I'm about 1/3 done. The zombies have been revealed, the grisly murder that requires to be revenged has been committed.

And I have discovered a plot hole.

It all looked so neat and clean in the outline. Christopher discovers the evil wizard. He leaves. Evil wizard is murdered. Chris returns to find evidence of evil magic. Zombie rises. Evil wizard's home burns down. Christopher returns with expert help to discover what has happened, discovers that place has burned down. Zombies start killing.

That looks easy, doesn't it? Yeah, that's what I had thought as well. Now that I'm writing it, however, it turns out that there is a small problem.

All of this has to happen in a period of less than two days.

Day one was Christopher finding the evil wizard, and the wizard getting killed.
Now I have the night, and I have to make Christopher find that particular piece of evidence he needs, I need to make the zombie rise and to burn down the house. All in one night.

I had initially thought to have Christopher return to the house the same night, but I can't make that work. I did find an excuse to stretch the 24 hours into almost two days, however. That still makes for a busy, no, make that hectic night. But it can work because there are several characters involved who operate independently from each other.

It would be easier if I didn't need a particular item from the house later in the story. If I didn't, I could stretch it even more. But I need someone in particular to retrieve the item before the house burns down. That turned out to be the tricky part. But I've figured it out.

Still, it will be a very very busy night for my characters.

I just wrapped up an expository chapter. It sets up some things and explains some of the rules of my novel, so that when people get to the showdown, they won't cry "deus ex machina."

I'm glad it's done. Well, almost. I have a shift of POV character in this chapter. It's the only chapter where I don't end the chapter and start a new one when I shift from one POV character to another. Which means I'm going to have to rewrite it later. When I do the second draft.

This is also the longest chapter, clocking in at over 10 pages. That makes it twice as long as average.

I'm now 70 pages into the novel. Things should go faster from here on, because all the setting up and introducing things is finished. (Well, almost.) From here on, the scares really begin. Within the next 10 pages, we'll finally see the zombies (although they aren't attacking yet). Within 20 pages, a very important death.

And then it will get really scary. Then the zombies will rise and attack the living. (insert evil laughter)

One thing I plan to do duiring the zombie attack is introducing the zombies. I'll have an attack force of 50 zombies out to destroy the living. For some of them, I'm going to take a page or two describing who they were in life, how and why they died, and why it's ironic/sad/horrible that they are now attacking the living. My plan is, essentially, to humanize the zombies, to make the readers see the tragedy.

Before, you know, they proceed to slaughter the living.

Okay, it's been a long time since I last updated the workblog. The good news was that I did, though an unexpected stroke of luck, got the funds to buy a used notebook. So I got back to work.

The bad news is that work isn't progressing as I had hoped. I'm just a shade over 10,000 words now. That's not much. Part of me hopes that this will change once the story begins to get scary. Because I'm still setting things up, introducing characters and generally introducing the reader to the world I'm trying to create while at the same time trying to create a sense of foreboding. The reader, who knows the title of the story and can be assumed to have read the back cover solicitation, knows much more than what the characters know who are trying, from various angles and for different reasons, to find out more about hoodoo and a certain evil bokor. At the moment, the whole thing reads more like a mystery novel than a horror novel. Within the next 10,000 words or so, that will likely change.

What concerns me is that the chapters are rather short. I'm at a bit over 50 pages in, and I'm writing chapter 11. That's just a shade over 4 manuscript pages per chapter. I'm not comfortable with such short chapters. It's basically, I tell a scene per chapter. A new scene equals a new chapter. I suppose, however, that while I'm uncomfortable with that, it's a pretty good match for modern reading habits. So I'm trying not to worry about it.

I've hit a snag of sorts: my notebook has died. After over eight years (it was still running Win 98), I suppose it was time.

The problem is, I liked to write my novels on the notebook. I liked to spend the evenings sitting at the dining room table and working there. It made me feel less isolated than sitting at the tower in the office.

Now I have no choice. Unless I find someone willing to donate me a notebook computer, I have to work downstairs in the office. I don't have the funds to buy a new notebook.

