I've spent my week back from Florida going through my progress on Brimstone and tweaking/amending/revising the chapters set in Cassadaga - to better reflect the reality of the place. I was wrong about a number of important things: the hierarchy/organization, the size of the place, some aspects of the spiritualist faith, etc., and I needed to fix it all before moving forward.

There's plenty I can fudge and fake, but some things I'd rather get right.

Anyway, as of this morning, I'm officially back to square one ... or square whichever ... and I can start moving forward on this again. Of course, this clean slate of sorts falls right in front of Christmas, but such is life. I'll be heading to Kentucky to my dad's place, and Dad lives out in the middle of nowhere. There will be downtime. I will make progress. Maybe not much, but some.

(Meanwhile, back at the ranch - my cousin will be house-sitting for us, keeping Quinn and Spain for the week. Both cats hate riding in a car, and will probably be far happier here on their home turf. Greyson is coming with us.)

With all that said ... here's recent progress on my subtropical (art)deco mystery about a friendly medium in a historic spiritualist community teaming up with a WWI shell-shocked haberdasher who's receiving love notes from hell ... as inspired by a real place and a real set of bizarre (otherworldly?) incidents:

Project: Brimstone
Deadline: March 1, 2016
New words written: A net loss with revision, actually. Oh well.
Present total word count: 13,213



Things Accomplished in Fiction: Got the first few chapters re-jiggered and ready for prime time. I'll give it all one more good read-through before launching back into production, just for the sake of batting cleanup and making sure I didn't miss any little fiddly bits, but the bulk of the heavy lifting has been handled.

Things Accomplished in Real Life: Neighborhood jaunts with the dog; Christmas shopping for everyone; Christmas cards this year, hooray! (sometimes I don't get to it); playdates for Greyson with his bestie, Luna; housework; business emails/phone calls/etc; went to bank; went to Walgreens; went grocery shopping; signed some short story contracts and went to the post office; went to the post office again to mail presents; went to post office to return some stuff that didn't work; boxed up some stuff for UPS to return the product of Amazon.com's screwup; ate out for lunch too many times; went lunching/shopping with my cousin; cut off a bunch of hair; had a routine doctor's appointment; more stuff I'm sure, it's been a week or more.

Next Other: Power through this one, because it's due in a little more than two months. Oof.

Cat Other: These two maniacs.



Dog Other: And this guy.



Number of fiction words so far this year: 125,136 (Still. Give or take.)