The flat chickens worked.

Man, I was in a dark mood yesterday but thanks to two flat chickens (one lemon and garlic and one Smoky Texas BBQ) I’m better now.

I’d reached the point after six weeks of continual disruption where I was like, what is even the fucking point. There is zero chance I can get WW 3.3 out before Christmas. I can finish it, for sure. But December is Hell Month in all forms of publishing, indie, trad, magazine, books, whatever. If your stuff not read by about Dec 8, you don’t got no stuff. You got problems.

And for the last six weeks all I had was problems. One after another. Yesterday afternoon I was like, just let me have one fucking win, Lord. Just one.

And that was when I decided to fire up the Big Green Egg and cook me some fancy chickens. Flattened, flavoured chickens. One Greek, one Texan, which I picked up from the spendy butcher in Kenmore after dropping my mother home, aprés doctor visits.

I figured, I can’t finish this book like I said I would. I’m gonna kill myself getting a submission together for the next John Ringo book. Everything is going sideways, hard.

But by God I can slow cook a couple of flat fucking birds for dinner.

So I did. And it made such a difference, setting my mind to something and getting it done that I was able to get up today and restart 3.3.

Now, yes, it helped that the house wasn’t crawling with tradies. There was just one, in fact. An electrician this time. But he was done and gone by 9am. I also knew that I’d been so disconnected from the book by the hiatus that I couldn’t just pick it up again. I had to start over. So I did. Luckily there was a specific little job I could do. I’ve been writing it in character arcs. Writing Harry, then Julia, then Jones, etc. Which means I had to eventually shuffle all of those chapters like cards on a storyboard. And that’s what I did today. I read over the stuff I’d written in each arc and started to shuffle the cards, blocking out the final structure of the book.

It was surprising how much I’d forgotten.

Like, did you realise that Beria had ordered the 3rd Shock Army to reverse out of Germany to help put down a rebellion in Ukraine? I guess I knew that six weeks ago but I’d completely forgotten that I’d set it up as a plot point.

Stuff like that.

Anyway, long story short. My writing tip is flat chickens.