The big question

I woke this morning, reached out for my husband, opened my eyes, stared lovingly into his, and said, “Did it rain last night?”

Oh, my disappointment!  It had not.  I felt cheated because there was a massive storm coming across Lake Michigan when we turned out the lights.  We even stayed up to make sure it made it across, because sometimes, the lake sort of calms everything and it evaporates.

I got to my computer first, though, and imagine my excitement when I pulled up the doppler radar and yes!  the first wave had evaporated, but the second was on our doorstep!  It is sprinkling as I write this, and more is on the way.  It’s a big one, too.  No guarantee that it’s going to hold together as it passes over the dry soil, but I’m hopeful.  Everything is stressed, so stressed.  It almost hurts to go outside and see the panic in the smaller animals.

Work is also going well.  I took a few hours yesterday morning to re-outline how the last five chapters are going to go since I had only a vague idea when I started at page one.  I’m sooooo glad that my writing style promotes revisions, and by that I mean that my first rough draft is actually that.  Very rough, and holding only the bones of the story.  Oh, it reads fine, but there is no way I’m going to show it to anyone because it’s all plot, no story–mostly because I don’t know what the story is until I get to the end and all the little ideas and realizations I make on the way culminate.  If I sweated over every chapter to make it perfect, if I kept dropping back and changing things as I figured them out, it not only would take me two to three times as long to get it done, I wouldn’t be as open to revision.  Some people write wonderful work that way.  I cannot.  I like my options wide  open.

The story doesn’t know what the story needs until it’s on the page.