saints & sinners

I had a great time with Elle last night. I took her out to Panera for dinner, and then we spent the evening watching a movie--Hitchcock's "To Catch A Thief"--and playing cards. Some game called Golf. I failed miserably. I promised to beat her next time, and I intend on keeping that promise. 

I've finished the rough draft of "Dwellers of the Night: Book One." I'm going to have a hard-copy professionally produced so that I can work my way through it with pens and highlighters, doing classic editing rather than digital editing, with which I tend to skip over things. This way I'll be able to pay closer attention. In the meantime I've started working on "Book Two," which introduces a plethora of other characters while drawing the plot to a cataclysmic conclusion which transcends Book Two and reaches into Book Three. The first chapter--entitled "Saints & Sinners"--sets a theme which will be reinforced again and again throughout the rest of the trilogy, the theme of what happens to humanity when rules and regulations are wrenched off the grid. Some people become saints, others become sinners. I enjoy writing about the "saints", but the "sinners"--those who become no more than animals--makes my stomach sick. While I was writing this chapter in 2008, I constantly considered deleting it altogether. Much of it is disturbing, and I'd rather not write it. But the twist in my gut eventually reaches a sort of refreshment when judgment follows swiftly upon the sinners (that sounds so archaically fundamentalist; I ensure I mean it in a literary fashion). Nevertheless, I am in the middle of redacting this chapter, and I am again encumbered with the disturbing nature of it all. It must be good writing if it disturbs the author, no? Anyways, the point is this: I can't wait to finish out the chapter and move on to the sweeter, more uplifting chapters. In the middle of it, I feel depressed, anxious, stressed, and downright nauseas at times.