Life in the medium lane

I just found out my oven doesn't really cook; it just does a really good job of warming things up if you leave it in there long enough. I rarely use it but decided to, today, because my toaster oven's got stuff piled on top of it. Well...I put my dinner of a frozen organic enchilada bowl in it to cook for 45 minutes...and it wasn't even heated all the way through when I took it out. So I cleared off the toaster oven and slammed din-dins in there and it was ready in 15 minutes. I'll have to have it looked at.

So...now it's 8pm and I've just finished dinner and am about to get down on BC3. I know what I need in it and the publisher is waiting for it, so it gets done now. There will be a book 4, but not till I'm done with at least a first draft of POS...and God knows when that'll be. You see, BC3 is intended to give Allen a chance to explain his side of what happened with Eric and Bobby, but he wasn't using it for that. He wanted to get all prurient and detailed and self-aggrandizing about it and that was killing the story. So he and I had a nice little slug fest and I let him know those tales go in another book (so he can still write them and I'll have Eric refer to it in BC3) but he had to be more revealing about his thought processes and history than he's been willing to be up to now. Another point -- the 4th book can be as graphic as he wants. That finally made him happy enough to start refocusing.

Fortunately, Eric stayed out of it. He already knows what he wants in his part of this book and Allen hates his guts for the trouble he's caused; all that needs to be done is the interweaving. I even know the final moments of the book and I hope they work within the overall context.

Brendan's letting me finish this, but then I have to hunker down and work with him on POS. When he saw what I did with "Desert Land," he sat back and gave me some slack. But the implication is, I have to be just as intense with his story as with that one...which will be draining; DL was just 4000 words long and I obsessed over every word and its placement to get it right and that made me numb for a week. I may wind up your typical Irish drunk after POS. Which Brendan laughed at. The little snake. Oh, sorry -- no snakes in Ireland; he's just a sneak...

...which is an anagram of snake, right?