Okay. I am about a day away from having to write the Kay-Murphy encounter ... It is the turning point in the book, as now we will learn what was it about the previous king everyone thought was worth fighting for. I have no idea how to do this and I am bending my brain in all directions as it is with Nuada Silverhand and Farbauti scenes ... I'm thinking that what I want to do is give the encounter a specific time frame ... Like, all about Silverhand takes place in one night, not over the course of a month as previously written. So do I compress the three different events that have Kay and Murphy sparring into one event and condense it further still in just one day?... Or what? Think, woman, think. 

I need more coffee. And to see more Bleach. For some reason.

Slowly but surely coming out from under a dark spell..

I saw the other day there's a lady who only takes photos of beautiful flowers ... That seemed like an incredible career to have - only ever photographing gardens in bloom and in the sun ... Not my cup of tea at all, I am more of a gloom kinda gal, but it still sounded awesome. But then again Kirsty Mitchell, doing a startup campaign for her book, said there have been A LOT of tears in her career, which makes me think perhaps it's not just me. I might have even had a whole lot more of a career if my tears weren't so important to me. We'll see. Anyhoo. Pickies of flowers in fruit. Tad gloomy edition. 

For the third night in a row - and never before all year - there has been mosquitos in the room. They start coming at me the minute General leaves for work and I stay up half the night, trying to kill them. If i kill one, there is bound to be another. If i don't kill it, it's just the one. This is mind-bending. The high-pitched buzz is driving me nuts. I dare not spray the room, because I don't want to harm the spiders, but what the fuck are all the spiders I am keeping doing, if they suddenly can no longer protect me from parasites? All I ask. Did I mention I have white walls? You know how disgusting that looks?

Still in PTSD and unable to take pickies with the proper camera (feeling like I filthied up the karma of Mark with all the shit it's been accused lately), but I took this with my phone this morning and I really love it. Reminds me of the collodions. 

Eh, G won't let me work nights, so he's preventing me from sleeping by day. This way when midnight comes and I'm ready to start working, I'm so sleepy all I can do is watch some cartoon porn and pass out. feel like watching horror-comedy, but that's usually British and British requires at least some part of the brain to be awake.... I was telling G some of the plot of the book earlier to lull him to his pre-work nap and managed to tranquilize myself.

I put the edited-so-far pages of Goose into the InDesign layout, just to see what sort of a font I'll want or what format (I like.big.books.and I cannot lie...hammer-time!) and I'm 223 pages in by those standards. This is going to be one mother of a tome. I love it when people tell me to write something a 100 pages long. That's not a book, that's a love letter. 

These days' challenge is writing the one scene in which the General makes an appearance and it has to be written so that you believe that this is a guy above others. Sure, I can write lines such as:

 You did not refuse an invitation from a man who looked like Seti Sepp SUN, unless he happened  to be advancing on you with a running chain saw and even then a part of your brain was like: heck it, I gotsta go some time… 

 

...But it's a *show, don't tell* sort of a narrative, so it would be amateurish to expect a reader to take my word for it, just because I hammer it in. 

Incidentally dyed the General's beard red. Okay, pink. He is not happy.

Actually had a pleasant day uphill, over family lunch. A precious, rare occurrence. Mum and I went around to get fruit from gran... Can it be that indeed the shorter our stays, the more genuinely, urgently loving they are? Naa, surely it is a coincidence that if I stay for more than an hour, we always get into a gruesome name-calling and bickering and over-all unpleasantness ... Surely it must be.

The General is on the grave-yard shift and I am on the 136th page of the first chapter and the part where things are supposed to start finally improving for Kay. She is told to find her own footing and get a lot smarter (and, in a way, given an estate on which to rebuild her mistakes). She is now ready to emerge with a vengeance. So, things are supposed to return from angst to comedy. And adventure. I'm still deciding whether to include some of the old stories, some of the interviews, to show how quirky she can be... But then I have yet two major conundrums to crack: all of Morpheus' best lines have already been taken by his heir and what is the point of all this to begin with? Alright, so they are pagans and they could be mighty when they choose not to, but what they really need is that other shoe dropping that will make the readers shit themselves when they realize what it is they've just read. 

Gotsta come up with just those two kicks. Just those two. And then it'll be a cool book.

Did I mention Robert Galbraith, a young-soldier-turned-writer sold only 1500 hard copies of Cuckoo's Calling until the publicist "incidentally leaked" that's actually J.K. Rawling's latest book? I am 34th on the waiting list in the library, translated into a language that's about 204th on the list of popular languages on the planet. Just saying. Good or bad book, I am fucked.