The Queen died today. Aretha Franklin.
I first heard Aretha young enough that I don’t even remember. It’s funny to say, but I don’t look back on my days as a child and recall all that much music being played in our household, at least popular music, anyway. And yet, Aretha Franklin was there. Arguably the biggest talent of her era, and what an era it was, ya?
She will be missed.
Liz is chasing Cooper around the bedroom right now because she wanted him to do something and he was like “nuh-uh.” He’s such a willful dog sometimes. Or put another way: a bad dog 😂
Now he’s up on the bed with us.
I wrote another 4,000 words today. Like a champion. This section I’m in is fun. I’m having these conversations between characters right now, and they’re a bit terrifying because I start them thinking I know where they’re going to go…and then they kind of morph into something else. It’s like I’m just kind of listening.
I find that (eventually) my best dialogue comes from doing that: just kind of knowing who my characters are as people and how they’d react to something being said, something revealed, or an action from another character…and I just kind of let that roll back and forth. It usually takes some coercing and some rewriting…but those are the scenes I end up being the most proud of. I think they’re the most difficult.
The actions scenes: those are pretty linear and straight-forward. Not EASY…no, they need to have a pace and clarity all their own…but I think they are, at the very least, less challenging.
Tomorrow, it’s more writing. Another 4,000 words is the goal. Over the past three weeks, after tomorrow, I will have put in about 35 hours of actual writing time; that’s sitting at the keyboard and doing nothing else, just for perspective. It’s an exhausting hour doing that. I can currently only do about 3-4 of those kinds of hours a day. That number may (read: probably will) increase with time and practice. 35 hours, and that will have produced about 46,000 words, or roughly half of a long-ish novel.
Crazy.
It took me three months to get that far earlier this year.
Progress.
Night!