Okay! These are the last mice for now. I put the word "fin" in the script, and Gabriel replaced it with The End of The Beginning, which is good news for me because that means it won't take much coaxing to make him return to The Mouse Well. This is the sweet spot: an amount of coaxing situated somewhere between zero and one.
It was a nice change of pace that sorta warmed me up for book writin'. I have had to do things like this a couple times, both with the Precipice games and with… other things, other secret things, but the "process" of "writing" for me doesn't look like all the books I read with the expressed purpose of developing a process for writing. The only way I can make it work is like this:
I have to know all of the people who I want to talk to each other very, very well. Because this book is about Omin and Jim, in large part, these are people I know better than I know most real people. I can take them by the scruff of their necks and set them down wherever I want them to jabber. I'm also ridiculously certain of certain of life in the town where Omin grew up, having embroidered it down to the micron over the five years I ran Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team, which was essentially just me making people play through my OCs too elaborate backstory. There are a few other people who need to be rendered at a high degree of resolution, and so I've taken this opportunity to know them also, because I'm gonna need them at their best.
Setting this cognitive machine up is the hard part. Well, and its fragility is an issue. It can be wobbled like a late stage Jenga tower by an incursion from dogs or children. When I was playing Professor Layton, I found a way to make my brain a clean room like they have in processor manufacturing. This machine is up, it is in operation, and it took me too long to get here. If I thought being mad at myself would help me write faster I would indulge myself in it; as it stands, anything that doesn't put words on pages has to go.
(CW)TB out.
