Hello. I'm still here, and finally got a chance to get some more work done on the novel. My sleep's been all messed up this week for whatever reason, so I ended up getting up at five a.m. to do some more writing on the Blackbeard novel. I'm still hoping to finish up the draft by the end of the month, and I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, at last. I'm down to maybe 10-12,000 words until I have a draft done.

I'd written myself into a corner way back on Monday, so I had to go back and do some fixing, and now, in hindsight, the fixes made sense. That's what you get, kiddies, when you diverge from your trusty outline.

Actually, my outline gets painfully vague by the end of the novel, so I had to do some tightening there as well. Looks like I may only have 2-3 more chapters to go after this one.

This chapter, by the way, leads up the the Hot Sex scene. Which I'm really tempted to just fade to black on, by the way... I'm a prude, I really am. Ah well... Maybe I'll go back to that scene and give it a whack -- I mean, uh, take a stab at--I mean, give it the ol' college try--oh hell, you know what I mean... ;)

Now Playing:
"Greatest Hits," Eurythmics

Now Reading:
Polyphony 2

Stories out to Publishers:
17

Today's Words:
3,700

Words for '03:
79,000

Today's Quote:
Mitch stepped up next to Ella and undid the silver chain from her belt loop. With all three pieces in his hand, he could feel their shared weight of history and something deeper, something that Mitch had felt on rare occasions with Julie and his other girlfriends. He was feeling the emotions -- the love -- that had been placed into this locket and this chain, centuries earlier, and it was almost too much for him to bear.

Because along with the love was an almost blinding sense of pain and betrayal.

Mitch would have dropped the pieces of the locket and the chain if Ella hadn’t taken his hands in hers, cupping the artifacts together and helping take on their stored power along with him. With the cold wind blowing her hair into Mitch’s face and her own, she leaned close to him.

“Hold on,” she said, kissing Mitch so hard on the lips that he saw stars. “I have a feeling that this is when things get a bit crazy.”