In the middle of a remote training session right now (it's a 2.5-hour long training, and the leader just gave us a 3-minute break -- three minutes!), and I was thinking about the little things we do as writers to amuse ourselves as we're blasting out that first draft.

One thing I wanted to do somewhere in this book is to add a fun reference to A Gathering of Doorways, since both novels take place in the same general location.

At least, they do for now. Who knows what may change when the revising begins. But in case I delete this later, I wanted to share, though it will probably only make sense to me and a handful of other folks:

Kait exhaled and surprised herself as a strange sense of calm covered her along with the frigid air. She was home. Just a mile up the road, heading away from Chapel Hill and the bustle of the university, sat the comforting chaos of the organic farm run by her friends Gil and Melissa, along with the less-soothing wildness of their elderly neighbor Ray's acreage, made up mostly of kudzu and populated by dozens of retired racing greyhounds. Kait closed her eyes and imagined Noah, Gil and Melissa's little boy, singing and kicking for sky on his swing outside his dad's store, while in the field next to him, Ray's dogs coursed over the uneven ground, chasing each other. If she listened hard enough, she could almost hear the thunder of greyhound paws in the night air.

Shivering with the cold, Kait felt herself come awake completely, free from the daze she'd been in while wandering through the House, Pablo's voice in her ear. At least he was still around, and not everyone she knew had been taken away.

And hey, the good news is that I've finally figured out how to fix chapter 5, which has been bothering me for over a week, and I've got the next few chapters mapped out, more or less. That's a nice feeling.

And I finally hit the 20% mark (yes, I'm rounding up!).



Later!