Interlude and Notes on the Process

I am, if nothing else, a slow writer these days. Sorry. Perhaps I've been too absorbed by the devolution of the American political process to pay much attention to other, more creative things. But that's a different story....

For Home, my own process is somewhat scattered, even haphazard. Hence, the number of typos one might find in any given section. For the most part, what is written stays at it is until I copy things to a Microsoft Word document and make some tweaks there. So far, I've written just over 10,000 words, and I'm shooting for about 50-60,000. Other books I've written are above 90,000, but I'm deliberately keeping Home somewhat short for a novel (which is what it will be). That said, at some point there has to be a significance to everything, something to make a potential reader care. Crappy writing is crappy writing, but a good plot makes things less crappy.

Right now, I think most of the major characters have been introduced, though if you've ever written a novel you know that characters appear--and disappear--without any planning or prompting. They're born when they are ready to be born, and they die when they're ready for that. Predetermination, I guess. And, yes, I realize that, thus far, there is no identifiable story line, no plot. This is, believe it or not, mostly predetermination on my own part, as it were, and when I am finished with the thing, I'll write about what I tried to do.

That's it.