Ten free days to write the ending of "Lucifer's Forge." I worked Sunday, so Cameron offered to work Thursday.

Todd has an art show on Art Hop Friday downtown, so he'll be home setting that up. He'll be showing his lumberjack animal paintings and robot critters and they're amazing, so I encourage everyone to come see them!

When I finish the book, I'm first going to fix the timeline, and adjust the sequence of chapters accordingly. Then I'm going to go and fix whatever else is a discrepancy.

Then I'm going to start reading all the books about firefighting I can, and make that part of the book as accurate as possible. (Fire porn.) My intention is to read "Young Men and Fire" by Norman Maclean and soak up the feelings and then try to transfer those feelings to my first chapter, where a similar event takes place.

The more telling detail I can put in the book, the better. I suppose I could overdo it, but I can always tone it down in the re-write.

After the research, I will do a thorough rewrite, taking the time to do it right.  

I'll have to make a decision when I'm finished about what to do with it.

If I publish a book that I think is good by myself and it sells only five copies, will that be OK? I mean, I'll KNOW it's a good book, and sales are not a reflection of quality. So I do this thing where I know that I've done something really good but only I know it and there is a certain subversive pleasure in that. (Weird, this hiding my light under a bushel.)

In a way, I think of the store. I knew how much work and effort and creativity I was expending on the store and no one else did, except maybe Linda. And it was mostly a struggle, all the work seeming to be for naught, and yet I knew that I was Ginger Rogers dancing backward in high heels and there was a satisfaction knowing that. (A comic store in Bend, Oregon is Ginger.)

Plus it will be pure. That is, the Horror market probably won't be interested in it, but to get to a market that would be interested, I'd have to try to get an agent, and then--I'm guessing--compromise with either an agent or publisher, plus at the bare minimum, wait for a couple of years for this book to come out.

So I write a good book and I put it out there and let it speak for itself.

Except--unlike the store where all those years of effort finally paid off--I have very little confidence that the same thing will happen to my book. An ignored book remains an ignored book--no matter how good it is.

That's just the way it is.