I finally finished the first chapter, after surmounting one little glitch.

Some of you might remember the bad-old days of computers. The days when crashes were frequent, and hours of work were lost forever. As rare as those occurrences are today, they still happen. Usually because of operator error. Often when that operator is distracted or disrupted and thinks she has saved hours worth of work, but hasn’t. Or when she has cut a passage, intending to paste and rework it somewhere else, but then gets engrossed in editing another section and cuts a different passage, thus losing the previously cut passage. Then she repeats this very bad behavior several times. Of course, all is not really lost. It’s retrievable through the magic “undo” arrow. But, that’s contingent upon the writer/editor being aware something needs to be undone before it’s lost in the maze of multiple edits.

However, with perseverance and a vague memory of what was written before, this little glitch was overcome and the first draft of the first chapter was completed. Hours after it should have been.

The first chapter ends with Father Francis awaiting Janelle’s arrival and wondering what exactly he’ll tell her.

“At the time, the series of confession hadn’t seemed unusual. They only became so in hindsight, and even now, he wasn’t sure that they were. A new context had changed his interpretation, and it was unclear to him which interpretation was correct. That’s what made it so difficult to know what, if anything, he should do.

For the last year, the young man’s words had been niggling in a corner of his mind, but he hadn’t felt pushed to do anything. Then last month, the reporter had called and asked to talk to him.

And he’d said yes.”

I’m sure before I jump into the second chapter, I’ll massage the first. But when I cut, I’ll paste it somewhere until I’m sure I want to delete it. And if I rephrase or reword, you better believe that I’ll be saving and saving often. And just to be on the extra safe side, I’ve saved what I’ve written so far on a thumb drive.

Now on to Chapter Two.