Deal with the Devil...

OK, I just have to blog about this meeting I just had.

I just met with my brilliant writing-partner, who always knows the right things to say.

So, I say to her:

"You know that I have just about 50,000 good words, and another 10,000 or weak ones I have discarded in December. And I need 80,000 words to enter the competition we agree on. And I won't quit. So I'm a little panicky right now, and a little depressed about it."

And she says: "You already have 20-30,000 words of a novel that needs to be written. You already have a novel between the lines. You can easily write those by September."

And then I take her feedback on two stories-two chapters, and get back into my "perpetual latte-making" office, and the words pour down! She was right. With a little bit of guidance on what's missing in the novel, I'm expanding on chapters pretty quickly actually.

Now, it's tiring. It's intense. But what job worth anything isn't?!

I also love her telling me that "I have chosen to go for the Boston marathon, not the Cherry Blossom 5K," by picking to work on my book to expand it in every direction over picking to publish it the way it is.
"You want a million-dollar book deal," she says. "So do I."

And there's nothing wrong with that. Right?

And only now am I realizing that I made a deal with "the devil." I can't really focus on anything else but this book for the next six, seven months.
Not if I want to do it right this time.
It's now or never, it really is.

Not only has my writing-partner given me ideas on how to expand my chapters, but also what new chapters to write.

So, I sat down a few hours ago, with this Golden-Grip gun chapter I have been working on for the last couple of weeks, and it's like a puzzle I MUST solve, it MUST be perfect, it just has to be.
And all of a sudden, I'm researching World War I, and the battles between Serbs and Croats in it, and the gun ends up being a gift to my character's great grandfather from the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand just before he was killed by the Black Hand. And, oh, history blends with fiction, and politics, and superstition, and magical realism...
It's just blowing my mind, where it's going, and it only needed a gentle push...

It's gonna be a great book, I promise you, no false modesty here needed. I can already see it. It will kill me to create it but once it's born, it's gonna be a great read.