11,500 words--amidst painting, novocaine, dancing. . .

Painting the dining room is good alpha-wave brain activity (though Boots the New Kitten's thorough enjoyment of the plastic drop cloth is probably not).

Serendipitously, just as I've gotten to the messiest part of the middle of the novel (which, by the way, is currently called "The Book Drop Dwarves"), I've gotten to the smoothest part of repairing the cracked and crumbling dining room wall.

So I'm taking the advice of the goddess-in-children's-author-form Donna Jo Napoli, who said at Chautauqua in 2006 something like this:

"I write my first draft very fast. It is AWFUL. I just keep driving forward, trying to get the emotion down. I never go back. If I'm writing along and suddenly discover I need a dog in this scene, and it should have been introduced it in the last chapter, I just scroll back to the last chapter and write DOG in big capital letters, and then GO ON!"

So now I have pop-ups like LIBRARY MONKEY and FIRE-EATING SALAMANDER--ANGEL? sprinkling my text with weirdness.

My amazing critique group, the Ladies of the Gordian Knot, is coming to my house this Saturday. By then, I'll have the dining room painted. But I think I'll not print anything out. I'll just tell them about the salamander and let them ask questions.


(For the thoroughly bored--a current list of the word-count by chapter:

• Ch. 1: 1545
• Ch. 2: 4280
• Ch. 3: 2880
• Ch. 4: 1650
• Ch. 5: 1135)