I know novels are written one word at a time, but I seem to be taking that to ridiculous lengths over the past couple of weeks. It's partly the fault of the cold medicine--really, it's hard to formulate an email and you've seen my blog entries lately--as well as the weather breaking some so I've been to the barn more. And of course, I've been reading. There aren't enough hours in the day.

However. I mentioned last week sometime that I'd chewed over the current scene to the point where I realized I was going about it all wrong. Well, I've revised that opinion slightly but continue to make small yet measurable progress.

In the scene I'm working on at the moment, Jordy has approached Anabeth to try and find out something about two other characters she's friendly with, about whom Jordy harbours suspicions. As the rest of the chapter plays out I intended to have him realize that she's not just a friendly person he should worry about, but a potential suspect herself, and also why. The way I was telling myself the sequence it had too many moving parts--back and forth between the event site and the campground, call home, and so on.

And then I looked at the questions Jordy asked her, and it occurred to me that if I was asked those questions, I might go back to the friends they were asked about and ask a few of my own.

Which, if Anabeth was innocent and the two guys were killers, is the kind of thing that could lead to some very nasty consequences for her.

And the thing that worried me from a writing point of view was that Jordy should think of that himself.

So. I started trying to have the whole sequence take place in a single location and block of time, but that didn't really work either. Eventually, by dint of much turning it over in my mind, I decided to keep some of the back-and-forthing, but drop one telephone conversation with Vanessa, which Jordy won't thank me for but these things have to be done. Originally Jordy had a revelation about Anabeth's Nova Scotia tartan kilt, and asked Vanessa to check out whether her story of buying the thing off eBay but the seller not telling her what sort of tartan it was made sense. (My impression, after an eBay search of my own, is that it does not. Sellers of individual kilts, according to my research, identify the tartan.) In this version I've also added a Monty Python t-shirt to Mike's wardrobe and Jordy's little revelation is that having this girl show up in Nova Scotia tartan and a shirt from Mike's favourite movie is just another of those damned coincidences he doesn't believe in.

So in this version he just tells the rest of the band what he's figured out and what he's thinking, as he figures it out.

Later we'll have the campground shooting sequence, only in this version Anabeth and her friends show up to Confess All about their relationship to two of the deceased from the original accident. Jordy and his friends aren't at all sure this appearance of openness is really to be trusted.

And then the shooting breaks out...

I managed to keep one sequence that may eventually have to go: the bit with the highway patrol cop who turns out to be friendly. The only purpose for that scene is to underscore something about Kowalski, which may already be sufficiently underscored: they don't mind adults and tend to trust them.

Which is only important because of the attitude expressed by a member of my writing group (a baby boomer) when she said, "Wait, I thought you couldn't trust anybody over thirty?"

Which is a baby boomer thing to think, and these kids aren't boomers. They tend to assume that friendly older people are probably all right, within their older-people sphere, which doesn't have a lot to do with them. There's a bit in My Friend Flicka where Kennie asks his mother if she ever really wanted something, and she says she still does. He's astonished because he assumed there is a point at which you're done. Complete. No longer prey to the wishes and worries and so forth that plague him. And I think that's the attitude of Jordy and perhaps to a lesser extent his friends: they don't even think about older suspects until quite late in the story because they don't think about older people much at all, or at least they assume that whatever they're doing or thinking, it's old-people stuff that has very little to do with Kowalski and their worries. It's not until something makes Jordy start wondering about Mrs. Goodnight that he even considers the idea.

Now, about Mrs. Goodnight: there are two separate issues connected to her, and I hope I can deal with them without fouling everything up. One bit is the part where Jordy starts to wonder whether she has something to do with the murders. And the other part is when he figures out why he was so convinced there was a Mr. Goodnight.

Also, and unrelated to anything else in this entry, repeat after me: blanket complaints about "readers today" are not helpful. They are the readers there are. And they're smarter than you think they are. In fact, that might even be the problem.

Maybe over the long weekend I can get some good work in...