I start over.
For every other McKenna book, I've been able to get probably 30- 50 pages done a day. Because it's been already there, written out on these yellow tablets in long-hand, waiting for years either in my attic or basement for the day when I would pull them out and put them into cyber-space somewhere. With a little tweaking.
Now, I am moving the way it took me when I was first writing them. Some days I get 5 pages. Some days, I hardly get a paragraph. Today, looks like none at all. Which doesn't mean I'm not working on it.
I guess everybody who has a passion thinks about it most of the time. Cooking or painting or motorcycles or puppies....it's on your mind. I write in my head long, long before anything gets on paper. Or whatever. I'm having conversations with Carrie and Max, with Dakota and Schuyler and Boone all the time. I feel out what's happening with them, what might happen, what should happen, what they would do.
It all simmers in there for awhile. You can't hurry this stuff.
Then...pow!...it explodes in a phrase, or a scene, or a feeling from one character or the other. And it all bubbles up together. How did these characters get to this place? Where are they going after this? The story works backwards, then forward again. And the story comes about.
It usually took me about 9 months to write and then rewrite a book. Like creating a baby, I guess. Strange but true. So, one book a year would be a sensible conclusion. Compared to what I've been able to put out...one about every 2 months...it's going to seem like forever. But, that's how it's going to be.
I don't know where the McKennas will go from 1948. That's where I am now. I'm not sure about the Korean War. I can't even consider Viet Nam. I said from the get-go that I can't write about Viet Nam. That was my generation's war. I still can't watch documentaries about it. Will they go to that war? I don't know.
But, after all, I really have very little to do with writing these books. They came into my head, bubbled around and around until I couldn't stand it, then poured out through my pen one long night at the end of '72. The next story came over Russian tea and olives by the light of a kerosene lamp during an ice storm in January of '73. Roger and I got married in June of that year. There's been a LOT of water under the bridge since then.
And those stories just kept bubbling. I didn't conjure them up; they simmered around and birthed themselves. Or God did it. I always thought that He gave me writing about these people as a retreat so I could do the work He had for me to do. The McKennas were necessary to me.
They still are, I suppose. Even now as we have our last adopted child 4 years from adulthood, after 41 years of kids, even now, I feel that bubbling in my spirit that says: Write.
So I am....
Just take it easy, Heidi....it'll get there.