The current text is really, really compact.  Maybe too compact.  Maybe too short for a novel!  That'd be a first!

My point-of-view problem resolved itself in a somewhat surprising manner, but it was one of those good "aha!" moments.  Many of my "aha!" moments are actually "Man, how could I possibly have missed that?" moments, but I'll take them any way I can get them.

It's a great thing.

I wrote about two chapters in this new book.  Right now the new book is looking like it's going to be much shorter than anything I've done recently -- which is not a bad thing -- but very dense.  We'll just see.

I'm wrestling with a point-of-view problem, because I wanted to keep them to a minimum.  But I think adding one is necessary and will add some dimension, so I have to get into this guy's head and figure out what his voice sounds like.

This book still needs to lose about 10% of its volume.  I'll cut another two scenes, and maybe I can get away with truncating two more toward the end.  "Oh, but it's sad when a love affair dies," and I really liked one of those last scenes, but what the heck.

Maybe I'm the only person who wants a book's last chapter to round everything out and finish the story . . . or maybe more people don't mind if the book starts out with two Big Questions and hasn't really answered either of them by the time it's finished.

I'm not sure my agent and I are in agreement on what the crisis of the book actually is, though the one she's seeing and the one I'm seeing do take place in the same scene.

One of the problems is that I have a notion I'm going to have to write all three, to sell one.  Which is a problem because I don't do more than one a year.  That's four years before I can make a sale.

On the other hand, with this story-line, I don't know if I would buy me, unless I had a really good idea where I was going.

Crows are not solitary.

Recent events in my writing life have left me making some adjustments in my process.

The novel that went in to my agent this spring came back from her with good edrevs, no problem.  The problem is that the novel needed the edrevs in the first place.

The additional problem is that while working on those edrevs, I'm asking myself "What was I thinking?  This thing clunks."  When it went in, it was perfect and powerful, of course.   No, really.

I'd like to think that it's because this story-line is a new one for me, but the last time I wrote a novel from the ground up it really didn't need much edrev.  A reader commented later that the story-line changed midway through, which was true in a sense -- I learn things from readers at the oddest times.

I'm thinking that, after several novels, it's time for me to rethink my process and get a second reader -- one that =isn't= my agent.

I'm working on a new novel, which I'm hoping to sell.  I'll murble about its progress -- or anything else -- in this journal.

I'll try not to say anything too compromising.  Unless you started it.