One of the things I love best about writing is when I reach a point with a troublesome scene that its potential, its true shape, begins to emerge, and it stops being something I’m struggling with and starts being something I’m excited about.

The turning point scene reached that point today. It still needs a lot of work — there’s a lot of unnecessary detail in the opening and the center doesn’t rise to a high enough peak — but now I know that. That means I know what to do.

I need to figure out what’s necessary in the opening — what do I want it to say? There’s a transition involved, but I always make too much of those, tying myself in knots when all I really need to say is, “Eleven days after their meeting…”

I also need to let my contained, careful characters flip out. They’re both faced with earth-shattering information; it’s weird that they’re not flipping out. Especially since they start to. I just need to let them keep going and stop containing them.

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I haven’t talked about what I’m reading in ages. It’s not that I’m not reading — I’d stop writing first — it’s more that every time I think of trying to explain what the current book is about, I get overwhelmed. It’s surprisingly difficult to summarize books, especially when you’re trying not to do the book a disservice, while also attempting to make sense.

Right now, I’m about a quarter of the way through Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden. I’m enjoying it but not loving it, and not loving it simply because it’s not written to my particular tastes. Which is to say that not being lovable to me isn’t a flaw in the book but a matter of failed reader/writer chemistry. I don’t wish the book to be other than it is, just because it’s not unlocking my deepest responses. When that happens, it’s magic; you can’t blame a book when the magic doesn’t work, you just love the ones when it does.

The book is about Cassandra and her grandmother Nell. In 1913, when Nell was four years old, she was found, abandoned, on a dock in Australia. She was brought home by the dock master while they waited for someone to come in search of her; when no one did, the dockmaster and his wife adopted Nell. In 1930, when Nell is 21, her ‘father’ tells her the truth, shattering her world. Nell is never the same.

75 years later, Nell dies, leaving a cottage in Cornwall to Cassandra. Nell had never told Cassandra about the cottage, or the truth of her mysterious parentage. Cassandra journeys to England to see the cottage before deciding what to do with it, and to follow her grandmother’s footsteps in trying to unravel the mystery of mystery of Nell’s parentage.

That’s a very simplified synopsis; it doesn’t begin to touch on Nell’s relationship to Eliza Makepeace, a woman who wrote fairy tales in the early part of the 20th century. I know that I’m reading this for the mystery of who Nell is and why she was on the ship to Australia in the first place, and for what happened to Eliza, who apparently dropped off the face of the earth around the time Nell turned up in Australia. The book has made me curious, and curiosity is something I have no shortage of. I’m resisting the urge to flip to the end and find out what happened; I know if I do that, I won’t finish the book. It won’t be the end of the world if I don’t, but it feels like cheating, somehow.