Welcome to an icy and windy Pacific Northwest. (My typing fingers wrote Pacific Northwet which auto-correct instantly changed to Pacific Northwest, but the other version seems right as \u2026 well \u2026 rain.)<\/p>\n
The last real snow here was the day before yesterday, but below freezing temperatures mean that everything on the ground has turned to ice. Currently the snowplow attempting to clear a path to my grandson\u2019s school, three miles from here, is stuck in \u2026 well \u2026 icy snow. I have a feeling all available tow trucks are already engaged. It may be a while before that snowplow gets loose, and school is out for the third day in a row. Since my daughter\u2019s home is directly across the street from said school, her street is an ice-skating rink, and she\u2019s home from work for the third day in a row as well.<\/p>\n
As for our house? We live at the top of a dead-straight and very steep driveway which is now icy, too. At the bottom of the driveway is a narrow private road. And beyond that? An equally steep cliff with no guard rail. So going down the driveway before the ice melts isn\u2019t exactly an option. As for the private road? That\u2019s icy, too. Yesterday, a neighbor\u2019s vehicle spun out and spent most of the day aimed at but not hitting our mailbox. That car blocked traffic from below while another stalled vehicle just up the street blocked traffic in the other direction. You might say we were an island unto ourselves. There\u2019s a palm tree in the corner of our pool deck. Because it\u2019s sheltered from the wind that is knocking snow and ice off taller trees, that weighed-down palm tree is very unhappy right now.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the good news. My commute from the bedroom to my writing chair by way of the coffee machine remains totally unaffected by the weather. And this morning, my commute became downright terrific. I left the bedroom and walked two dogs, Mary, with her eye surgery cone in place, and Jojo, with a bit of a hitch in her get-along, to the doggy door in the laundry room. Mary went out. I opened the human door to let Jojo out. She can make it up and down the steps, (something for which I am incredibly grateful), but with three-inch-long legs, the height of the doggy door opening is too much for her. While they were outside, walking in the required number of circles, I continued on into the kitchen to turn on lights and the coffee machine. When I turned around BOTH dogs were back in the house and curled up in the family room. Thank you Dr. Qahwash! Thank you so very much.<\/p>\n
So yes, we\u2019re all snug as bugs in rugs around here, and with no power lines down our electric service is uninterrupted. That means I\u2019ve been writing steadily along. Why not? With Jojo\u2019s physical therapy canceled, with our personal trainer appointment canceled, and with company unable to make it up our hill, there\u2019s no reason not to. And I have to tell you, I\u2019ve been making good progress.<\/p>\n
I may have mentioned before that I count the words every day. That\u2019s how I keep track of forward progress. As of this moment, I\u2019m 22,369 words into Joanna # 19, Missing and Endangered.(M&E as I refer to it in my files.) Books are supposed to be 95,000 to 100,000 words long. I always aim for 95,000. That means only 72,631 to go. Yippee!!!<\/p>\n
Out in public people often ask me about my \u201cwriting process.\u201d There are several answers to that. There\u2019s the no outlining answer which means I start with someone dead or dying and then spend the rest of the book figuring out who killed that person and why. There\u2019s the ‘here\u2019s my day’ answer which means telling people that I get up, start the coffee, answer email, read my on-line papers, and then go to work. (This morning answering my email meant sending a relatively new reader, definitely an IOR (In Order Reader) a link to the books-listed-in-order link on my website. It also meant doing an online Q and A with a blogger who just read Sins of the Fathers and was surprised to discover that book was two dozen books into the Beaumont Series.)<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the real writing process story. I sit in my writing chair, one chosen specifically to be wide enough to contain both a human with a laptop on her lap along with a dachshund lying next to said human\u2019s hip and thigh. And the hours go by. Sometimes my fingers are actually typing on the keyboard\u2014as they are right now. Sometimes my fingers are playing endless games of Solitaire. (My record time for winning on The Fan is one minute, forty-six seconds!)<\/p>\n
Two days ago, I was supposedly working on M&E but playing solitaire, too. I had been working on part of the story that was keeping me engaged and connected, but in the back of my mind I kept wondering how it was related to the rest of the book. And then, suddenly, I knew\u2014I figured out who was in jeopardy in that part of the story, and for murder mysteries, that\u2019s usually the whole point. Who\u2019s in jeopardy?<\/p>\n
Yesterday when I went back to writing, KERBLAMMO!!! I had a 3,000-word day. Those don\u2019t usually happen until I\u2019m on the banana peel of a story. So I wrote 3,000 words and walked my 10,000 steps. They were all indoor steps, and those take longer\u2014two full hours.<\/p>\n
At that rate I could finish the book in jig time. Bill and my editor are probably both hoping the ice will stick around so I can finish the book that much sooner. But that\u2019s not going to work.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re going to run out of milk sooner than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to an icy and windy Pacific Northwest. (My typing fingers wrote Pacific Northwet which auto-correct instantly changed to Pacific Northwest, but the other version seems right as \u2026 well \u2026 rain.) The last real snow here was the day before yesterday, but below freezing temperatures mean that everything on the ground has turned to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-w7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1991"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1993,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions\/1993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}