Our planet Earth was formed by an accretion of whatever matter happened to be nearby, all falling together over a period of giga-years. It collided, made a mess, and eventually settled out into something that could support life.

Giga-years.

I bet you can guess why I’m talking about this: my books come together in a similar way. I write a scene, and revise it over and over. And sure, each round involves smoothing out the text, but I’m also adding little things the story needs–tiny character moments, details that establish the “rules” of the setting, important scene setting, and often times it’s just little ways to slow down the pacing to make sure the action will have more impact.

This is a problem for me sometimes. People can easily recognize when a book is too slow, but when a book (or even just a scene within the book) is too fast, people rarely describe it that way. It’s much more likely for them to say “I didn’t care.”

This reminds me of a fight scene from a best-seller. The narrative off the fight was just a string of karate moves in detail. Reading it, I got that confused-puppy-headquirk. I didn’t recognize the names of some of the strikes and blocks and couldn’t picture them. The guy Our Hero was fighting was just a mook that I didn’t know or care about. I didn’t understand what the stakes were beyond a bloody nose.

Now, that sort of thing can work in a Bruce Lee movie where the physicality of a fight scene can be beautiful and thrilling to watch, but on the page it came to nothing. What works in text is not the play-by-play, it’s the color commentary.

My first drafts usually feel a bit stripped down, as I race through the narrative. It’s only in revisions that I look at things a second time and add in the important stuff: how it feels, what is means, why it’s frightening or embarrassing or just depressing, how it smells or tastes.

And that turns out to be a process of dropping text–sometimes long segments of text–into dialog or between paragraphs. It would take less time if I could do that in the first time around, but I can’t. I can only spend the time to do fix after fix after fix, because these first drafts really are not worth reading.

At least it doesn’t take giga-years.

Anyway, I’m making good progress.

Moving on, this is June, which means my actual birthday recently passed but the day I celebrate it is still in the future. Plus, Father’s Day. As a gift, I got a month’s worth of AppleTV so we can watch more Slow Horses, Severance, and other shows, too. FYI: The Gorge was a delight and I’m really looking forward to Widow’s Bay.

I wish I could pass on a book rec, but everything I’ve been reading has been a little off, for one reason or another. Maybe in July.

Thanks for reading. Talk to you next month, if I’m still alive.