October 26, 2008

Since returning from France I’ve been working sporadically on a new novel, IN THE PLACE OF JOY AND LAUGHTER. Yesterday it finally started to open up for me, revealing more and more of what the characters are about.

Sometimes I write with a game plan and a fully conceived plotline in my head, while at other times I simply go with my intuition. This is one of the latter, and the going has been slow. I don’t feel I am suddenly about to start zipping along, but now I have a much better sense of where things are heading.

Part of the difficulty is that there are three concurrent timelines and three separate characters who don’t fully link till later in the book. It’s been a challenge keeping the book feeling like a whole entity rather than a series of aimless wanderings.