"What did you do last night?" "The wrong thing."

This has been an insanely busy week. Not just the stuff about getting the webpage up and going (which, thanks to my sainted friend Jason of MacDowell Colony fame, is going very smoothly) but also....

I told my agent I would send him the first draft of the second book by the end of this week. So of course I look over it and of course now that I know someone else, someone important to me, is actually going to read it, I spaz out. Everything looks wrong. I start polishing and trimming and then of course of course of course the missing scene, that place in the manuscript where I had actually typed INSERT SCENE HERE comes to me in a rush. So I start writing that too. Polishing the old stuff and pacing and fretting and adding new stuff and pacing some more. But it is the most incredible high when a whole scene comes to you. Real life fades away. You live in the book. It's strange but it's also a rush.

Yesterday I was sitting in the coffee shop reading draft number 314 of the new scene. It was afternoon and the shop was almost empty and as I go up for cream one of the bored teenage girls behind the counter says to the other one "What did you do last night?" and her friend answered "The wrong thing."

What a great exchange! It's perfect. I rushed back to put it into my scene. Because that's the thing about a writing binge - and make no mistake, the last four days have been a writing binge - the whole world seems like it is conspiring to help you write. People speak in dialogue, colors seem brighter, metaphors leap out at you as you walk down the street.


It doesn't happen often. But it does happen