It was a slow start to the writing day. I sat at the computer for hours, but couldn’t concentrate as the kids played and whined and questioned. Plus there was the distraction of staring at a bottle of pills, knowing that if I took the first one I was admitting to my age. Last year it was bifocals. Now it’s blood pressure medicine. Aging sucks. After reading the side effects over and over, and comparing those to how crappy I’ve been feeling, and contemplating dying of a stroke before I’m ready to check out, I finally took the damn pill.

Anyway, I only wrote about three pages all afternoon. That’s not going to help me meet my committment in the pact I made with Gayleen. Tonight, however, I ripped out about a dozen pages, putting me on page 168. (I set a goal of reaching page 225 by Friday, remember.) The chapter I just finished turned out to be an important one. All in all, I wrote 3,253 words today.

This book seems to be a lot more literary than the previous volumes of The Werewolf Saga. I have to make myself put in action scenes. There is too much talking. Fortunately, the book follows a huge cast of characters, so finding one who is actually doing something isn’t that hard. In this book, we learn about Fenris’s motivation in hunting and wanting to kill Joey. We find out whether or not Joey is the true Alpha. And, in the chapter I just finished, we find out there is another option besides the training prescribed by Ulrik and the solution wanted by Fenris. So, basically, there are now three factions wanting control of the Alpha werewolf.

There are also many allusions to other authors, such as Jack London, Robert E. Howard, Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc. I just hope all this doesn’t bore the pants off the few people who bother to read my books.

To see the other side of this Spring Break Pact, you can visit Gayleen’s blog, where she’s posting about her own progress. This is exactly what I needed. Maybe it’s the old journalist in me, unable to work until somebody is standing over my shoulder, pointing at a deadline.