This thing I'm writing

Meters swum today: 1900 (I swim with Dallas Aquatic Masters)
Playing on the iPod: Something by Terry Oldfield

So I'm writing a book. It's my second. Well, actually, it may be my fifth, I'm not sure how many of the others count. I'm flogging two of them around to the Media, which is to say, I'm thinking about flogging two of them around to the Media, but I actually haven't done any flogging at all this year. I keep coming up with reasons not to send out letters. I need to compile a list of potential markets and do research and create an Excel table and and and. Procrastination and anxiety are my friends. And with friends like these...

Anyway, what I'm writing is Spellbinder, the sequel to Mindbender. Mindbender was/is about a twelve-year-old American boy, picking up about six months after his mother's mysterious death. His stranger-father shows up and whisks him away to a large Latin American city (the fictional San Sebastian, standing in for San Salvador, El Salvador, where I spent some happy time as a delirious idealistic twentysomething.) They're staying with an art collector who hates having a child in her very expensive home, Dad's away most of the time doing whatever it is he does, he's alone and at loose ends, and the whole thing would be plenty unpleasant enough without the men in grey that seem to follow him everywhere he goes. Oh, and for some reason things tend to blow up whenever he's around. He makes a friend, a university librarian, and he's more or less gotten her convinced that the men in grey are real when they show up at the library. Hm, they're both more and less than they seem to be, and oddly enough they're not very nice guys. Much hilarity ensues.

Spellbinder is about what happens next.

I've always been a big fan of what happens next. Take Stephen King's The Shining, for example. At the end of the book (spoiler alert!) the psycho dad blows up the Overlook Hotel, killing himself and hopefully all the spooks. (Can you kill spooks? If you don't believe in them, do they go away?) Mom and kid are left alive, and what happens to them? Do they get arrested? How do they explain the blown-up hotel to its owners and insurance agents? (Hey, I'm an insurance defense paralegal, I wonder about these things.) Do they get sued? Probably not, since they don't have any money. How do they go on with their lives, knowing what they know about things that go AAAAAAAAAAAIGH!!!!! in the night? Steve doesn't tell us. He did a better job with IT, though he gave us (spoiler alert again!) a mournful future of forgetting all about everything that made our heroes what they are. Which sucks. Sorry, Big Steve.

Anyway, that's what Spellbinder is about. "Okay, we've been kidnapped, tortured, lied to, we watched friends die, learned about a sinister conspiracy, escaped and survived, so now what?" I'll probably post some of it here. It's going great guns. I seem to get into these periods of being hyperproductive-- right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant, oddly enough--when I can't hardly stop. I think I'm coming down from one of those as it were, but I still cranked out close on sixty pages in two weeks, which is pretty amazing. I was emailing chapters to my writing group because I didn't want to wait to read it all to them. Nice folks, the ones in my writing group. Heck, anyone who puts up with me is nice folks.