A long day at work yesterday. Mondays always are. I’m working on the Air Conditioner mod Technical Issuance (TI, which is a maintenance manual, really), and will be at least until the middle of July. It’s really a lot of work. I’ve been spending all my time in Section 3, so far, and it’s well over 100 pages. Most of the others won’t be that long.
I think what I want to do on Sleeping Kings is post up the last scene I have written out longhand, and then stop trying to do the daily, 1000-word posts. Instead, I want to just get the novel finished, in a traditional style. I’m sick of it being this close to the end, and unfinished. Still, as any writer will tell you, ending a book is the hardest part. Have you ever read The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny? If not, you should. But writing a book or story is a lot like the way he describes walking the Pattern. With each page you finish, it gets harder to write the next one, until the ending is just a monumental task to put down each paragraph. There’s Great Arcs, too, but I don’t want to belabor this too long.
I think I’ve decided not to kill off Carlos. I’m not making any promises for the finished version, but I’m going to leave it out of the rough draft, and see how it goes. Before I killed Adrian, I didn’t intend for that to be an emotionally significant death, but it became one within the narrative, so maybe that’ll serve the purpose Carlos’s death was supposed to. We’ll see.
Last night I got home and mostly crashed. T– made tacos, I played with A–b– on the floor (and watched her scoot, which is almost like a crawl, except lamer), and then N– invited us over for Texas Yumyum, which is a sort of dessert. And while we were there, we Guitar Heroed on K–‘s new XBox. Apparently, I did pretty well for my first time. I can see how it would be very challenging at harder difficulty levels, though.
All in all, a really fun evening. We got home at ten, and I went to bed as soon as I was done feeding the kittens.