It's been a very good few days for the book, with big progress over the weekend as well as Monday and Tuesday night. But to meet my June deadline, I have booked a writing getaway week in early April in an Undisclosed Location.

A change of scenery sometimes helps me break through tough plot or logic areas, mostly because there's bigger blocks of time available. Typical weekdays or even social weekends really only offer up a few hours, which means text produced and considered in small bits and bites. Two years ago at the CSSF workshop in Lawrence, I had huge blocks of time, and consequently wrote 30K words in a week, just poring over a laptop and a blank disk. I hope I have something like a similar run of it this time.

Plus, I'm inordinately happy that I got a flash of inspiration while walking up the stairs today; the sense of being in the book was so sharp that I don't really remember walking up the stairs themselves. Knowing how ephemeral these things can be, I immediately scribbled the chapter opener down on a notepad at my desk. It was one of those "oh, of course!" moments that will be enormously useful for expanding the "forest chapter" of the book. I hope to expand on it a little bit tonight, but just having the right tone and approach is often half the battle. I feel like I'm holding a golden key to the next few chapters.

In any case, that may only make sense to the writerly sorts, but I'm sure everyone can appreciate the value of finding a map through the wilderness.