Pressure!

My second-favorite Quaker joke:  There was a Quaker who found a burglar in his living room at 3 a.m. Hoisting his double-barrel 12-gauge at the man, he said, “Friend, I mean thee no harm, but thou art standing where I am intending to shoot.”

A little setback on And Then You Dye.  I forgot to pay close attention to the three pages of notes at the end of the ms copy I got from my editor.  I’d glanced at them and they all seemed to be minor – but now: Uh-oh.  Why don’t we move this scene back up a couple of chapters?  And then this scene might be better in another place, like over here.  And so on and so on.  What I thought was a timeline set in stone is crumbling like a week-old cookie.  And right now the changes are not making any sense.  I have till Friday to make sense of them, make the changes, make the corrections to the text these changes will call for, and get the ms back to Berkley.  Headache City over here!

It doesn’t help that the other morning I woke up aware that a plot point in the next novel I’m plotting out is not right, it makes hash of the key turning point.  And while I think I have the solution, I don’t have time right now to address it.

I better have two cups of strong black tea this morning