Morning Star Rising

78,997 / 150,000 (52.7%)

Well, a rather pathetic day yesterday. Why is that? It came to my attention a few days ago that the city I set most of the novel in is in fact a highly-excavated site and I'd never looked at it before writing the book. The city is so rarely mentioned in history texts so I thought it was a place known only through story and myth sources, but in fact it was a real city, and I spent several hours looking at pictures of it on the internet (and man is it freakin' awesome!) and even found it on Google Earth, complete with accompanying photographs to enhance the aerials. When I finally convince Jeff to take us to Mexico, I'm demanding to go to this site (Xochicalco). I wonder if I could talk him into it before I decide to start shopping this novel, which--since I imagined the city completely wrong and so will necessitate a third draft to fix that problem--could be a while now. I'd really love to see the ruins, particularly the carvings on the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, which are absolutely beautiful. I'd love to actually stand in the city my novel takes place in and get a feel for its dimensions and layout and imagine what it might have looked like back when it was still inhabited. After much debate, I decided to not stall the 2nd draft to go back and correct the city's details and instead intend to continue plowing through. I'm going to attempt to work in the new details from here on out, to lessen the work load later, but I'm going to save most of that until the third draft.

I'm not so sure how much I'm going to get done today either. I was up quite a bit last night, regretting McDonald's for dinner, so I'm exhausted this morning. Plus, Fiona has a vet appointment in about an hour and that will probably last about 45 minutes and it will take me a good half hour to get back home. Then I'll probably want to sleep. So I'm only counting on getting in an hour or two of writing today.