Where did these 20K words come from?

I don't know what happened. I think that one of the long pieces was missing from the master document -- it certainly was just now when I was nosing around to check continuity and correct the timetable -- but Afterwar, with two chunks left to complete, is at 87679 words, which is well inside my comfort zone. Previously I thought I was going to be lucky to come in at 70K, which is the bottom of my comfort zone for this kind of book. I don't want it to be much longer than 90=92K, though, because it does some wonky things with the timeline and I think it's a burden to read wonky books that are very long.

I have never written anything so out of order and jumping around in my life. I have gone back and changed things radically, or added and subtracted things, but this book is entirely crazy-quilt in process. This is true of the chronological order as well as the process order, and the one might be the cause of the other. At first I thought I was doing two straight linear timelines, one in Pablo and Resi's childhoods and one in their adulthoods, but at some point last year it hit me that I wanted the three longer pieces, the adult ones, to go A-C-B instead of A-B-C. A being the segment in which the two men meet as adults, B the segment in which they more or less become friends and also meet the women they'll spend their lives with, and C being the segment in which they are both involved in a labor dispute,and both of them take unaccustomed risks to resolve it. I just thought that the B segment was more like a conclusion.

And now I have a segment at the end (which was originally the last one of the early timeline and the first time the two men meet in the flesh, though they don't know it, and I hope I'm not bludgeoning the reader too much with this) which takes place before A and which joins the two timelines together.

The early timeline does proceed in a linear, chronological fashion, in a series of much shorter segments, the last of which takes place only months before the new last segment. In a way, I guess, this ties the story together better, and explains how they came out the way they did.

You should read this man's journal

I hope he doesn't mind me doing this. The Urban Pantheist is just the sweetest livejournal there is. Jef rambles around Boston's environs and takes really good picture of urban organisms -- a lot of very handsome invasive weeds, some bugs, and a really nice series of a slime mold.

Unlike me, this guy knows what he's talking about, and when he asks for help identifying a species, it's not "I didn't get a good picture of this hawk -- is it a redtail like all the others or one of the other hawks we get sometimes?" like it is for me, it's "Which cranefly is this?"

Especially if you're back East you'll get a richer appreciation for what's happening in the cities by reading his journal. Even as a westerner, I recognize some of these species and I definitely recognize the issues and the patterns.

And he has dogs. And hates Ronald Reagan for his tree remark. ("if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all" -- which is not nearly true, even though they are all clones -- there's tremendous diversity in a redwood grove, and even within one crown that all looks like it's clones of an original, vanished tree in the middle, members of the crown can be clones of trees a long ways away. And, at the big native plants nursery, there's named varieties -- named for places in my area, mostly. I guess we have prettier trees than the North Coast!)

On another note, somewhat related: the baby redtail at Lighthouse Field has gotten big enough that its fuzzy little head can be seen poking up from his nest at the top of the tallest snag in the field (which is really really tall -- the Monterey cypress which is famous for being kind of small and gnarly grows pretty tall when the coastal wind is not so strong). And I didn't even notice till Nadine pointed it out -- because I've been crawling on my belly trying to get comprehensible pictures of the plants!

For example, white flowers always elude me -- this is watercress growing on the cliff at Its Beach, across the street from Lighthouse Field. See how the features of the flowers are largely wiped out in glare? This is one of my best results, and I got it by setting the camera to "snow scene" which works this much better than the "white flower" setting.