Tomorrow is my birthday.

I will be 49. I'm finally getting some serious writing done. Some serious realizations on a novel that is making the rounds. Luna always has a good effect upon me, even though it sometimes takes me months of pondering what she said to fully understand it all. But I realized that I had been completely misrepresenting a key character. As a result none of the four novels in the set worked the way I wanted them to. It wasn't a major disaster, just like having tuned a piano and only a fine ear would have caught it. Two people, both published authors who loved the material and could not understand why it had not sold yet, had failed to catch that single disharmony and Luna caught it. I deliberately gave her the novels to read out of sequence since I felt that each needed to stand alone. When I gave her the first one as the last one she picked up one the essential disharmony at the root and my brain ground to a halt and I started into this serious contemplation of the whole and just niggled. It helped that I was also sick for several weeks and had no choice but to rest and quit fighting, quit being my usual stubborn ass, I will write no matter what self. Then it all clicked into place. I understood it.

For the last few days I have simply been making notes as I had the energy (another round of being sick hasn't helped, more dtrs on Friday), preparing for the new layers of characterization. I'm introducing some characters earlier, aspects of other characters earlier, and adding a new character to foreshadow a character from the second book.

I still feel a sense of trepedation when I look at the stack of pages, the first two are roughly 200k and the second two are 300k. I cope by never having more than one manuscript in view at a time. Otherwise I freak.