Last night, I deleted all of chapter 2 and most of chapter 1 and started from that. I wrote a new version of chapter 1 that eliminated all the problems I had with the chapter -- chiefly by eliminating the character that caused the problems, the black police detective. This new chapter 1 is a combination of the original chapter 1 and the original chapter 2. What will now be chapter 2 was originally going to be chapter 3.

Confused? Don't be. Bascially, I'm saying that I combined two chapters into one to eliminate a problem.

In the process, I lost half my word count.

I have written two chapters.

I need to trash them both and start over.

The problem is that the POV character for the first three chapters is a racist. I tend to try and get into the POV characters' heads when I write, and this guy's head is not a nice place to be. Which isn't the problem.

The problem is that I have the character think and talk like a racist. Revenge isn't meant for the American market, so nobody would send me hate mail over writing a racist character as a racist, mistaking character voice for writer voice.

The problem is that the POV character's warped POV sets the wrong tone for the story. It gives the reader, who will at best give me one page to convince them to buy this novel, the wrong idea of what this novel is about, what it's like.

Which means that this is a problem that needs fixing. Luckily, it's easy to fix. I simply need to remove an African-American character from these two chapters, which removes the trigger for the POV character's racist thoughts.

(The PC readers of this blog don't need to worry; there are several story-relevant African-American characters in this novel. Removing this one, who I only introduced to show off the POV character's racist attitudes, won't make any difference.)

Once I've established the horror, I can get deeper into the unpleasant recessed of that particular character's mind.

I only managed 780 words last night, far below the intended total. I could make some excuses about how my 9 year old laptop computer gave me a bunch of trouble (apparently, it's so far gone that it can no longer run MS Word and an audio player at the same time). But it would be excuses.

Still, not meeting my nightly quota the first night out doesn't really mean all that much (he tried to convince himself), so long as I meet or exceed my quota on a regular basis.

Tonight, I start writing. All the prep work is done. The target length is 75,000 words, but I won't complain if it runs longer. My weekly word target is 10,000 words. It sounds like not much, but since I only have four nights a week to actually get this work done, it means 2,500 words a night. I hope that I can manage more, on average. At that speed, I shouldn't take more than three months, including revisions.

As usual, I'm going to set up shop in the dining room/TV room with the notebook computer. The catch is that the notebook computer is 9 years old and not working properly anymore. I need a new one, but I can't afford one. I can only hope that it will not break down completely before the novel is finished (as I'd rather work upstairs than downstairs at the tower). In any case, I'm keeping the manuscript on a USB stick rather than saving it to the notebook's hard disc.

Research is done. Preparatory research anyway; when you write a novel, research isn't done until the novel is finished. Also, the revisions of the outline that the research made necessary are finished.

I had a nightmare last night. A nightmare about the novel I'm about to begin writing. Not about how hard it will be to write, or how it will suck, but actually a plot related nightmare. That's nice. It's encouraging. I mean, think about it, this novel is so scary that it gives me nightmares before I've even started writing it.

I will begin the actual writing on Monday. The weekend will be busy with other work-related stuff, so I plan to kick back and relax tonight. Okay, so I won't really be relaxing, I'll spend the weekend thinking about where and how to start the novel.

- Will I start it with the mysterious deaths of 50 people? No, I don't think so, that would go too far back into the timeline.

- Will I start it with the funeral of Henry Lacroix, who is one of those 50? Again, no, for the same reason.

- Will I start it with the opening of Henry Lacroix's grave, where his father and his brother discover that the body is missing? That, so far, is my favorite, but it makes me wonder about how to put in the reason why they open the grave, how they get the idea that they need to check.

- Since there are 50 mysteriously dead people in the story, the opening that I favor right now is that the relatives of one of them has just discovered that the body of their dead family member is missing and tells the Lacroix family. I think that sets things up well -- mysterious deaths, weird goings-on, introduces some of the main characters and establishes their motivations. I think that of the possible openings, this one is the strongest.

Research is your friend. Outlining is your friend too.

I finally got started on doing my research on Voodoo. Keep in mind that without the outline, I wouldn't know in which direction I'd need to slant my research. Anyway. There is one Voodoo spirit that I wanted to use in some capacity, so I paid close attention to that one. (I won't say which, although it's probably obvious.) When I started my research, I learned a startling fact about this spirit, which made me toss out my originally planned showdown for something much, much better.