Alpennia Writing Retreat: Day 7

[hrj]

Whew! That was quite a ride today. The larger part of today's chapter took place entirely within Serafina's perception of mystic forces at work. Describing it reminds me a bit of the root cause analysis team meeting at work once where I described taking vast quantities of environmental monitoring data, color-coding it, and then sorting it out every which way and sideways until the colors formed some sort of pattern in five-dimensional space that gave me the key to where the investigation needed to go. (Somehow the by-the-book guys in the Operational Excellence department failed to find this an acceptable method. But hey, they asked, so I told them. And I was on the track of the right answer before they had even worked up to the right questions. But I digress.)

Only two more chapters. Two! Of course, we're coming to the end, and ends are hard. There are a lot of events packed into those two chapters, and at least this time I have a clear and concrete final event. (Much more of a "boom" than the last two books.) This last cluster of chapters is coming in at a shorter word count that the overall average. (The last half dozen have averaged around 3100 words, compared to the whole-book average of 4500.) I don't know whether this is due to my current working style or simply because the pace is picking up as the end approaches. I haven't dared try to stand back and take a look at the whole thing yet. I'm about to stumble into the stadium for the last lap on the marathon and if I think about how far I've come, I may collapse into a puddle at this point.

Sat. Dec 19: Chapter 23 (Barbara) and 24 (Luzie) (clean-up only)
Sun. Dec 20: Chapter 25 (Jeanne) 827 words, needs more outline
Mon. Dec 21: Chapter 26 (Serafina) needs more outlining, particularly adding in political stuff
Tue. Dec 22: Chapter 27 (Margerit) has outline but needs to be updated for other changes
Wed. Dec 23: Chapter 28 (Luzie) solidly outlined
Thu. Dec 24: Chapter 29 (Barbara) outline is full but a bit of a mess, needs updating
Fri. Dec 25: Chapter 30 (Serafina) solidly outlined but needs updating
Sat. Dec 26: Chapter 31 (Margerit) solidly outlined but needs updating
Sun. Dec 27: Chapter 32 (Luzie) solidly outlined but needs updating -- and done!