Well, that holidays are over and I can breathe a sigh of relief. I really don't like them at all. My writing pace is getting steadily nearer to normal. I got ten pages of fresh material today and hope to get ten tomorrow. Then I have some editing to do for renebooks. I just turned in the revised afterword to my collection that is coming out from Wildside today and I haven't counted that into my writing total because it was fractional. I don't do word count totals, I do page count totals. Any thing under a page doesn't get counted until it goes over a page and so I'm really doing rough totals.

There was a very good discussion in the chats about killing characters a few days ago and it made me think a bit. I like high body counts. Part of that comes from reading so much about major wars, major revolutions, and other conflicts. I'm fond of non- fiction books that give the full sweep with many, many vignettes such as "O Jerusalem." My fiction is heavily influenced by non-fiction. In fact it is probably more influenced by non-fiction than it has been by fiction.

I set up in layers of characters, all with names, primary, secondary, and tertiary and I prefer to think in clusters of central characters than in a single protagonist. Tertiary is the cannon fodder. Some of the tertiary characters are going to contribute to the plot even if it's by getting murdered and a lot of them do. Secondary heads for the leadership element and I always lose some of them. At some point I usually destroy a primary character, killed, maimed, or emotionally/mentally destroyed. That's what tends to happen in real life and that's what I'm trying to achieve. I do like gore, but not all the scenes involve it.

So I ended up getting into it with a person who doesn't like that kind of wrting and calls it "bathos". But life is ugly and it's usually the little guys who get it first because it's harder to get at the top folks. Anyway. I am thinking this will be a better year than the previous three and hopefully better than the past ten. I'd like to be able to help my son out and get moved from here.