Twice in the past decade or so, Bill and I have had occasion to spend time in the UK. Having watched fascinating scripted BBC dramas on PBS, we eagerly turned on the hotel TV sets. What a disappointment! Once we saw a national lawn bowling tournament, and once we were treated to an endless loop of shows about meerkats. Between lawn bowling and meerkats, I prefer meerkats.

Here’s something to remember. Watching a writer write is a spectator sport akin to watching paint dry or lawn bowling. And if you don’t believe me, ask my husband. He’s been standing on the sidelines watching me do it for the past twenty-nine-and-counting years. Due to my blog, several times in the last weeks, I’ve sucked my readers into watching the writing process, too. And so, as Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story.

We’re talking about a book with no name, hereafter referred to as BWNN. The book had a name once, but the first one ended up being used as the title for a novella when I yanked seventy pages or so out of the book-in-process because that part of the story was causing a distraction. Then BWNN had a new name for a day or so last week, but the marketing folks didn’t like it. So, as I write this, it’s still BWNN, and I can tell you that writing it has been a struggle.

It’s an Arizona book; a Walker/Beaumont combo book; a reservation book. Over the months I’ve done battle with it—literally night and day—sitting over my keyboard by day and tossing and turning about it at night.

Earlier this week we saw a movie, The Hotel Budapest. At the beginning a character, who is presumably the guy writing the story, says words to the effect that writers aren’t just writers when they write. They are writers all the time, searching out stories and finding connections.

Part of the problem with BWNN was that I actively disliked one of the characters. If he got knocked off, who cared? There was no one to mourn his passing, and I couldn’t mourn him, either.

Then, in December, I accompanied my daughter and grandson to a Christmas Eve service at church—you know, a service about the Greatest Story Ever Told. And while I was sitting there in the pew, a miracle happened. Yes, the service was all about the story of Baby Jesus, but to my astonishment, another baby was born that night, too. While people were singing the final carols, I learned that one of my characters, the one I didn’t like, had a daughter. That meant he DID have someone who cared about him, and if she could care about him, so could I.

That put BWNN in a whole new light. It was about that same time when I reached the conclusion that the distraction part of the story had to come out. I was in the process of doing just that when we arrived in Arizona. I’ve often said that I don’t have to BE somewhere to write ABOUT it, but it turns out that isn’t true, at least not this time, because until we arrived here with the blue skies and sunshine overhead, my story still wouldn’t sing.

When we arrived, the house here had been empty for months. There was no food in the pantry or the fridge, so that first morning we went to Chaffins on Broadway for breakfast. (By the way, as far as I know, Chaffins is the only place in the universe that makes and sells real live Sugarloaf Cafe Sweet Rolls.) As we were leaving the restaurant after breakfast, we walked out to the end of the parking lot while chatting with a man and a woman who looked as though they were probably of Tohono O’odham stock. When we reached our car, I asked them if they were from the reservation. The man said yes, they were. I said, “I worked out at Sells for a number of years. I was the school librarian.”

I’m going to quote his response, but I’m also going to try to duplicate how it sounded. The Tohono O’odham are very soft-spoken, and they tend to swallow final syllables of words which makes it seem so as though there are full stops between each word. “Oh,” he said, “so . you’re . the . lady . who . writes . all . those . books.”

If you’ve not been on a reservation, you have no idea of what a remarkable conversation that was between two strangers, Indian and Anglo; Tohono O’odham and Milgahn. Remarkable! I walked away from his comment feeling lighter than air; as though I’d just received a blessing; as though he’d just patted me on the back and said, “Good job.”

So now I’m back working on the book, and it is singing. The feel and the sounds of the desert are in my heart and they’re also in the words going into the file. The characters are talking to me at night, and that’s all to the good. The little linch-pins of legend that fit into each chapter are clicking into place like parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle. But it’s still not easy.

When I got my first computer, the best my 128 K Eagle could do was a max of 2500 words per file. Believe me, that made for short, choppy chapters. And that’s how I constructed the books on my PC for a very long time, short and choppy; chapter by chapter. Doing it that way, however, came with two major drawbacks: 1. Printing the whole document when I finished doing the writing, and 2. Finding something in one of the earlier chapters and then, if changes had to be made, tracing all the threads and making similar changes throughout the manuscript.

Now, on my Mac, I tend to write books that are “all of a piece,” as my mother would say. Everything goes into one long string of story and one very long file. Sometimes I’ll need to go back and find something in a previous chapter and follow that through the entire manuscript. With a single key word, doing that is a breeze. And when I finish writing BWNN, I won’t even have to print it. I’ll just put it in a file and e-mail it to my editor in New York.

But early this week a new problem raised its ugly head. I discovered I had two chapters with 30 plus pages. Oops. That is WAY TOO LONG!! So I’ve spent the last few days restructuring the book—adding chapters and pieces of legend and shuttling material back and forth among them. There were times yesterday afternoon when I thought my head would explode. But now the restructuring is done. Today, once this blog is finished, I get to write new material instead of battling with old stuff. It should be fun.

The Tohono O’odham have a tradition of “singing for power.” That’s how I’m feeling today—powerful. The parking lot blessing is still working.

By the way, if you’ve been bored to tears by this blog and by peeking behind the curtain at this writer’s life, then I suspect you wouldn’t like watching lawn bowling very much, either.