I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but I’ve been on a roll ever since I got home. I’ve gotten into this pattern where I wake up, novel 3 is already in my head, and I start writing even before I get out of bed. Two hours or so later, I’m still there, ravenous, but with another 1500 words or so written down. It’s just great. And I’m convinced that it works for me because this way I trick myself into writing. I’m not awake enough to start making excuses. It’s too early to find emails waiting that must be answered immediately. There are no distractions.  Bliss. Obviously, as recently as two years ago, I never would have been able to consider doing this. But now that 25 years of child rearing is behind me, my time is my own. One good thing about getting older…

But that’s not the point. The point is that because I’m half asleep when I get started I’m not driving myself crazy worrying about imagined complexities of style. You see, after all this time and all these words, I had somehow convinced myself that I could only write in 1st person.  Both of my novels are written that way, and I began to believe that I didn’t understand how to write in any other way.  Third person was escaping me. Whenever I thought about writing in 3rd person I stopped myself and said, “Wait a minute. Who is this person telling this story? Why should I believe her? Or is it a him? Where does he/she live? What did he/she have for breakfast?”  I am so concerned with creating characters that I couldn’t stop myself from feeling that my narrator needed to be a character, too. Now, of course, sometimes he does. But not always and yesterday, without stopping to obsess about it, I just started doing it. I started writing in 3rd person, that person being, I guess, Sue Guiney, and sometimes I would look through the eyes of one character, sometimes another, but I never used anyone else’s voice except, well, I guess, my own. And it seems to be working. I feel like a skiier who’s finally learned how to make turns. Sometimes I can write one way, sometimes another. It’s great, especially because I think novel 3 needs to have alternating voices. Deborah from A Clash of Innocents will sometimes be there giving her commentary. But she won’t be there to actually witness the action and so the plot has to be told in some other way — 3rd person! Oh, the joys of not thinking to much….