Fleshed out the beginning of A Time For Dying, which is running a hair under 3,000 words. It’s lots of fun letting the characters run the show instead of index cards.

There’s been a few changes to the story. While the basic ending makes sense, the more the protagonist reveals themselves, the more it suggests additional twists. I’m also surprised by the balance of dialog to narrative. Taking the reader inside the character without having them speak, or writing out how they feel has been a huge stumbling block. Dialog comes very easily, narrative much less so. This story taxes both tools equally.

A trick from Charles Dickens about dialog. Dicken’s was as much an actor as a writer, and made quite a lot of money performing his classic works on the stage. Inside his writing studio were five wall mirrors; each represented a different character. When a roadblock emerged, he stood before the related mirror and acted out lines, emoting through obstacle. Sounds insane, but I’ve seen it work. Even with just one mirror.

With all the time freed up by The Eight’s review, I ditched my original forecast for the next project. Initially, I planned on waiting a week after writing the ending to have a go at the first chapter. Excess nervous energy drove me back to the keyboard.

As it stands there’s a first chapter and a last, but no outline or concrete plan for a middle. This is unprecedented. Before on each project I sat down quite deliberately and devised plot points, and hashed out a synopsis. Not so here. It could be a short story; it could be a novella; it could be a novel. Word count will determine the final form. Since it’s a side project, I’m just going to let this story drive its own course. The only rule I’m imposing on the process is a time allotment. A maximum of sixty minutes per day until completion. In an act of blind faith, I’m not even looking at a calendar for this project, and have no idea how long it might take.

For reference purposes on the blog – it’s easier to recall something by name – the title is A Time for Dying. That’s the Internet safe “handle”. The real title is more fun. And ominous.

Yesterday I ran into one of The Eight by accident. We did the hello/idle chatter thing for a moment and she dropped a bombshell.

She works with law enforcement via the criminal court system. Intrigued by techniques the villain used to frustrate ballistics, she sought the counsel of a police officer. Interestingly, this was no vanilla beat cop. He’s on the SWAT team, and former member of the narcotics desk. The officer confirmed all the techniques the villain used would work, and caught a small glitch that while feasible, was inconsistent with the character. Based on the page he read, he wants to chat. I’m meeting with him after Thanksgiving. Sweet.

And there’s more from The Eight. A frantic IM came in last night from another pre-submit reader. He identified a separate inconsistency with the villain. It was tiny, but when he pointed it out, suddenly the problem flared like a bottle rocket.

Bottom line: The Eight rules. Oh yeah, and people like reading about criminals.

During last month of heads down writing, a few ideas bubbled up from wherever stories come. These bits had no connection to the manuscript so I jotted them in text files and set them aside. Call them distractions perhaps, and very unwelcome in the moment. Essentially they were raw, rough, half formed seeds. Tiny ideas so undeveloped that when reviewing the sentence fragments weeks afterwards, I questioned why I bothered. Yet something caught my eye.

At the time, leaving the files be was difficult, one more so than the others. It interested me and on several occasions my thoughts strayed from the manuscript. That was bad enough, but the most interesting bit of the lot made the least sense. Late nights, I popped open the file and tried to decipher what it meant. What had I meant? Considering the note was a single brief phrase: 7PM confession, a chalice unless the keyboard banged out its own answer, I was at a loss. I considered deletion and went to bed.

On Tuesday, I tried a new writing exercise. Focus on an idea for five minutes, crank an egg timer to sixty, and let it rip at the keyboard. When the timer dings, stop. The object of my focus: the nonsensical sentence fragment. The approach worked. An hour later, I had three pages and a nice ending to…well…maybe a novel. I slept on the pages for two days and returned to them Thursday. If the ending still strikes me the same way next Monday – as an ending – I’ll allocate sixty minutes a day for a week and see what can be done about a beginning.