by throwing Peachy's iPhone in a swimming pool, inability to remember her husband's mobile number after years of using an icon shortcut, and a network firewall that scrambles text messages sent from her sister's Android device. All completely silly, right? -- but if you get past the technofrauds for story's sake, it becomes a rather wonderful tale of two lovers separated and frantic with worry.
Of course, there must be action, people must be killed, all hope lost, saved more than once by impossibly good fortune, and in the end to risk life itself for love and honor, price no object, the same story told twice as a man would live it and then as a woman might. The project is nearing completion, maybe two more weeks.
Each day I try to write a chapter. Wednesday is a day off, although I like work days best. The most difficult part of beginning a new novel is beginning, thinking oneself obviously incompetent to do such a thing ever again. With the first line, there will be a second, and then (as of today) 59,000 words in highly polished form with about another 20 thousand to go, milking high drama and action as slowly as I can from a shrinking herd of characters. Stories force endings. The trick is to get there in loops and spirals of ever-increasing suspense and force. Wish me luck on that.
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