We’re watching The Hunt for Red October, and while Alec Baldwin is…fine in it, but coming off Harrison Ford playing the same character, we both much prefer Harrison, obviously…it is sooooo goooood. The movie is SO good. I get why Tom Clancy was such a sensation. What a fun tale. What a world to suck us into, with insanely high stakes and—fictionalized, certainly—real-world intrigue.
That’s what sets stories like that apart for me, I’m realizing tonight as I sit here: when someone can pull you into a real world and teach you about it. All that submarine jargon, tactics, tech, tradition. Teach me, but wrapped up in a life and death struggle? Fuck yes. I eat that stuff up.
Hit 80 pages today on the manuscript. It’ll be 90 tomorrow. 100 day after that. I think the battle begins on Friday. That would make this book about 400 pages, I think, which is actually just about perfect. I think if all my books topped out around 400 pages, that would be grand. Just about exactly 100,000 words, maybe ever so slightly over that. But, we’ll see once we get there.
Night night.