Actually writing, yay! I guess there are advantages to waking up in the dead of night. Quickly revised Part I again, looking at Sunita and Dawn's notes, making sure all the Toms got changed to Tims, the Jesuses to Juans, the Tim/Tad to Ron/Ray, and adding Gabriel's sister, Leah. 'Cause there was no good reason to make Gabriel an only child, and I realized that it could be useful, his having a sister, several years older than him, who had married young, had several kids, and moved to live on a kibbutz in Israel. It would explain some things. My only difficulty is that Leah can't be there for their mother's funeral, since I want that scene alone with Gabriel and his father. But if she's sufficiently pregnant again, then she wouldn't be allowed to fly, so I think that works out okay.
I don't know if I've mentioned how much I appreciate and rely on reader comments. Sometimes to catch errors, but sometimes just to tell me what they like. One reader wrote: "I'm very pulled along by this story. You've set up a very fragile house of cards and then you keep pushing at it in a kind
of weird Jenga. I like that there are reasons for the characters being stupid. For keeping secrets. Reasonable ways to misunderstand a situation..." That's the sort of thing that makes a writer happy, when someone gets what she's trying to do.
The making-stuff-up part is also fun. On to Part II. DayQuil is my friend.
