For the second weekend running, I am ensconced in my office at work. And I have to confess–I like it. Oh, not the work part, but I have to confess I am really enjoying the quiet. There is the low hum of the AC and assorted other white noise, but there is no one else here in this entire big building and that’s soothing to me. I spend all week surrounded by people and/or my dogs, and now and then, it’s so nice to be in the silence. Makes me want to meditate. 😀
I was up here all last weekend taking shameless advantage of the T3 connection to work on updating my class for the semester. I made a huge push, got a lot done (also did a full read through of Til Death last Saturday), which was a good thing, as Blackboard went down for 3 days this week. Hard to update a course website when it’s not available. Anyway, it’s back up this morning, so I’ve got a bunch of time-release announcements to post, and a lecture to write. Then it’s off for a family birthday party that will likely take up the rest of my afternoon and a good chunk of evening. I don’t expect to write today.
I did finish that second read-through yesterday. It took a lot longer than normal because I wasn’t just reading, I was plotting to fill in gaps. I think I came up with a great deal of stuff that will tie the plot together more firmly. I thought a lot last night about just totally axing the family history thread of the story, and I may play around with a draft outline to see what would be left if I took it out, but I just really think it would be a lot less interesting, though less work for me. See, so much of the history they hear (and the family I’m referring to is the family who used to own the estate that Marin is turning into a B and B) from Miss Ada, the old woman from whose family Marin bought the place. She’s still a neighbor and she’s all the time telling stories. There’s also some that comes from her grandson Isaac. But I needed something else, some way to bring more of the history in, without necessarily having either of them present. Pot made the suggestion that I invent some relative who decided to play historian and write it all down in a narrative, so I may wind up doing that. Which means I’d need to decide during what period it would have been written and go track down some stuff written during that era to see what the style would have been. More work for me. But it’s all in the name of making the story better. So one of these weeks, I’m going to give myself the task of writing said family history all the way through. I think that would wind up working better then trying to piecemeal it as it fits into the plot. Write it in a stretch, then take the relevant passages and stick it in. I don’t know if I’ll give myself that project for next week or not. I may prefer to start making some of the other changes and writing new scenes for earlier in the book first. We’ll see what floats my boat on Monday. In the meantime, work to do.