(Note -- I kept a journal while I was at World Fantasy in DC, and I didn't get a chance to post the entries 'til now.)

Amtrak ain't all that bad, if you can get away from chatty-type folks. We're just pulling out of Richmond, Va, and I've been aboard the train for almost 4 hours, but I'm not dying like I would be if I'd been on a plane. I've checked out the dining car, paid for some overpriced snacks, stretched my legs. We should be in DC in an hour and a half.

I had to move from my first seat because the folks behind me were chatting on and on and I couldn't turn off my eavesdropping sensors. I tried reading to no avail. So I pulled out the laptop and tried to get some writing done. By this time I was getting pretty damn miserable. Some plan this train ride was turning out to be! So finally when the people one seat up and over from me got off in scenic Wilson, NC, I slid over to the window seat (there's an outlet right next to me!) and fired up the laptop and actually wrote about 500 words on the scene in the mall/camp.

Now we're moving again, on our way to DC. It's sort of surreal, being back in Richmond again after just being here what, 4 days ago? I wonder how people who travel for their jobs, or simply travel a lot feel like after a couple back-to-back trips. It's got to be a bit unsettling, maybe, or just more liberating. Like the country is an open atlas, and you can go wherever the lines on the page lead.

What's cool about the train ride is that we pass by the less fancy parts of town, and I get glimpses of lives that are probably people like me, and even more like my characters. People without much of a voice, who I try to give a voice in my fiction. People with much much harder lives than my middle class self has ever experienced. What do they think about when they hear that train whistle blow? Is it an annoyance, or a glimmer of hope for escape or just a reminder that life can get better somehow? And why do I assume that these people are unhappy in the first place? Isn't that condescending?

Ahh... it's too much for me to figure out right now.

Another perk of the train: not having to deal with traffic.

Added about 500 to the last part of the second section of the novel, and I feel like everything's all pulled together now. Woo-hoo! Managed to squeeze in 1,100 words today on the train. I'm happy. This pulls me up to 12,800 for the month. Maybe tomorrow I can get another thousand or so and finish up that scene in the tunnels underneath the old shopping mall. I pretty much know what happens, just have to do what Stephen King's character in BAG OF BONES called the "secretarial work."

Speaking of BAG OF BONES, I finally finished it this morning! Great book. I had to really rush through the end, because I had to leave home at 10, so I pretty much skimmed the epilogue, which I found pretty unnecessary anyway (King must feel like he needs to tie up EVERY SINGLE loose end with his stories and novels -- he's done this before). To me, the story ended when he took care of the main ghost in the story, with a wonderful scene that just worked perfectly. Everything after that was anticlimactic.

Maybe that's just my lack of sophistication as a reader -- King had a lot of characters in this novel, as he usually does, and because of that, he has a lot of work to do at the end to resolve everything (I also think that he needs to do this because of his audience as a bestselling author -- no slam against his readership, I just think it's a requirement for those readers to not have any ambiguity whatsoever -- I get that feeling when I read mysteries a lot, and that's why I don't care for mysteries. I can figure shit out, thanks! Don't need the author to hold my hand).

Best scene of the novel after the climactic resolution with the ghost and its "early remains" was when King kicked it into gear with one of the minor minor characters after a horrific shooting, and he turned this skinny old dude named George Kennedy ("like the actor") into a fucking gunslinger, that's all I can call him, and he gives us readers the vengeance we need at that point in the scene. Though it comes at a cost. When King does this sort of action scene, there is no one better at writing it than him. Makes me hungry for when I start rereading the Dark Tower novels. And I've heard good things about the latest one so far...

4:34 p.m. and we're almost in DC. Wahoo!

Today's Words: 1,100

2003 Words: 135,100

Today's Quote:
Even more shocking than the sight of the restless aliens are the sounds they are making. They hum and sing in low voices that are almost too high-pitched to hear. Birdsong has never sounded so mournful or pained. The melody is threadbare without sounding like moaning, and they sometimes scratched at the dirt floor simultaneously as if agreeing to some obscure fact or scratching a persistent itch.

The camera operator makes another sound that is added to the soundtrack, a sudden exhalation of air that sounds like a mix of satisfaction and horror, as if the filmer had finally found something he or she had been expecting to find for weeks, but too afraid to admit it existed.