Weekly observation: Russian dolls are so full of themselves, aren’t they?

Election day’s just around the corner, but even after it’s all over, you can still vote on my Story of the Week. See the convenient link located at the bottom of the story. A prompt donated by fellow writer Michael Latta inspired this week’s tale. Thanks, Mike!

Here’s the story.

They Went Right For The Juggler

Victor was a passionate romantic who loved his wife—almost as much as he loved his two current girlfriends.

When they found out he was married, Number One demanded a new car for her silence; Number Two, a furnished condo.

Now working two jobs to pay off his blackmailers, Victor had neither the time nor energy for any women.

Once his wife discovered the affairs, she divorced him—right after telling the first lover about the second.

His ex got the house.

His girlfriends got each other.

Victor got a tent under the freeway—and an unwanted romantic visit from Bubba.

Prompt: Cheaters Never Prosper

Novel News & Notes:

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, these graphs of my progress on Questionable Characters (my first novel) pretty much tell the story. The bar graph on the top shows a mostly steady climb in terms of my overall progress until you reach the middle of the graph where everything mysteriously flatlines. That would be when Covid gently suggested I take a break. My “productivity” during that hiatus is even clearer in the bottom graph where the daily word count shows four days of zero words in early October when I went dark.

Now let’s talk about the good stuff. You might call it a problem. I see it as an opportunity or perhaps an embarrassment of riches. In terms of my target, with 203 pages and approximately 49,600 words written, I’ve passed what should be the halfway point of the book. I say should be because I’m not looking to write 100,000 words. Ideally, I think I’d like the book to come in at around 80,000-85,000 (somewhere around 350 pages).

My problem—oops, I mean that opportunity I spoke of, refers to the fact that I haven’t reached the middle of my story according to my outline. I have several story beats (what you civilians might call “scenes”) that I haven’t written yet, so even though the page and word counts tell me I’ve reached the midpoint, my outline says otherwise. And I need to get to the midpoint soon, since that’s where everything takes an unexpected turn.

In the meantime, while I’m actively looking for entire beats to cut, I’m not stressing too badly over it—yet. Better to have too much than not enough, right?

Time to get back to it.

Thanks for listening.

Scotty out