Books are peculiar creatures. No two write alike…and it’s rarely straight forward.

I’ve limped along since May or June on this book. It flew at first. Then—I swear it was two sentences. Break. Two sentences. Break. Erase two sentences. Write three. Break.

That has been the progress for two months. Enough to make a writer tear her hair out. Usually I’d think I was distracted. Well, there was A-Kon, that trip south…after which things began to go like this. But it’s not as if I don’t sort of know where the book is going. What’s the matter with my focus, eh? I pride myself on being able to focus down and get to it. Nothing’s going on in the house, really? Tranquility and pretty good weather. Walking for exercise. Gardening. Tending the pond.

I tried writing just one viewpoint in the set and leaving out the other, just to maintain continuity, to go back and write the other viewpoint as a sequence and then shuffle them into proper order later. With attendant rewrite to trim up loose ends.

Two sentences. Break. Two more sentences. Break.

Well, damn.

Then, all of a sudden, I decided to do the forbidden. Vault over the stuck spots. Write the denouement.

Part way through it I start flipping back and adding bits to scenes all through the book. Revelations start spilling every which way.

So I just write this book backwards. Sort of. I got only part of the way through the denouement before I decided it was time to go back to the beginning and write forward knowing what I know now.

Ah, the blissful expectations of the novice writer of old, who would sit down to the keyboard and envision doing a clean outline and just writing straight through to the end.

I’ve had that happen a couple of times. A couple…in how many years?