Eleven pages seems to be comfortable to me. It feels like not very much, but most days, it’s where things settle out. Today, eleven pages took three hours, though those hours were broken up with laundry, making baked beans and some staring out the window. Plus, I figured out some things about Dacey Brown. It’s amazing how I feel like I know these characters so well, have lived with them inside my head for two or three years now, have been all up in their business for weeks–and still can have these flashes of OHHHHH, THAT’S WHY SHE’S LIKE THAT. And that often those flashes come not while I’m actually at the desk writing, but while I’m doing some terrifically mundane task, like taking the laundry basket down to the basement. Zing, Dacey Brown does this because of that. Zonk, here’s how Lansing Meadows and Evan Cornfield end up in the States. Zap, something’s gotta go wrong to bring them together, and here’s what it’s gonna be.

It makes it all very crowded and noisy inside my head pretty much all the time, but I guess that’s why it’s good to have a couple months off work to just do this. Because it makes you temporarily insane.