every witness turns to steam

772 words of Chill this morning, 46 tonight, and I am utterly at a loss to discover what the Interesting Thing is that happens in this scene. See, a scene needs to accomplish Work. It needs to be doing things to move the story forward, and this scene is not doing that.

This book is just totally not ripe yet. Realistically, I think it needs to sit in my head for another year and grow things like a plot and characters. But the deadline is this year, alas, about three months hence, which means I need to have something to hand my editor on June 1. Something. Anything.

Who are these people? What do they want? Why am I supposed to care about them? Why are you supposed to care about them? How the heck am I supposed to get a decent manuscript out of this?

Part of the problem, I think, is that I wrote Dust so very fast. (Anne wanted the manuscript very quickly to fill a hole in the schedule, and I was able to do it--but I'm afraid now I've written ahead of my creativity in this setting, and I just have nothing to build with. I'm full of story ideas in other venues, mind you. But here, I'm scrabbling. It's not so fun.)

And my brain is currently full of other things that it deems important that I deal with Right Now, like childhood trauma. Thank you, brain. I'll get right on the thirty-year-old emotional baggage. Get the fuck off my lawn.

Or better yet, get to work on the fucking novel.

Thanks for your support!