Scenes and bridges

I do a lot of reading. Lol...if I didn't something would be seriously wrong with me. Although I'm not reading as much fiction as I normally do because I've hit "writer's disease", that illness where reading other people's stuff is hard because my internal editor won't shut off, and I keep wanting to break out the pen and make notes.

I did read Jen's book, Heat of the Storm. WOW was it hot. Guess I should have checked the heat classification. I kept looking up to see if my kid was watching me, or if she was wondering what I was doing with a book that had a cover of a guy with his hand in his pants. It's a great cover, btw...

But mostly, I've been chugging my way through non-fiction. They're easy on the brain when you can't write or think.

I did re-read Emotional Structure to see if there was something I missed, but it wasn't what I needed for DG, and Seger's book on character didn't cut it either. It was that thread (again with the threads?) over on RD about Scene and Sequel. Old school-terminology. It surprises me that Butcher still refers back to it, since a lot of his books have grown from straight S and S to something very close to Brockmann's deep pov. White Night and Proven Guilty are almost entirely deep pov wrapped in a three act structure.

But anywho.

That got me thinking about how--after struggling with Hot Contract for lo these many years I'm clipping along so fast on Dead Gorgeous. I think...'cause I finally realized plotting and pantsing and stuff don't work quite the way they should. It's not about intricate details, or feeling your way through to the end. It's about the set pieces.

Pt A, Pt B, Pt C and so on. I'm slotting them into place like there's no tomorrow, so all that are left are the bridges, y'know, the hard stuff linking it all together. Guideposts are the given. The weft of the story, the string that holds the other stuff in place so it doesn't slide around. I'm boinking around like a ping-pong ball, but it's flowing, and I'm not complaining.