Chapter Nine

of "Confessions" is complete, about halfway between the 55k and 56k marks. It's a little on the short side - 5,000 words as opposed to the 6-7k average per chapter thus far - but in spite of the brevity there's a lot going on inside (or maybe it's because there's a lot of action in the narrative that this chapter is so short). I'm excited about how it turned out. Up until this point the novel has been an tease, with a series of forays into the big bad world that for all their danger have brought my protagonist back to where he started unscathed, more or less, time and time again; Chapter Nine ends this cycle of happy returns. I really don't want to elaborate, since the people who take the time to read this blog are also the people who will be most interest in reading "Confessions" once I've finished it. So let it suffice to say now that I feel I've reached the tipping point of this novel, as I inevitably have with my short stories when I'm more than halfway to the end. Something important has given way with this chapter, and I'm feeling that familiar thrill of downward momentum at last, now that the hill has been crested.

Woo-hoo!