Pecking away at my sequel novel tonight, and just finished the chapter which, according to my Draft Zero, marks the one-third-of-the-way mark. This is where it starts to get exciting, at least for this work in progress.

I’ve always liked the idea of a spy thriller opening with a bang. This is sometimes known as the “Opening Gambit,” wherein the hero has some quick, exciting adventure or action sequence that somehow relates to the rest of the story, and often helps set it up. The James Bond films are notorious for this. The part before the title and music sequence is the “opening gambit,” and it’s often very good.

And then the necessary lull. You can’t just have ACTION ACTION ACTION all the way through. The audience has to occasionally catch their breath. They need to learn about what just happened and understand why it will matter going forward. And maybe, just maybe, a little bit of character development is in order.

But at some point, inevitably … tick tick tick tick … BANG! And it’s off to the races again. It’s a little bit of dance, bridging the gap between adrenaline bursts. Those rests have to be there, but they can’t go too long, and they need to be stimulating in some other way.

For a smart action hero, like the one I’m writing, it’s his thought processes and the emotional heights and depths that do the trick. When it isn’t time to make the reader’s pulse pound, the idea is to tickle a their neurons or tug on their heartstrings. The dance continues until, as the story finally approaches the end, the goal is to do all three at once.

Tonight, I’m just excited knowing that for the next little while, it’s adrenaline time. The kind of stuff that, as I’m writing it, I absent-mindedly roll my sleeves up. Wouldn’t want to get blood on them, you know?

When I was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, that’s what we called the doctoral level courses that weren’t really courses. Every semester, a supported graduate student was supposed to be registered for 36 units, i.e. 3 classes, but toward the end of the program we’d just be working on our dissertations, sometimes not talking any actual classes. “Reading and Research” was the fill-in term for “I’ve gone beyond coursework and am doing my own thing now.”

Ironically, I’m doing a lot more research as an author than I ever did as a grad student. And it’s more fun, honestly, probably because there is no pressure to impress the resident experts. I can just learn for my own enjoyment and betterment, and to hopefully make better art.

Lately, I’ve been bugging knowledgeable chemists and environmental activists about certain topics organic chemistry. Without giving away spoilers, let’s just say that the villains in my second novel have nefarious plans that involve hazardous materials.

Research for writing is different than scientific research, thankfully. If I were a chemistry student, I would be completely absorbed in these topics, trying to become an expert. But as a writer, my task is easier. I only have to sound like an expert, and only for a few pages.

The measure for whether I’ve done enough research: I want chemists who read the book to not shake their heads at how far off I am, and I want everyone else to wonder if maybe I’m an actual chemist.

The other topic I’m trying to research is Seneca traditions surrounding death and the dying. One of the new heroes in the book is a Seneca woman who is a local science teacher and old friend of the main character’s family, and I suspect she and her family will be fan favorites down the road.

It turns out this is a more difficult topic to research, as every indigenous person I’ve asked has been reluctant to talk to me about it, some of them totally ghosting me upon realizing I’m not indigenous. I guess they don’t trust me to portray things positively and accurately, or maybe would prefer I not write about them at all.

That won’t stop me, of course. It’s ridiculous to suggest you have to belong to a demographic to write about it or create a character from it. Imagine for a moment: Shakespeare being told he should only write stories about English people. Tom Clancy being told his novels are trash because he’s not Russian and shouldn’t write Russians.

Ironically, this only lays bare the importance of doing as much research as possible, as best as I can with whatever resources I can find. I may have to settle for reading a handful of online resources, but if that’s all I have to work with, then it’ll have to do.

It comes down to trusting myself, which is kind of how it always is in writing. Because I’m not an expert on writing, nor am I an expert in most of the topics I write about. I trust myself to fill in the blanks as much as I can with research. I trust my imagination to fill in the rest. I trust that my intent will be clear in the final result. And most importantly, I trust in my ability to spin all of that into a good story.

After a five week holiday hiatus, I return to my blog. They say everything in the publishing industry tends to slow down or stop for a while around the holidays. A much needed break for everyone. I was no exception.

I wouldn’t say I had a break, per se, but my writing did slow down for a while. It was a combination of family fun and obligations, the fact that I just happened to be at a difficult part of my work in progress, and just that end-of-the-year fatigue and ennui that besets us all. Another year gone. We made it. Happy New Year!

I’ve been doing a little reading lately, including a re-read of Neil Gaiman’s “Books of Magic.” I’m not a fan of the fantasy genre in general, but the master of any art is worth experiencing, and perhaps studying. Part 1 of 4 of that work, “The Invisible Labyrinth,” contains one of the best quick strolls through the history of the occult that I’ve seen. But it’s Part 3, “The Land of Summer’s Twilight,” that haunts my mind tonight.

That’s the part where the main character is taken on a tour of “Fairyland.” Whether it’s a Gaiman story, or Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” or any other attempts at magical fiction, the most important thing to remember when reading about faeries is that everything is a metaphor. Therein lies the power of such stories. Certain human truths are best explained in the language of metaphor.

It occurred to me the other day that writing books is my version of adventuring through Fairyland. One of the common tropes of these stories is the difference in the rate of time’s passage between magically-interlinked worlds. A year’s time in our world equates to the passing of centuries in Narnia, for example.

My first novel, Burn Card, takes place over the course of six days. From the beginning of my outlining and research, to the moment I typed THE END on the last page of my first draft, I had spent about 21 months. That’s about a 100-to-1 scaling of time, between the real world and the parallel universe I’ve created. Not time lost. Time well spent.

But quite a loss of time, when you think about it. My literary life is a burning fuse next to a ticking clock. A flower growing in a sunny grove within the deep dark woods. The song of passing geese amidst the howling of the eternal wind holding them aloft.

The most metaphory metaphor in the metaphoresque realm of metaphoriness. Pass the lemon sherbet, please.

And what’s most important — it was worth every moment spent.