Can I rent you to come play with my dog, because she has some playing needs that cannot be met by her current allotment of two humans-to-a dog.

God. I had to go write in Corner Bakery just to get some black on white.

But success! I have begun that tough series of scenes that will bring everything to a head. Total word count as of right now: 88,769. That’s 1637 for today. Man. That doesn’t feel as big a number as the effort I had to put forth. Things are getting tough for my protagonist, so they are also getting tough for me, I guess.

A fellow writer asked me how it was going. He knew about the word counts, etc., but wanted to know, no, really: How is it going?

The answer is that it’s hard to say. I’m too close to it right now. I think I want to get the scenes in place, do a good scrubbing of the new stuff and then go back to the front half and make sure all the stuff I invented in the second half gets invented, instead, up front. Like: a character I added late in the game. Like: getting the police stuff closer to reality. (I have a friend in the policing business who is getting some details of daily life together for me to help with that.) Like: getting the protagonist up and moving around more. I’m not going to get all this stuff done by August 31, I know. I want to get things at a good spot to let a few of my readers have a go at it. While they’re doing that, I’ll be moving on to something else to give the book some breathing room. Maybe…a new book? Gar. Did I just say that?