Me and two other writers--and a dog--hiking through a veritable low-tide mountain range.
Me and two other writers–and a dog–hiking through a veritable low-tide mountain range.
More action-packed days here in the back of beyond! The last few days my attention has been divided between finding ways to get enough exercise amid sporadic (but severe) rainstorms and working to get back on track with my writing.

And it’s working. I’m up a goodly amount in the last few days, and the book is flying.

An interesting thing happens a couple years into living in a small town. You begin to get a hang on the local etiquette, and you start to meed fascinating characters of all types. The other night while working the dog at a local parking garage, an eight-fingered man happened across us with his Irish Wolfhound. Dog geekery wound up turning to career talk–turns out the man used to be a bomb disposal technician, and then later a machinist. Oddly, the lack of digits was a result of his industrial career, not his military career. A half-hour conversation wound up with two pages of personal notes that’ll wind up going into a character sometime in the future.

One of the things I hadn’t expected when I de-camped from the Bay Area was how much social classes mix around here. In the Bay Area, property values mean that people are heavily separated by class, race, and subculture. While there isn’t quite the variety of immigrant cultures here, the daily-contact variety of people is a lot higher–much more like what the Bay Area used to be before the first big housing boom of the oughts.

Who’d have thought rural Oregon would wind up being, in its own way, as cosmopolitan as the Bay Area?

And, of course, this being a tourist down we do get a whole raft of new faces every holiday and tourist season as the population of the town rises by a factor of ten for a few days here and a few weeks there.

By the way, don’t forget, for just a few more weeks you can get a bevy of beautiful writing books curated by Kevin J. Anderson to help you level up in your productivity, craft, and writing business. It’s also got some hefty discounts for the ebook authoring program Jutoh and for The Writer’s Cafe! Name your own price and get them here, for yourself or for the aspiring novelist in your life.

Anyway, where the book is concerned, I did considerable damage this evening, so I’m heading off to bed quite pleased with myself. This universe has gotten so big I’m now officially terrified of organizing my series bible once this book is done, but these are the problems that it’s good to have.

Word count for the last three days: 9002
Total state of the project:
The Briggs Defection — 50.7%

45,654 / 90000 words