Partial draft...

I added a thought regarding New World For Old into the midway point, dealing with how he's too pissed off to be afraid when he's been kidnapped. Things snowballed to where I would up polishing up the second half of this section. Mainly intensifying the emotional content and avoiding anything that's too derivative. While retracing the car's route when he was grabbed and taken to be beaten, Brendan finally feels the fear he ignored during the actual kidnapping.

I wound up increasing the page count to 542 and wordage to 122,427. I think this is all I can do, for now. I'm at the point where I'm changing punctuation and making some sentences smaller...so time to step back and let it percolate.

I've also got a solid friendship going between Brendan, Jeremy and Everett. A straight guy with two gay friends caught in a very 70s sensibility. Putting some of myself into that, mainly as Everett. All pre-AIDs, when things were wild and free and being gay wasn't quite the dangerous political issue it is, now...or that it became during the epidemic.

I'm letting Everett tell Brendan about an incident that happened to him when he was 19, in San Antonio. He accepted a ride from a guy he knew and the guy's two friends, but instead of taking him to his home, they took him into Breckenridge Park and raped him, then dumped him. He flagged down a cop and was talked out of filing a report because he was gay. It's illegal to be gay in Texas, the cop said, so you'll go to jail. Everett believed him and let it go. And it fucked him up for years. But it's also why he stepped in when he saw something similar about to happen to Brendan's cousin, Scott, early in the book.

A job outside Boston is back on the for third week of March, now that I'm Covid negative. Going into the office, tomorrow, to get paperwork for the San Francisco job and swinging by storage to see what we have for materials. Finish preparations. I'd already canceled my hotel and car, so rebook those. Dammit.