It's Saturday.

Saturday morning and even less sleep than before. It wasn't a good evening or night and I'm hoping that it gets better today. I could use a little breathing room. I find myself one again on the ramparts guarding against disaster. Part of it comes from the inside and part of it from outside.

For now, I will focus on my warm-up routine and see if I can turn this pressure into something more constructive. I will also need to meditate as soon as I finish this piece.

I didn't get the response I was hoping for with the big biography portion or the story that I finished yesterday. But then again, that's the purpose of a reader. So I'm actually right on track.

I still think I got that part right in terms of the process. The idea was to get through it quickly just because it was so daunting to me. There was no way I could meet all the goals of that part quickly and the first time through. I would have stalled out. I've done that before. That's exactly what happened to Bad Times or Counting Coup on the Devil, whatever that book was called.

I couldn't get through the tough part even once BECAUSE I tried to edit and perfect it as I wrote it the first time. I learned there, after months of bashing my head against it, when I come to the tough part, the part where the needs of the story are complex and delicate, do not try to shit out the statue of David. Instead, I need to shit out a David-sized block of marble and then go back and make it look like a man and finally make it into David.

That might be a little crude but it's true. Almost exactly. It's hard enough just to poop out a piece of marble that big. I think I was just expecting congratulations for getting that far. But that's not the reader's job. So instead of being disappointed, I should be just as happy as I was yesterday when I finally pinched off that 15-ton block of Carrara marble. Pulling the analogy to its finality, the finished work is 5,5 tons, so that tells me how much work I have to do.

All of the suggestions she made are good ones. To humanize the back story and connect it to this man who before we thought was a cold opinionated distant father of Gene. The back story has to pull in the reader, but it must sound like it's written by a machinist who has suffered.

While shortening the back story I also need to work on the provenance for the wayback part. I can lose some of the detail and shore up the source of the story from Joel's standpoint.

But I can't stop to begin revealing the David yet. I have to push on through the rest of the story and then I can go back and begin working on the rest of the story. I suspect that the rest of the story is just as much in need of work as the back story. But because there was so much contained in the back story, it showed a lot more.

There's obviously more to do. So I should get to it.

More later,