Woot! Passed 300 pages!

Finished chapter 32; 56,766 word count

Writing Tip: In this passage, I did something I usually avoid. I like telling straight out tales, and I stick to that in most cases. But this chapter is a turning poin,t and I picked up the challenge of creating image within image.
The country is being invaded, and ordinary men are going to be called into extraordinary circumstances. One young man realizes this, and he contemplates the serenity of the moment he is presently in, knowing that all that is about to change. He picks two things from nature, a dried leaf and a handful of dirt, and looks more deeply into what they are. He doesn't vocalize any great metaphor, but in his analysis of what these things are, the reader should be able to make deep comparisons.
Now, a lot of readers will zip through these two pages and not bother to make the connections. That's okay. But perhaps some English teacher, somewhere , sometime, will torture a class into really thinking about dead leaves and decomposing stuff that makes dirt. And maybe some philosophical reader will mull over these things without the threat of a C- if he doesn't come up with something profound.