I still have another day, but I don’t believe I’ll make my goal of finishing the sixth book by tomorrow. I could blame the 27-hour power outage, and it certainly had an impact. But the next-to-last chapter became two chapters, at least in the admittedly very rough draft, and I hadn’t expected that.
In the best news, I’ve crossed a line. My long narrational nightmare of a year that took four books is over. To put that in perspective, the first novel covered 1955 (and some flashbacks to memories of earlier decades) to 1966. The second novel, with a few more flashbacks, covered 1967 to 1970. Three, four, five: all 1974. And the sixth book uses the last two chapters to sprint into 1975. (I first wrote “crawl into 1975,” but it didn’t feel that way to the characters, only to me.)
Seventh book begins… TBD.
I think these are the only two CDs I listened to during a sporadic and hectic few days of writing the most recent chapter.
Pearl Jam, “Vitalogy,” and Pink, “I’m Not Dead.”