A cliffhanger! (For reals, though)

OK, well, I've been working on it. That's the GREAT news.

The not-so-great news is some of my work has been way off course. I was reworking the chapters, cutting things in half to create whole other chapters, moving text around, blah blah... and then as I was writing new stuff for the end of Chapter 6, I let the story take a dark, morbid turn. I had Zachary lock himself in a bathroom and slice open his forearm with a razor. Not just a slice. No, I made it gory and...WRONG.

It bugged me after I wrote it. I kept thinking about it and feeling depressed. Which is not helpful when you are already going through real depression in real life! But it was more than that; this was a departure for his character. It wasn't fitting in with the person I see him as (and yes, I do see him as a person, even if he doesn't!), since I think he's stronger and more self-confident than that. He wouldn't take a coward way out of things just because he was stressed out. Nah.

He'd rip shit out of the walls, smash it with sonar and destroy the implant activator before taking off and scaling a barbed wire fence to run to the cliff...

Yeah. THAT'S more like it. That's my boy.

So anyway, I am coming back. It's just about finished, that cool Chapter 6, and I can't wait to write a little bridging text to pull it into Chapter 7 and what it can be before I move the story along like it needs to.

It was scary losing it for a minute there. But I learned a lot from it, so it wasn't totally a lost cause, I guess. I learned what Zachary is NOT. And I am saving every word I write and cut in a separate file, because I don't know what could come back into play or be handy in some way down the road.

I'm going to Chicago in two days. With a laptop. I admit I'm hoping for a repeat of how productive I was on the last trip to Washington DC, when I wrote like a fiend. It seems like traveling alone, being focused on my own thoughts (and by default, that means the book) is really GREAT for me. Funny that I love being away that much. Or maybe it's not that funny. Either way... whatever works is what I want to do!