Unstuck, Abstract!

Each day here in Guerneville I am awakened by mockingbirds shrieking...or by some folks down the way dropping something called "FOXY", which keeps them awake and giggling all night and through the morning.

I am most certainly not a morning person, but during my time here I'm up with the birds and the foxy's, usually by 06.45. I walk down the way and take a shower, brush my teeth, walk back to my tent. I grab my iBook (don't say it) and head for a walk down to the coffee house that has internet connectivity—well, it has a lone Blueberry iMac running Mac OS 9, with a dialup connection. I don't use it; I can't easily use the connection to post blog entries, and well, fuck it, my email and the news of the world can wait a few days.

Besides, the hour or two I spend there feeds my need for solitude, or at least for reflection in this weekend of people-people-everywhere.

This morning was a landmark session. After having spent the last couple of weeks digging out notes and other preparatories for a nice long story I wanted to write, I finally pulled it all together into a serious timeline, fleshing out details with almost frictionless ease.

Odd that I had only brought up MacJournal, the app into which I have been entering all the materials (including writing) for the new novel, as a shield for the blog entries about bears. I figured if someone I knew came into the coffee shop, they might not.....appreciate....the subject or the tone of the entries. So the work on the novel was busy work, a cover up.

But lo and behold...there it was..the story laid itself out for me..or at least most of it has. And this is very different to how I wrote the first novel, which was a shoot-from-the-hip kind of thing that was character driven and finished up quite nicely even though I didn't know where I was going with it before I started.

This one will also be character-driven, but I knew plot points in advance, and so I wrote timelines and filled them in in order to be sure that explications, foreshadowing, pattern and locations were all included.

To quote Sam, "it makes me happy in the pants."