Here, it only took me three hours of crawling around the back end of the wordpress plug-in directory to see if I could put up an audio sample of it on this blog.

I think it’s still easily buyable. And now, since I’m a media-uploading fiend, here’s what the cover looks like.

Anyway, the Bikram near-death experience is very instructive. I lie in savasana and think, “I am dead.” My whole life, I should just be getting ready to be dead: for instance, finally clearing out my folder of junk mail and important financial statements so that when I’m dead my loved ones won’t have to go through all that crap.

Most of the poses I am happy just to survive. But occasionally I get some additional nuance beyond just life and death. Standing Bow Pulling pose is the one I usually fall while trying to do, but now I like it because I think it’s the best one for writing.

The reason is, in order to achieve balance in the pose you have to charge your body forward (the instructors always say that: “charge” – like we’re the yoga cavalry) and kick back at the same time. If you don’t kick back as hard as you go forward, you fall. The importance of kicking back while you’re going forward made me think about my novel and how I really needed to think more about the forces of opposition within it (well, also, my editor may have mentioned something about that). For the story to work, my antagonist needs to be going just as strongly in his direction as my dear little protagonist goes in hers.

So I’ve been focusing on my antagonist and trying to get to the heart of a villainy that makes sense.

But I’m thinking about aeration issues and why you really do need to get in and mix things up every now and then because I am – of course – rewriting. And it’s night. And I’m not going to eat chocolate (which is how I got to the point of having written something that needs to be rewritten in the first place; sometimes people ask how I did it with kids, job, etc. etc. and the answer really is good dark chocolate.) When I’m stuck like this – going through the Word file for the umpteenth time, knowing the thing by heart – I end up doing tweaks. It gets down to word choice and punctuation. Useless. So tonight I’m going to move chunks around. I know I’ve needed to do it and I’ve been tweaking instead. But this seems exactly like the kind of pitchfork job I could do on a somewhat brain dead night like this. That is, not think about the language or anything tweakable, but just get stuff moved around and in place. Then I’ll have done the kind of manual labor, like aerating, that always makes me forget everything else while I’m doing it, and I’ll feel very virtuous afterward. Hopefully…

Now, I hate to write from an outline. And I absolutely hate to look at the page count and from there consider which plot point I’m headed toward. To me that makes writing feel like screenwriter hell – and it gives me bad flashbacks of a time when I tied myself in knots after too much time spent with Robert McKee’s Story and one particularly recalcitrant manuscript. But the strange truth is that stepping back and looking at plot at the right time in the process has totally changed things for me.

A previous draft ended with my dear protagonist bleeding to death, alone, in the back of a rental truck used for transporting illegal drugs and realizing that her brother has betrayed her. New ending? Dear protagonist is embraced in the bosom of her family, a wedding has everyone put aside their differences and realize how much they love each other, the love interest beckons.

I guess it’s the enduring influence of my grad school writing program that still gives me these night terrors about writing something that’s actually fun to write – and to read.