Last week I wrote 1791 words, for a total of 37,580 on this novel so far. That puts me roughly half-way through the book, and I decided to take a short break to read through what I’ve written so far. I need to consolidate my thoughts and figure out how to bring things together going into the book’s end game, and I’m sure there are lots of hints sprinkled through what I’ve already written.

So I may get back to writing this week, or it may be next, but I’m taking the time to re-read and then brainstorm on several issues where I’m not sure how to proceed.

When I do this sort of brainstorming work, I like to use the techniques described in Gabriele Lusser Rico’s Writing the Natural Way. My copy of this book is so old that it’s falling apart. It describes how to create a conceptual web, drawing out and clustering your random thoughts. This continues until you hit what Rico calls the “trial-web shift”, where you get at last a vision of how your thoughts connect and what you need to write.

It all sounds a little looney described that way, but I’ve found that in practice it works well to bring together my thoughts, which all too often are disorganized and only weakly connected. That’s the plan for this week anyway. Fingers crossed that this all goes well.