His progress with writing the story was slow.
He knew it was going to be a large book when he started. At this point, chapter six was beginning to take shape. Thinking back, his first chapter had not gone well. It had been a lot of boring background stuff, so, he had deleted it. When he read through the second chapter, although it gave more information about the where and the when, this too was pretty humdrum. He decided that he could do without it. Chapter three wasn’t much better. It went into a lot of mind-numbing description about the building. This also ended up in the bin.
Chapter four didn’t add anything to the action. It had gone on and on about the four men and what had brought them there. Reading back through it he had found it all very tedious. Details about getting their hands on the required floor plans and how they managed to acquire the various components they needed to build the explosive device was uninteresting to say the least. It had to go.
The build-up of how they broke in and made their way to the basement, in chapter five, made tiresome reading. The account of how they carried out the wiring made dull reading, and the narrative dealing with how nervous they were all getting, became pretty dreary after the first few paragraphs.
Meanwhile, chapter six was going nicely and it was pretty straightforward. He felt he was finally getting to the essence of it. After all, the bomb had gone off prematurely and they all died. That’s all there was to it, really.
There’s a lot to be said for short stories.