Well, that transition that was coming closer like a soul-hunter’s girlfriend has decided to take a u-turn. Some deep dark part of my subconscious got the bright idea to go all Dashiell Hammett on the moon and I got sidetracked into a hard-boiled detective story in the middle of my space opera.

Oh well, them’s the break, and it’s solved a lot of the other problems that were keeping me awake at night. I’m just now despairing that I’ll be able to finish this fucking thing before the leaves start falling. Douglas Adams said “I love deadlines – I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Well, I love deadlines, mostly because when they whoosh you can get away with pushing someone else in front of them! Alas, they’re usually characters, and that narrows sequel options, but then again what is writing if it’s not an exercise in narrowing options? You start off with so many words in the language, and have to whittle it down till you’ve beat the language into a shape it’s never been in before, hang a title on the monstrosity and call it a novel.

So, Predestination now stands at 150k words, with 65k of those being final draft and the balance being what I have to chew through and finish whittling and polishing. Back to the wood shop. No, you can’t follow me in, I don’t want you to see what I do what the belt sander when nobody’s looking…