I wrote 500 words yesterday. Combined with the 800 I still owe from last week, that put me 4900 words behind. 4900 words divided among the 13 writing days remaining in January is 374 per day; round it up, and I’m at +400, or 5100 for today. A quota I did manage to hit today, albeit around 11:30 pm. We’ll see if I can continue to do this.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a marriage proposal before. It makes me feel a lot worse about what Esker and Hasina are going to go through. Actually, I’ll have to get through most of that tomorrow… once I figure out how to get Esker out of the Tungsten Kid’s camp alive.
Speaking of which, Chapter 5 has burst the confines of the beats like a Scott/Giger alien out of its host. I’d never planned a meeting with the Kid, never planned any of Esker’s doomed subterfuge—never planned that he might actually abandon his friends (forget the Epseris brothers) if he could just get the Kid’s permission to search for the voice-crystal and nothing else. It all makes so much sense, and the fact that it’s shoehorning in Mayet’s revenge plan that collapses the whole lie—or, rather, that makes it a lie; the rest of it is pure truth—seems to fit in a way I can’t quite get my head around yet. I like this a lot better than what I had planned. But I need to figure out what I’m going to get back to. There has to be some kind of showdown moment in Chapter 7. And, actually, since Esker’s trick has failed, it could be rather similar to the one in the beats. I guess we’ll see.
I think there are spots where I forget that Jaidari women (well, not all Jaidari women) are mute but not deaf, and Esker uses sign for no particular reason. At some point I should think about what it might mean, when he does and when he doesn’t. I think of using it as a little more intimate, extending himself into Iseret or Hasina or Mayet’s world; using vocal speech is a little more retrograde, a conventional mode of male-female interaction in this society, and one that highlights the asymmetries of the relationship.
Need sleep. No more.