Trying to be diligent

I have always been a great lover of books.  In fact, as my high school graduation gift from my parents, I requested books.  My oldest sister got an amethyst pendant necklace, but books were and will always be more valuable to me than jewelry.  I can't remember what any of my other siblings received for their graduation presents, but there's nothing like the tactile glossiness of a pristine dust jacket, followed by the first audible crack of the binding when the front cover is opened.  The smell of the ink on the page, the smell of the paper.

The trouble is, I like having the books, but I don't always get around to reading them.  Nevertheless, they look good on the shelf, something for guests to talk about. Meretricious at best. That was then.  I have almost none of the books I gathered throughout the years.  They become burdensome in weight and shelving requirements, and interests in reading material also changed, and they have all found their way to various charity shops between Colorado and California.  Only a few reside in storage at my sister's house.  I need to have her send them to me.

In my new living situation I have started with basically nothing, but I have been purchasing books again.  I have such a small new library that no shelving is yet needed.  That may not be true for much longer.  I don't want to get into the bad habit of compulsively buying books that I think sound interesting to read but in fact do not get read, so I am trying to limit myself:  when I am half way through a book, I allow myself to buy another. That was the original idea, but that has already gone to the wayside.  I am currently on my second Laurie R. King "Mary Russell" novel, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and I already have book #3 in hand.  Books 4 and 5 are ordered.  Plus two biographies on Benedict Cumberbatch... plus the complete original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I also have my friend's book on cycling across America, Under a Triumphant Sky, but to be fair I did read a rough draft of it before it was published.  I also have several new reference books on building a smarter word vocabulary although I still painstakingly write down words I come across that I don't know, and I write down their definitions.  Should I choose to use one of them, I highlight it in green so that I know that it appears somewhere in my writing.

Quote from Chapter 3 "I am the one holding the mirror you
do not wish to look into."  Yeah, it's like that.

I am continuing to work on my 4th Blackbird book.  Due to the complexity of the research, I don't anticipate being done with it until later this year.  Although I completed the first chapter fairly quickly, and I do know overall where I am going with this book, chapter 2 has not come easily to me.  I finished a chapter that occurs much later in the book, but then I've never written in a linear fashion.  Then something unexpected happened in chapter 2, something that opened up a can of worms or Pandora's box, if you will, and I wasn't sure I wanted to deal with it.  That serendipity in storytelling happens sometimes.  It was something that I could not rightfully ignore, however, to stay true to the character although it really colored the drama of the story in a very different way,  I could have ignored it.  I could have never brought it up and no one would have been the wiser, but I threw in the monkey wrench, and the most devastating things began to happen...and chapter 2 and 3 began to write themselves.  I was giddy with delight... not so much that the chapters were finally moving but that I had found a vein of inspiration and have been mining it for everything it's worth... and it's worth a lot, but at a great cost to the characters.

My neighbors don't understand why I am smiling so much when we get together for a communal meal, but when I am feeling quite inspired and the words are flowing, there is no better feeling to me.  I wonder if other writers feel that way.

Difficult chapters

I'm currently working on the 4th in my "Blackbird" series of books, and I just finished a very difficult chapter.  It was difficult on many different levels:

1. It is the final game-changer between two characters, and now I am completely AU ("alternate universe") with no turning back.  Part of me is wondering - what the heck have I done??!!!

2.  The research was pretty intense.  Although I was very well-versed in this particular subject 20 years ago, I had to reacquaint myself with some information.

3.  I use real places in my books, specifically venues, hotels, restaurants.  I don't make that stuff up. That means if I am sending my character to a specific restaurant, for example, I go to that restaurant's website, look at their menu, and figure out what my character would order, and that detail is generally included.  If my character stays at a particular Ritz-Carlton, I go to that specific hotel's website, look at the rooms offered and figure out which one my character would stay in.  I don't just make up names for hotels and restaurants.  Why should I?  If my character visits a little town, I use Google maps to get me onto the street level of that town so that i can see what's there (or not there in some cases).  I look at street names, and sometimes I choose a particular street simply because I like its name, but regardless, the location is always correct for the action required.  If my character visits a museum, I know the layout of the interior.  I study pictures of the museum and its exhibits, what street it is located on, and what is nearby.

4. My characters got to do something I have a dream to do, so I got to live vicariously through them - which meant that my research had to be spot-on.

As I don't write in sequence, however, this chapter has to wait for its proper slot within the book. There is a lot that happens before and a lot afterwards.  Of course, I am still tinkering slightly with the chapter but I am also moving on.