Thanks, TB! Believe it or not, that's a scene I'm planning for toward the end of Book Two, but it features the characters I see most clearly.

By Love

There was much to forgive on both sides.

They would have to forgive her secrets, her lies, the way she shut them out and shunned their advice. There had been missing money, missing pills, missing jewelry, but most of all, trust was missing. She’d obscured herself with deception and guile.

She would have to forgive their condemnation, their pettiness, their assumed moral rectitude. There had been no support, no love, no trust in her that she could make the right decision. They hid behind platitudes and hypocrisy.

They all cried when she opened the last present, a penguin-shaped cookie jar.

Susan, this is just a question, not a criticism or a suggestion. I'm just curious about your process. Do you ever write little things that have nothing to do with your current project? Just as a change of pace, or a way to loosen up, use your writing muscles in different patterns, blow some different-colored balloons through the headspace?

You always seem so tight-focused on whatever your current project is. I realize people work differently, so again, not a criticism, just an observation, and you could be doing headstands and just not telling us about them.

Purely from my standpoint, I have to shake off characters and situations that are riding me, periodically, and do something different. Something silly, or ponderous, whimsical or schmoopy, just to blast the stale air out of my brane. I tend to over-focus, and when I do I get grim. So I have to program in some diversion-writing time.

How about the rest of you? Do you concentrate on a single project at a time? Make one thing your primary focus but work on others as they call to you? In that case, how do you draw the line between refreshing diversion and avoidance and procrastination?

'Cause I'm a champion procrastinator, me. C'mon, fess up. NosyInquiring minds wanna know.

Oh man, Sail, you're not ending your saga there, are you? You've barely begun.

I suggest you print all your vignettes out and rearrange them on the floor till they have a narrative flow. After you write a couple dozen more of them.

It could be a good end point, but then I could also go back in and fill in the blanks there, too. Dunno. The muse is still playing, but this is what this weeks prompt drew out. They've been chronological up til now, but....eh. Like your last post, sometimes writing things out of order actually helps you see where things are going.

Baltimore Transformations

Ever since Kay said, you know, what she said,(God, he still wished she hadn't,) Ed Danvers gets greeted like the number one Lover Man of the Potomac. Women primp when they see him, and even the perpetually pre-menstrual court reporter he usually works with introduced herself and bought him a Coke. Her name is Stephanie and she has two dogs. No kids, she said, after a long meaningful look in his direction.

Waitresses close to downtown dust off their touristy "Hons" and ignore his punctilious overview of the check, figuring that anyone who could tame the redhaired murder police knows a little something. The young ones try not to look at his thumbs or his feet, or the moment when his tongue darts out to remove meringue from his upper lip, but they all giggle about it anyway. Maybe it really is the quiet ones.

OK, trying to avoid comma abuse here:

It describes the interests, "such as fossil fuel companies and automobile manufacturers, that would directly suffer from a reduction in fossil fuel use, but as a secondary factor." Because the sentence includes two secondary clause, one an interjection, the other modifying the predicate, using commas for both is confusing.

I could try a dash. "It describes the interests - such as fossil fuel companies and automobile manufacturers - that would directly suffer from a reduction in fossil fuel use, but as a secondary factor." or "It describes the interests, such as fossil fuel companies and automobile manufacturers, that would directly suffer from a reduction in fossil fuel use - but as a secondary factor."

The first is technically correct (I think), but because a dash is used to replace the first rather than the second comma looks wrong. The second is not using a dash either to set off an expression or for explanatory comments, so is technically wrong. But the second use of dashes is less intrusive and looks better. I really don't want to break it up into multiple sentences because it adds words, also flows less well in context of what precedes and follows. Any body care to comment or correct false assumptions?

Theoretically, I favor total immersion in one project at a time. The longer I can spend thinking about one universe the better and deeper I understand it, I think. But I'm not very good at not sparking off into other things whenever a stray thought from a different story wanders by.

I do like to keep whatever I'm reading or watching or talking about unrelated to what I'm working on, though, and escape that way.

I need someone who's willing to read three...well, two and a half...chapters of a goofy fantasy novel and help me get past the point where I'm stuck. I need someone to go "Dude, what should happen next is..." and then I can do that.

'cause I been stuck on this one fucking "and then what?" point for, like, two months.

The first sentence, with two dashes, reads easiest to me. Would parentheses be a possibility? It seems like a parenthetical clarification.