We have two kids in the house again. Middle and Youngest Son were living with a friend of theirs, but the lease ran out as did the friendship, so Middle is moving back home for a while, and Youngest is moving into one of our rent houses all by himself. I’m proud of both of them for what they’re doing because they both made decisions that were right for them.
Middle Son needs to save some money, and he’ll be able to do that by living here. We’re not charging him rent, not even nominally, though he’s said he’ll help with expenses.
Youngest Son is doing something I never did: he’s living completely on his own. All through my adult life, I lived with someone, from my parents to a college or Army roommate to my wives. It was never just me in a place. Oh, sure, ostensibly my first apartment was supposed to be just me, but Diana stayed there more than she did at the sorority house, and their newsletter editor even joked about it once she heard I had a place.
I’ve wondered more than a few times what my life might have been like if I’d ever struck out on my own, even back in my hometown. Would I have met my first wife? Would I have become a cop? And if not, would I have met my second wife? Would I have traveled more? What other experiences would I have had? My mind meanders down that path on a regular basis. I think that’s one reason alternate history and do-over stories resonate so much with me. I will likely never get tired of that genre.

I mentioned back in February that Oldest Son had sent me a Storyworth subscription for Christmas. I’ve done an absolutely horrible job of keeping up with the prompts. We’re 42 weeks into the year and I’ve responded to fewer than a dozen, I think. Really need to get my butt in gear on that. It’s hard to believe we’ve only got ten weeks left in the year.
Writing
This week marks over 19,000 words on the blog since I started my weekly streak. That’s about 800 words per week or about 2.5 times what I was doing before the streak. I’ve put in over 63,000 words in my fiction during that same time (2700 words/week) and about 11,000 before the streak (600 words/week). I think it’s safe to say that the weekly postings are making a difference.
I’m stuck in Ghost though, and it’s not the first time this has happened to me. I’m right around 45k words, what some writers call the “muddy middle,” and I can’t quite figure out how to move on from here. In in the same boat when it comes to Walls.
I think part of the problem with Walls and Ghost is that I don’t quite know how either one is going to end. With Walls, I’d originally intended it to be a short story, but it’s up at 24k right now—novella territory at a minimum. But I didn’t have a clear path in my mind when I started writing it, and I think that’s why it got stuck. Don’t Stop Believing and The Sad Girl both had very clear storylines, so I was able to write them relatively quickly. Discoveries and In Plain Sight were less clear to me, so they took a little longer. In Plain Sight is taking longer because I’ve got a couple of different plotlines, and it’s one of those that wasn’t clear on the closure.
In Ghost, I know where Keith is and how he got there. I know what his basic goals are. But I don’t know what’s going to happen to him when he reaches those goals. For that matter, I don’t even know if he’s going to reach all of his goals in this book. That could be interesting. It did literally just occur to me that this could become an interesting series, not unlike Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, or Dean Wesley Smith’s Ghost of a Chance series.
Never a dull moment, I guess.
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