I shouldn’t have stayed up this late, but I couldn’t stop in the middle of either of those scenes.

I’ve passed the halfway point in the novel. It came just shy of 60K — I’m at 60,210 right now — which might or might not be precisely half the wordcount; I think not. It’s probably about three-quarters of the way through Act Three. But it’s the point at which the novel pivots, at which it stops moving away from the beginning and starts moving toward the end.

Things went boom, as one might expect.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Technically I wrote the crucial moment a month ago, on my way back from London, but it wasn’t real until it went into the novel. Now all the stuff that created this situation will start to come out. Now the depth of backstory — the reason I’m writing this novel — will become apparent.

Now my characters are scroooooowed.

It seems the right place to leave them for tonight.

Authorial sadism: All of it, of course. But the “forgive me” lines are the ones that hurt the most.

LBR quota: Love led to blood. As it so often does.