Hello, milestone. It's me, Derek. I assume that you heard I would be arriving, all fancied up and surfing a handstand along my word wave! Whooshy whooshy. Splashy splashy. And for no apparent reason...honk.

What's that, milestone? Oh, yes, I WILL sit down to your table and have a big old steak of self-satisfaction...raw and ragged, to appropriately symbolize the journey thus far. It might not seem like a lot to some, but to me, 75,000 words of anything is a whole heap of...well...something. Hell, I could just type the word “story” 75,000 times, and although that wouldn't exactly added up to anything of what you might call “narrative value”, the sheer deluge of words alone should be impressive, dammit.

I have two time-lines that I'm dealing with...one in the distant past, and one in the distant future. It's been a challenge to figure out exactly how to present them, whether it be concurrently or separately. I think I've settled on separately, although I realize at a risk of interrupting the flow. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I think it would be less confusing, overall. Also, that way, I get to divide the novel into three “books”, or “acts”, and include cool, meaningful pages that announce each one, like “BOOK ONE: THE BOOKENING” or “BOOK TWO: THE THUNDER BOOK”.

As an aside, "The Thunder Book" is now officially a project in my idea list. You saw it here first. You can't have it. IT'S MINE.

That's about 300 pages, you guys. 100 or so to go.

Baaaaack...to work.

Yikes. I'm working on a scene in the book that is emotionally charged like crazy. A man and a boy are discussing things they've lost, and finding some comfort in the voids in one another's lives. It's been an interesting look into the differences in the emotional states and dynamics of children and adults. Knowing what I know of myself, and what I know of my own daughter has helped figure out the right things to say.

One thing I've discovered is that the emotions of adults have more inertia than those of children. They don't swing as freely as the hyper-temporary, soup-bubble feelings of kids. Children can feel the most intense loss and the most profound joy before any adult can even begin to figure out what's going on in their own head. Adults' emotions are ships at sea; kids' are leaves in splashed puddles.

Writing about it makes me yearn for that emotional impermanence again. How great it would be to be able to pull oneself out of something dark so quickly, even considering that one could be right back down there in a blink.

I miss being young. I miss that ignorance, that ant-sized perspective.

Ugh. This is a difficult one, especially since I know where the scene is going.

Back to work.

I stand atop a pile of words. 54,528 of them, to be precise.

That is the most recent count, the most recent clump of language and raw ore pulled from the earth, that I've generated for The Footsteps of Cain. Good, bad, and everything in between.

Of my estimation, I believe I'm about half-way to a...deep breath here...finished piece! Since I've been able to focus full-timeish (at least as full time as I can with my 7 year old at school and a perpetual mountain of house work and keep-my-family-alive food preparation that I SUPPOSE I should commit to), I've been able to crank out 20,000 words, or thereabouts. For me, that's about a month and a half of work.

I've passed in and out of a couple different types of certainty on the journey; certainty that part of what I've generated is good, and certainty that part of it sucks in the most cringe-worthy sense. I feel like I have too many one-dimensional puppets, and I know that in my second run through I'm going to try to breathe more life and blood into them...take felt and make it flesh. The view from inside a story, especially for someone like me with little experience, can be a very constricting one; I wonder and fear what fresh eyes will reveal about it when they see it.

Walk forward with fear, old man, and let it keep your eyes open.

Back to work.