<\/a>which I listened to while I was stationary biking this morning.\u00a0 I don\u2019t like that musical.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t even watch the movie.\u00a0 But the song has haunted me since I first heard it years ago, and when I listen to it now, I find its peculiar combination of sweetness and menace so disturbing.\u00a0 I think, the man who wrote that song and that musical was willing to go to some very, very creepy places in his mind.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s where I want to go.\u00a0 Not, of course, into Sondheim\u2019s mind, but into my own dark, squeamish corners.\u00a0 That\u2019s where I need to go for Book 3.\u00a0 My problem is not the plot.\u00a0 I can\u2019t solve this book by lining up the events and bolstering the connections between them.\u00a0 I need to push deeper into the characters and find out how I can hurt them psychologically.\u00a0 I have to find the costs there.<\/p>\n
Ick, right?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t have my solutions yet, but I know where to go looking for them now.\u00a0 This is not going to be a fast fix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I swear I\u2019ve been here before. I\u2019m working with this draft of Book 3, and I\u2019ve been revising along pretty steadily from the beginning, knocking out characters and scenes, deepening what remains, and I\u2019ve reached a place where Gaia gets out of trouble.\u00a0 She can catch her breath for a minute, which is obviously a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-1046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1049,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions\/1049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/GaiaWalking.jpg\" "\\"Gaia")
I\u2019m working with this draft of Book 3, and I\u2019ve been revising along pretty steadily from the beginning, knocking out characters and scenes, deepening what remains, and I\u2019ve reached a place where Gaia gets out of trouble.\u00a0 She can catch her breath for a minute, which is obviously a disaster as far as writing goes.\u00a0 The two of us sit back and look ahead at the next few scenes, and the links between them are simply not there.\u00a0 In fact, all of the rest of the book appears to have a random quality.\u00a0 The scenes make sense within themselves.\u00a0 Some are quite convincingly grueling, even.\u00a0 But the underlying threads to keep them all together are not tight.<\/p>\n