Making steady progress on DG3. I’m facing a couple of big, multi-charactered action scenes that trigger a deer in the headlights stupor. (Umm…for me, not the reader. Hopefully.)

The good—I wrote my favorite scene ever over the weekend. Is it my best? I don’t know. Hell, I don’t even know if it’s any good. But it’s my favorite. Chock full of Gallagher-ness and the scene in which Carmen tells him she loves him. Those “I love you” scenes are notoriously hard for me, and I have a tendency to swing between flat and cloyingly sweet. Such was the case with On the Edge. In the first go-round it was so flat I don’t even want to tell you what Angie thought of it. So I sweetened it up and ran it by Mandy. I think I went a little heavy-handed with the syrupy sugar because she claims she threw up in her mouth. I think she was lying because you can’t laugh hysterically at somebody while throwing up in your mouth. The final scene fell in the middle. Considering Carmen’s kind of an emotional hard-ass (I work in every freakin’ paragraph at keeping her from being cold), having this scene turn out the way it did is a huge high.

The bad—Still don’t have my callback line for the ending. While I don’t purposely set out to write it, I get increasingly antsy until I have it. Maybe that’s because as soon as it comes to me, the book is as good as written. From that point on, it’s just the fingers trying to keep up with the muse.

The ugly—Facing down this next action scene might kill me. I have to choreograph five Devlin Group agents who are in four different locations, a hostage and umpteen dozens of gun-toting guerillas. I might have to steal some Legos from the Short Kid to help me out.

And the “Oh crap! MOMMY!!!”—