Death in the afternoon (actually a nap) - after writing all morning

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - The second full week of writing my first draft of The Fracking War ended last week and today started the third with about 10 chapters (more or less) in the bank. Many more to go, then revise, then... I don't want to think about it.

It took the full two weeks to get into the right cadence because even with the time blocked out to write, plot sort of set up, characters developing faster than teenagers, it still has been hard as all hell to write.

Part of it is the tendency to get waaaaay too complicated.

Several scenes take place in an upstate New York diner in a little place called Horseheads. I started going into great detail about this diner, then realized it only existed because the characters needed a place outside of the newspaper office to go talk.

Who gives a flying shit about the decor? That's information way beyond what any reader wants and/or needs.

The good news this past week was that I stumbled onto a rubric to make it easier for me to slam particular kinds of information to the readers without struggling as a novelist.

The main character will be writing a regular newspaper column and, voila, each column will be integral to the story.

His first column, headlined "Three Women, Three Cancers" is one smokin' piece of writing, if I do say so myself.

And I just did.

More next week, unless I become a casualty of The Fracking War and decide to start writing sonnets instead of this novel.