In the midst of the Florence novel, stuck, I chose

to move my story (for the moment) into a new tense.  It was the only way for me to see the story new, to get the characters moving more quickly, to take a landscape and give it shape and meaning, to accelerate the plot.

Here, then, is where I have been since 5 AM, along the great wall of Fort Belvedere.  Four new paragraphs for the Florence novel, a book that I had left untouched for weeks.

We move ahead, in stolen time.