350 Pages and Counting

It’s been a very good start to the New Year.

I’m still struggling with the last scene in my novella-within-my-novel, in which Agnes, A.J., and Elyssa are taken into Abundant Life. This will be the final component bridging the early narrative to the present, allowing me to jump back to where I’d left off in Act III of my five-part drama. I’m so close, but I need a dramatic transition.

Detail from a painting my wife did promoting Grace Among the Dead.
Copyright © 2020 Cynthia J. Aiken.

When in doubt, the dead attack is my motto. The Wrong Kind of Dead is a novel in which the living dead are presumably the primary antagonist, although, as with all post-apocalyptic scenarios, it’s your fellow survivors who tend to threaten your survival as much, if not more. It’s always a challenge making an attack by the living dead as unique as it is suspenseful, especially when you already know this is a backstory and your heroes’ success is assured. 

It’s going one sentence at a time. What’s interesting about the process now is I used to do so well making the connections while drinking beer and smoking during the designated night time hours. Unfortunately, as with any psychoactive supplement, more beer and cigarettes were required over time. Every morning I woke up feeling worse and worse with little to nothing to show for it.

New Year’s Day I went cold-turkey, and though I’ve had my anxious patches, I’ve suffered the precise opposite of being blocked in terms of creativity. If I can’t write one sentence more on my novel, I write a blog post. I make notes in my journal for other things I want to do; these things are often the blog posts of the future.

Then I come back and write one more sentence. Sometimes I can blast out an entire paragraph and then some. Sometimes it’s just a sentence. I’m always coming back. I don't leave until I've left something.

I’ve got this strange, powerful energy that wasn’t there before. And now I’ve crossed the 350-page mark, and I stand to make a few more before I make the long march out to the end.

Once more into the breach. There is nothing else.