They Call Alabama the Crimson Tide

 I've been thinking too much about writing. That's made it hard to actually write.

I've been answering questions on Quora. I've been reviewing books through Pubby. And I've drafted the first 3,000 words or so on A Fox's Wedding. At least twice.

Started using Scrivener's Snapshot function, too. Very nice. It is basically a Wayback Machine for your novel. Except it works on a document basis, so you can look at or revert one scene or chapter without touching the rest.

With each book in this series, I revisit what I'm trying to do with the character, and with the series itself. So there's been a lot of that. I'm also re-thinking a lot of what I have been doing and what I think I know about story-telling. Opening chapters are hard, anyhow, in that you are trying to set the style and mood and set up the conflicts and introduce the major players all at once.

And, basically, every choice you make in the opening chapters has repercussions that spread through the rest of the manuscript. I don't mind revising a bit to put the ducks properly in the row. But when you are still figuring out where the ducks are heading...

So one win for the light outlining mode. I completely stumbled on a great name for the Enka singer turned charismatic cult leader at the center of the novel. It is a name that gives him so much character it is making me rethink the rest of the people around him. One of those characters might get cut entirely. Well, maybe I can use him in another book.

And a quite different win for my insistence on going where the research leads. When I flew to Kyoto we landed at Osaka. Well, that airport is now called "Itami" and it only does domestic flights. The new Kansai International is the place; built in the middle of Osaka Bay. And I'm watching video right now of when Typhoon Jebi came through (about a month ago in story time). It threw a tanker against the skybridge, damaging it badly.

I could have hand-waved this and just flown into Osaka, or not even mentioned it. But showing the damage from Typhoon Jebi gives me a useful beat to the end-of-the-world message the cult is moving into (now officially called Healthy Spirit -- yes, in English, but also nicknamed the Genki. I wanted to call it Expanding Man but that didn't scan right in Japanese or in English.)

Got my sinuses tickled and it would tickle the rest of me if they didn't get around to clearing me to return to work until at least Tuesday. Even if it is unpaid vacation. My boss is in the same tried-to-get-tested-at-the-height-of-thanksgiving boat so there's not going to be a stink about that. I'm pretty determined Monday is a goner in any case.

Oh, and I got another hundred-dollar violin, swapped the chin-cello strings to that and now I have a silent violin to practice on again. And I can feel the improvements happening already. Still no silent bowing, but the vibrato is improving and the intonation is improving a lot.