Archive for September 28th, 2004

9/27/04: Hammering pieces into the puzzle

Word count: 98848 | Since last entry: 467 | This month: 7798 Spent much of the evening adding a new shelf to the CD bookcase — a project we’ve meant to do for, oh, about twelve years, but Kate finally got around to buying all the pieces today and all I had to do was haul out the hammer and screwdrivers and Power Tools and install it. Grunt. That and getting dinner just about killed the evening; going out to eat every night is really time-consuming. I’ll be glad when the kitchen is done. Only about 300 words of actual new prose tonight; the rest is notes on the difficult question of “how the hell does Jason figure out what is really happening, given that everyone involved is hiding their part of the facts from everyone else?” In this chapter Jason has to find answers to two key questions, one of which has been driving him for basically the whole novel and the other has turned his life upside down in the last couple of chapters. (Of course, those answers only make things harder.) I’ve figured out a way for him to find the answer to question 2: it involves him being the only person in the world who is in a position to see all the pieces at once, or having any reason to look. Finding the answer to question 1 is harder, but I had an important realization: if it’s Sienna who holds the final link in the chain of evidence that leads to the answer, I can have her reveal it at the very end of this chapter, which gives that scene some needed oomph and also motivates a decision of hers that is otherwise rather inexplicable. So all I need is to figure out what that link is, and the other links will fall into place. I think I’ll have to futz with the calendar a little, since this chapter is outlined as taking place over three days and I’ll need at least four for all the above to happen plausibly. Further calendar rejiggering will be required due to the fact that all of this is happening on Thanksgiving weekend, which just can’t work (most businesses would be closed on Thanksgiving). Or should I have Sienna’s key revelation happen at Jason and Sienna’s squalid little impoverished two-person Thanksgiving dinner? Naah, too Hallmark, and besides I think it’s better if it coincides with the rebellion that started on December 8 in the last Clarity chapter. That’ll really bolt the two plot threads together. Man, it’s like juggling jigsaw puzzles in here. There’s pieces all over the place. Good thing I still have that hammer…