I’m what’s known as a plantser — I start a bare outline and fill it in as I write. I’m finding out more about Josh and Jeanne as I write, and they’re turning out to be quite the couple.
Josh is afraid of an intimate relationship, but not for the usual reasons. He believes in another world, a world of spirits, hidden (as he puts it) in plain sight. He feels these spirits, sees visions, dances among the unseen in aikido. If he opens up, he reveals that world inside him.
Jeanne, meanwhile, is afraid of herself. She has been repressing her own relationship to the hidden world, because it wars with her adoption of the logical world of research. What happens, then, if she finds out — or remembers — her true connection to the world of the plants she nurtures?
I’ve gotten to the point where Josh has spoken of the hidden world as a theoretical, a source of poetry, and Jeanne begins to examine the imagination that she left behind in her chemistry labs. It’s exciting to see them launch into the second part of the book, the part of mysteries.
Words Like Me 