As you can see from the progress bar, the draft for DESCENT is moving along steadily. I write faster the further I get into the book, and especially once I reach the last quarter, so I expect to be finished in another two weeks or so. Then it goes off to the developmental editor, and I get to move on to the next project while I wait for the marked-up draft to get back to me for changes.
In unrelated news, I had an experience the other day that definitely marks me as a child of a certain time. There was a song on the radio I hadn’t heard in a long time, one that was popular when I was a poor teenager who had to make his own mix tapes from the radio. This involved keeping the boom box in my bedroom ready with a blank tape, and hit the red button whenever a song came on I wanted to record. Invariably, the start and the finish of the song would be cut off because I had to tape over the yakking of the DJ, who would talk into the beginning and start talking again at the end.
It was strange because I hadn’t heard that song in at least twenty years, but I still remembered exactly where the song cut off on my mix tape. Then I realized that I could not only remember where the song ended, but also the song that came after it on the tape. I must have listened to those home-baked mix tapes on my knock-off walkman constantly for those associations to still be lodged in my memories almost forty years later…
