Typical cops...trying to make it look like nobody, it looks like everybody.(Maybe somebody having fun with his supervisor?) Seems I read someplace, not sure where, that if a suspect is the same race as a sketch artist, the sketches look like them, sometimes

Question re: drafts, especially electronic ones. What do you keep? I can see keeping a radically different version of a scene or chapter, just in case you decide that that approach is really the best one, but if you're just futzing with dialogue, word choices, etc., do you just change it and forget it?

Connie, speaking just for me? When I change, I change. It's a question of commiting to what you've decided to say, and a question of trusting your instincts.

The only time I save something is I've done a radical rewrite or taken out an entire scene, which isn't something I do often. I'm a linear writer - start at the beginning, and write in order - but I will save those, especially if I think those originals might be useful in a later book or later scene in the same book.

Connie, I usually define a draft by its sense of completion. If when you're done, you think, "Okay, this is the story as it stands," then save it. And when you start making changes, you call it a new draft, and you can make little changes on that one to your heart's content until you decide, "Okay, this is the story as it stands."

It's funny cause I was looking at my documents and I found some stories I'd started years ago. They're only a few beginning paragraphs, and if I do pick them up, I'd like to save those few beginning paragraphs regardless of whether I change them completely in the very first draft, since I'm so far away from when I initially thought of the story. So that's a case where I would save something that's incomplete.

Connie, with minor tweaks--changes within a scene--I just change them and leave it at that. With major changes--rewriting a scene--I'll usually keep the old version for awhile just so if I want to use any of the information later, I won't have to recreate it from scratch.

Ugh. I'm fighting writer's block, and I think it's because I'm working on scenes from Anna's POV immediately after Sebastian's death, and I'm just stuck on what she would be feeling and how to portray it in a way that's both believable and sympathetic.

Basically, they had a terrible marriage, so I don't think she'd be human if some part of her wasn't relieved to be free. Yet she can't actually rejoice in a death, so she's going to spend some time feeling guilty over that normal human reaction. So far I've got her doing a combination of reflecting upon what went wrong with her marriage, and probably blaming herself more and Sebastian less than she did while he was alive, and focusing resolutely on little physical details--is there a place in the village where they're staying where she can buy what she needs for a basic mourning wardrobe, how soon can she find a way to travel to Lisbon so she can sail for England, etc.?

Does that work? I'm all at sea here because I have so little experience of death, and none at all where my relationship with the deceased was weird and complicated.

She might have some authentic mourning that now there is no chance to fix things, no chance to apologize or be apologized to, etc. Is there a reason she married him other than he was suitable? Some characteristic that she authentically respected? She can mourn the loss of that, as well.

Susan, I would think the grief over the shortened life, the loss of the potential, the absence of the familiar person, whether loved or not, would be foremost. She doesn't strike me as a Faith type, aware and cynical, but a lady of her time -- If she felt relief right away, I don't think she'd recognize it for what it is. Instead, I think the relief would trickle in slowly, maybe shock at being able to laugh at something "too soon", realizing that she doesn't feel as cramped, as constrained, and building from there.

the absence of the familiar person,

Oh, yeah. They may have had a difficult relationship, but there was still a commonality between them. Someone who knew her reactions, someone I'm assuming she could at least have a conversation with where they both understood the underlying assumptions. Something such as thinking in the morning, "I must remember to make sure there are four eggs poached in a particular way--no, wait. He's not here to eat those anymore."

Deena's absolutely right. The first thing would be shock, and the numbness that accompanies sudden grief of someone close to us, whether it was intimate closeness or not. Sebastian was a pillar of her world as it was, and now the foundations of that life are shaken. She's adrift and, from personal experience, she would probably focus on details she can control, like her wardrobe, and take great pains to get it right because it keeps her from thinking about things she cannot control, or those beginning flutters of relief that any woman in her position would instantly believe to be wrong and bad.

There's a reason they give victims of emotional shock a glass of water, have them sit down, have them focus on something mundane and accomplishable. The hind brain goes on, copes, deals with and assimilates the information, so that the next time the conscious is reminded of it, it's less of a shock. This repeats, over hours, and days, and weeks, until the bereaved is able to take a more comprehensive look at the relationship and make some judgements about it. And also about the immediate future.