In my latest blog post on Birthing the Next Book, I talk about how I’m behind on my word count deadline, but what I want to point out here is a couple of fun thoughts about the excerpt I decided to include for the day.

The writer in 4B did owe Jo a favor for beta reading the tacky romance novel he’d finished last month. Sanjay would count it as her owing him a favor, rather than as payment of his, but he was an agoraphobic who never set foot outside his door so at least he’d be available regardless of when Avril stopped by.

As I was writing the section you can read a bit of by clicking the quote above, there were three threads unrelated to Cry Baby Cry that made their way into the scene. The first was, that when I was trying to decide which neighbor Jo was going to leave her key with, I almost decided to use Calvin Ringenberger, who is a character that actually only shows up (I think) in an unrelated short story I wrote about Jo a long time ago. Instead, I decided to create a writer so it would be someone who would most likely be home all day.

Once that happened, it just naturally followed that I would add the bit about Jo doing a beta reading for him, since I’ve been thinking lately about calling for beta readers for Cry Baby Cry, which is not a tacky romance novel (not tacky at all, hopefully) but anyone who does read for me is seriously in my debt anytime they want to collect.

The third thread to mention is that I’ve decided that Jo needs to go downstate for this part of the novel, and when she does, she is seriously treading on the territory of my Deb Donahue books. My split personality is going wacky over that.