Twenty more pages written, but more importantly, I think I'm finished with the rough form of acts one and two of the story, tied together with a fancy word bow...

...for I am NOTHING if not...fancy.

That just leaves the third act to be completed. Aaaaaand, it shouldn't be nearly as long as the first. I have a clear idea where I want things to go, and what major stuff has to get done or explained along the way. Spirits are up, happiness reigns...the only thing that would make this better would be a piping hot, brand new apple pie in my lap.

Or, maybe a luke-warm apple pie in my lap. Y'know, with my tender loins and all. (I set out with this post trying to see if I could include the words “tender loins” somewhere. I just won...against...myself....)

I'm having a ball, but even so, I just want to get this thing done! I feel like I've been waiting for this...who knows...most of my life maybe, either consciously or unconsciously. It's almost...almost, mind you...secondary to me if the story is any good or not. Just having something out there with my name on it...the prospect makes me all tingly. Yup. Like warm apple pie on my loins. Callback!

I hope everybody's doing well. Life got really crappy at the end of last week, with the Paris attacks. Can't stop thinking about what's been going on over there. I'm a pretty easy-going, peaceful sort of person, so “assholes with guns” is something that I just can't compute. I have a daughter. She's young, but I despair thinking that this is the world I have to acquaint her with. Let's just hope there's some scientific “peace breakthrough” or something within the next ten or fifteen years. In the meantime, let's try to keep the guns away from the assholes.

Be good to each other, okay?

Back to work.

Hello, milestone. It's me, Derek. I assume that you heard I would be arriving, all fancied up and surfing a handstand along my word wave! Whooshy whooshy. Splashy splashy. And for no apparent reason...honk.

What's that, milestone? Oh, yes, I WILL sit down to your table and have a big old steak of self-satisfaction...raw and ragged, to appropriately symbolize the journey thus far. It might not seem like a lot to some, but to me, 75,000 words of anything is a whole heap of...well...something. Hell, I could just type the word “story” 75,000 times, and although that wouldn't exactly added up to anything of what you might call “narrative value”, the sheer deluge of words alone should be impressive, dammit.

I have two time-lines that I'm dealing with...one in the distant past, and one in the distant future. It's been a challenge to figure out exactly how to present them, whether it be concurrently or separately. I think I've settled on separately, although I realize at a risk of interrupting the flow. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I think it would be less confusing, overall. Also, that way, I get to divide the novel into three “books”, or “acts”, and include cool, meaningful pages that announce each one, like “BOOK ONE: THE BOOKENING” or “BOOK TWO: THE THUNDER BOOK”.

As an aside, The Thunder Book is now officially a project in my idea list. You saw it here first. You can't have it. IT'S MINE.

That's about 300 pages, you guys. 100 or so to go.

Baaaaack...to work.