Whoa Nelly!

A good day of writing yesterday - for me at least. I spent about forty five minutes up in 296 reorganizing my outline notes. I had hoped to do a little town work, you know, drawing rough maps of what it looks like and mapping everyone's routes, but I got stuck mucking around loading software onto the computer at Annie's request.

Something interesting I found yesterday is Lompoc, California, which is not far from where I put Skyview. It's square. The streets are straight and the whole town was totally laid out on a grid. On the google map it really drew my eye, and on a whim I went to the city's web site and read some of their history, thinking maybe it had been founded by a band of whackos. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the ancestral home of the Chumash Indians! From Buffy! I could see Wheden's total theft when I further read that the missionaries who offed the indians built their mission on sacred ground and it was destroyed in an earthquake.

So, after work Birdie and I had a good dinner at the Trojan Horse and then went our separate ways. She went to a Master Gardener meeting and I set up my laptop by the window over the street in the library. Got a LOT of work done, too, in the hour that I did work. I had made a quick note at the last minute in 296 about the order of things being done at the beginning of the book, mostly to up the suspense a little, have things lead into other things. I cleaned up chapter one and did away with the dufousy chapter two, and typed a fair bit on the new chapter two. I'm getting a better grip on Kelsey and Parker, but I'm falling into another of my writing traps.

I have a tendency to make my characters too logical, not in the least bit irrational, and certainly not passionate. There's precious little passion in my life, and that definitely shows in my fiction. So, I keep writing notes to myself to ramp it up, and I will go back through when I'm done and do just that.

I also keep making a note to FIGHT LOTS OF ZOMBIES. Duh. It's not all about, "Go here then go there, then say this, then do that." It's supposed to be a zombie novel, so I should do more with that. So far I've only roughed out one, and that's the neighbor lady Miriam, who warns the old lady across the street and then goes to get her cat and take it to the shelter with Kelsey and her Grandma Opal. But OOOPS...she doesn't make it back in time.