Holding Back the Desert

I spent an inordinate amount of time last night just before bed tossing and turning and playing out in my head the scene in Black Desert that finally made the whole thing fall together for me. It's a brutal little book, meaner than the last one but with more heart (you know, compared to the last one, not compared to any other book; feel-good movie of the week, it ain't). I found a lot of stuff I want to deal with in this book; the emotional core of the story, and immediately after that, about 80% of the plot-that-wasn't-there.

Turns out this means I need to go back and severely rewrite the first 200 pages that I've got before I can push through, but at least I have a proper roadmap now. I was sort of winging it there for awhile.

I mean, not that I'm not winging it (I'm *always* winging it), but it's starting to look real juicy.