Novel Update

Enough talk about vacation. It's time to get back to work.

So I spent a few days trying to figure out how to get my mind back in the groove, which is to say, how to get my novel going again. I tried toying with my notes for a while, but the words still wouldn't come, so I finally decided to go back and read it through from the beginning. I was hooked. If this were a real book, I would have stayed up late reading it. What a relief.

Tomorrow I'm going to try something I haven't done for a while. I'm writing a dramatic scene in which two characters are at extreme odds. In fact, the first wishes to torture the second, and the second wishes to kill the first. They know this about each other, but owing to some unique circumstances, they have to pretend to be civil. So I have a unique challenge: to make the characters say and do one thing, but mean and intend something entirely different. One of my better short stories employs this technique, but not to such an extreme degree. Should be fun.