…which it did this week, it’s good to have a partner to rely on. We had to make a couple of road trips, and as always we tried to use that time productively. It worked pretty well.

We’re also playing with index cards to debug the new plot. These aren’t the color-coded, character-specific rainbow cards, but no-shit index cards. By now we have a fairly long list of events that we want to include in the book. So we made a card for each one that we could recall off the tops of our heads and started laying them out in different configurations. It’s a quick way to look at what-ifs, and it’s a great exercise to do together. It just doesn’t work too well in the car.

It’s been a little bit of a challenge to unknot the middle portion of this plot, and it’s taking longer than we’d like. But it’d be much worse to discover these knots by writing our way up to them in prose. And with a partner, at least there’s someone to talk to out on the road.