The end of a rough draft.

The last 10,000 or so words have been like pulling teeth as I try to navigate a couple of fight scenes, a magical healing scene that goes beyond the healer's former capabilities, a couple of hostage situations, wrap up subplots, and realize I need to make certain subplots and characters and themes more prominent.

So now there's a rough draft and I will let it sit and stew for a bit before making major revisions. My critique partners have already been reading and critiquing, so I should probably add their changes in before getting it out of my head too much.

I have a side project I started a bit before and abandoned, and lately ideas for it have been popping back into my head, asking me to tell that story again.

Collaborative fiction (third grade boy style)

T is my eight-year-old and W is another third-grader and son of a friend of mine, who drove them on a field trip:

"Then he and W and another boy, G, told a long saga about Big Pitts ( an enormously fat man who puts apples in his armpits and shoots them at others) and Giant Kung Fu Banana Slug Guy. G dropped out of the narrative task early on, but T and W kept the saga going for miles and miles, cracking up G and themselves. At one point, when it was T's turn, he began narrating, in a serious voice, "There was a lot of farting going on in the city. "
It turns out that Big Pits does not, as I suggested, own an orchard. Big Pitts buys the apples. he is a millionaire. he makes his money eating beans and selling his flatuence for greenhouse gasses. No lie."