Sunday Stroll: Changing Trees and Chatty Characters

I wish I might have gone to the Big Lake with the Chap...to see the trees, which must be at peak colour now or very nearly. Although I'm feeling rather better, it's another quiet day at the Lodge for me. He'll be doing some closing-up tasks. Columbus Day weekend is the traditional time for that, but some years we extend the season a bit. That won't be possible for a variety of reasons.

A few quick, unspectacular shots from the Lodge, where we aren't yet at peak colour, after a feeble foray into the outdoors on this chilly morning.





The last rose of the year, which I brought inside for appropriate cherishing.



I was awake nearly the whole night because my characters kept me up with their chatter. They were endlessly dictacting several of the final scenes and I desperately tried to carve these crucial conversations into my memory so they wouldn't be lost.

Sometime around 4 a.m., right after the Chap fed the dogs, I actually got up and went into the kitchen with a flashlight and scribbled the last paragraphs of the book, and a few prior sections of narrative and dialogue, just to get as much of it down as possible. Then I fell asleep.

Around 8:30, as the Chap was preparing to leave for church, my eyes flew open and I climbed out of bed, ready for a busy day at the keyboard.

I'm now chugging coffee but hardly need the caffeine. I'm buzzing just from the joy of wrapping up this story. I can't predict exactly when I'll finish, I only know it will be fairly "soon" and that's an ever-moving target. You'll be among the first to know, I promise.

As the book waxes ever long, I consider what must be trimmed. I've identified some earlier scenes that will go, except that I always save them somewhere. I made a document to preserve the text that I remove and planned to title it Scene Dump, my rubbish heaps of unused words. Instead I'm calling it Scenic Transfer Station, a concession to local terminology. Round here, what is colloquially known as a dump is officially referred to as a transfer station.

As seen here, the final days of creation are...



teribly messy. And that's only a partial view of what's accumulated in my work area.

I'm afraid that stack of reference material will look worse in about fifteen minutes, when I dig into to do some fact-checking!

Thanks for stopping by. If you'd like to keep strolling, head over to Aisling's blog.