The Ride Home by Liz Flaherty

One of the first articles I ever sold as a new writer was an article on the value of the ride home from work. I don't remember the title of the article or the examples used in it, but I do remember how important that 28 miles was in so many different areas of my life. Just lately, as I began doing battle with the last 10,000 words of my work-in-progress, I was reminded about the ride home. 

Summer of Sorrow and Dance is not a book that has come easily--although not very many of them do, do they?--and I'm so ready for it to be done. There's another one on the back burner whose flame is brighter, hotter, and looks like more fun. 

It used to be that 10K words was a week or so...maybe 10 days if the words were being argumentative or sticking in the keyboard's throat. It's not that way anymore, and I know I've got some time to put into Dinah's story before she's ready to finish telling it to me. But sometimes 10,000 words might as well be 100,000. They are just stuck. The black moment is meh, such a light gray it doesn't even show up on the planning wall. The plot point I want in Chapter Twelve should have been foreshadowed in Chapter Three and Chapter Seven, the conflict is laughable, and I have twice as many characters as I should. 

This is not a repeat blog post, by the way; however, I do still whine about the same things as I crawl through the last few chapters of every book. I also use the words I hate this book! complete with the exclamation point numerous times. I wonder whatever made me think I could be a writer. I must have been insane.

It's not true. I love the book. I love Dinah and Zach and the five children they have between them. I love Fallen Soldier, Pennsylvania, and Cooper Lake, which forms its edge before you get to the mountain road. I love that Captain Jason Benteen, a Vietnam vet, shows up in each of the three books in the Second Chances series. 

Last night, as I drove home from a writers' group meeting, I thought about the last 10,000 words and about Dinah and Zach, seeing them my mind's eye. I thought about how they've come to know each other, how one of them will sense the other's pain and the other is reluctant to accept help. I thought about the grief one of them is suffering and suffered it myself. 

What a gift to a writer the ride home is. While I didn't get home with the whole last 10K planned out, I filled in some gaps, found an aha moment or two, and darkened the gray of that culminating moment up a bit. I figured out how to tie up a few strings while leaving a few others fluttering a bit. Just in case I want to go back to Fallen Soldier sometime. I'll give that some thought later, on another ride home.