This Weekend

Many of my plans fell through. Much rewriting got done. I had breakfast with a friend that went clear past lunch, we were both laughing and solving all of the world’s problems. I’m making an afghan for my grad school friend who’s in Australia kind of having a rough go of things. Yes, I’m going to send her an afghan in the middle of her summer. Oops.

It’s just one of my regular diagonal granny square ones. I really like those.

I was going to tell you all a little bit about how the writing is going from a practical stand-point. I’m still retyping. I have a file called Ashland 3 open on the left side of my screen and a file called Ashland 4 open on the right. Ashland 3 was an exact copy of Ashland 2, my first massive revision. Ashland 4 started out blank. Following along Ashland 3, I either typed whole new things that had to fix what was wrong with the story into Ashland 4 or typed what was there or made minor corrections.

Sometimes I go out and walk the dog and I’m struck by an idea–like, for instance, what my bad guy responds to is not people who know him well, since most of the people who know him well come to loathe him, but people who love the house. That’s the thing that puts you in a semi-protected bubble from him. But I’m not anywhere near fixing that scene in Ashland 4. So, I go ahead and skip to that part in Ashland 3 and fix it there so that it is right, or closer to right, when 4 finally gets to that point.

I’m liking the shape of this version a lot. It’s very slimmed down. The two things about the shape of it that I still feel uncertain about, which still require major mulling over are one small and one large. The small thing is that, at the end, a TV crew is present. We’ve never been introduced to them before. It makes sense that they would show up at the end of the book, but it violates my belief that, in a working horror novel, nothing new is added in the last quarter of the book. I’m still not sure how to work them in earlier, probably deeply in the background, but they need to be there. Since my house doesn’t have a TV, this is a problem. My house does have a radio, though.

I’ll have to think about it.

The other thing is that I’ve now read a lot of haunted house stories and a convention of the genre is the slow descent into batshit stuff. At the moment, this is how Ashland works. But I’m not sure it’s the right way for it to work. I don’t want to change it yet. I want to get the mechanics of the whole story working right. But it’s hanging out there–I may not yet have the beginning right. Like the first quarter of the book. That’s daunting.