The End Of The World Is Over

Delivered the draft manuscript of Rise Again II: Below Zero today.

Sometimes writing is easy, and the story pours out as fast as it can be set down.  At other times it's a slow, agonizing process, line by line, word by word.

What gets me through the hard patches is knowing that we read things at the same speed, no matter how slowly they were written.  The struggle to write vanishes, and leaves behind only the struggle of the characters.  Or that's the idea, anyway.

I've blown two deadlines in my professional life.  The first, in 1996, involved an illustration of a miniature golf course.  This novel was the second.

Time for the fizz.

Thrillers

We've been watching a lot of thrillers at chez Tripp lately, and I've noticed something that had eluded me until now: no matter how complicated the story, mostly it's nothing more than somebody trying to learn something, and somebody trying to stop them learning it.

And three-quarters of the twists and sequences are devoted to learning a single piece of information that leads to the next one.  Shoot thirty people, break into a building, escape by helicopter.  All to learn you're looking for a guy named 'Smith.'  Blow up an oil tanker, attend an opera, and kill two men with a piece of cheese.  All to determine you need to open locker #13 at Grand Central Station.

That's all they contain.  Discover you need to know something, then go find out.  It's still fun to watch thrillers, of course, but the structure underneath turns out to be a lot simpler than I ever imagined.