No, these are not rattlesnakes. They are garter snakes. But you get the idea.

Dream a couple  nights ago.

Rattlesnake infestation.

But I was handling it, in typical “made sense at the time” dream logic: I was picking them up (no, not with my hands! with a stick!) and . . . putting them into books.

Large, thick books, they were, with the pages partially scooped out in the middle. Plenty heavy enough to contain a rattlesnake.

And as it happens, I’m editing Loose Dog — and one of the things I’m doing is fleshing out a couple of the characters a bit more.

Which means I’m making them more human.

Which means I’m showing a bit more of how slithery they can be.

Get into the book, you slithery character, you ;-)

Incidentally, I’m also working on the plotting.

I can show that here without the use of random nature photos, because I use stickies to help me visualize the relationship between plots and subplots.

Here’s what the book looked like a couple weeks ago.

I’d front-loaded the backstory about my protag’s relationship with her ex-fiance (blue stickies on the left). Decided that didn’t work — gave away too much too early.

Another weakness in the plot was that too much of my main counterplot (protag breaks up a dog fighting ring) was clumped at the end (orange stickies on the far right).

Here’s how it looks now.

So.

More slither.

Plot a bit more mixed up.

Progress, I think . . .