Warmongers: Where are you going, where have you been?

This is a very very old missive from the past, the week of Apr 21, 2025, to be precise, because I was toying with the idea of writing more behind the scenes stuff. Feel free to step into the time capsule, and know that I am jogging along through a very different point in the narrative now, but having just as much fun (the ups and the downs of it, yes).

This week, I've been admittedly a bit busy. A lot of running around has kept me from getting as much on-the-page work as I would have liked. Friends in town, schedule changes, meetings, events. That's something for me to get a handle on, but I did try to get work done when and how I could. Part of that meant knowing what I needed to do so that I could come to the page with focus.

Last week, I had a lot of fun because I skipped ahead to write the first time our leads actually have sex, which may or may not have been under the influence of a prophetic hallucinogenic drug. Unfortunately, that left a gap and it wasn't a case of "writing the islands" where there's nothing in between that I'm enthusiastic about. I was--am?--very enthusiastic about what goes before the lesbian sex, I...just...didn't know what exactly it was.

In the end, I started my work day with the following list:

Basically, I tasked myself with finding the what, who, and where so that I could write the missing section.

As you can see, I have a check mark beneath where I note that I've done some character work for Kaz and Dyom, who are two of the side characters traveling with our MC, Díránghà.

After I did the character work, I had a better understanding of the who of the scene I needed to write, but still no sense of the what and I firmly hold that a sense of writing block is often a lack of knowledge. When I decided to jump ahead to the sex scene (*cough*), I left our quartet looking into the Hundaswat, a forest that I know is haunted, but have no real tangible grasp on the setting. Nothing sensual, nothing evocative. Nothing for the characters to physically relate and react to.

I also just finished reading Another Country by James Baldwin this week, which has so many long and lingering passages about its cities. I felt inspired. I thought spending time on setting, which is usually my last last phase before I ship a book to final, could open up more opportunities for the what. So instead of bashing my head against the what some more, I decided to look at the where.

Here's a little snippet from the notebook: