How's It Going?

​I’m lucky to have friends who are attentive and interested in my writing life.  Often I’m asked “how is the book coming?”  It would be easy to deflect and say “oh fine”.  I would then get the puzzled look because no one on the planet knows what “oh fine” means – it’s always in context.
Since people are kind enough and interested enough to ask I tell them the truth – whatever that may be.  My current answer is “slow” and then I explain that I’m just in the stage of reading and re-writing for story.  I always explain the difference between ‘re-writing’ and ‘editing’ and in most cases my friends didn’t realize there is a difference.
I am even further honest when I tell them how shocked I was the first time I read through the entire manuscript to discover that the first chapter didn’t have an inciting incident.  I don’t like to get wonky with friends but I’m always asked what an ‘inciting incident is’.  I relate it to their own reading experience of getting “hooked” or having a “page turner”.  I love the “oh” of understanding.
I recall the first reaction my best friend had when he finished Murphy’s Troubles: “How do you come up with all those words?  How many words does your book have?”
That question is more difficult to answer, isn’t it?  If we are truthful, the answer is:  “I really don’t know how I come up with all those words.”  The truth is, it is a mystery of our imagination.  I’ve always thought that what makes us unique as humans is our imagination.  We can imagine the future.  We can imagine something that doesn’t exist and then create it.
So, I think I will imagine my manuscript for Dead Reckoning transforming into a published book, then it will happen by some miraculous process.