Being continued
The insidious nature of distraction occurred to me the other day as possible excuses piled up. I have a box from a friend that I referred to as my "retirement," in that it contained a gaming system and a dozen different games. When I used to open the box and look inside, I could see a future where I sat next to a television and let my brain make dazzling chemicals as I exercised my fingers.
A week at my new place, I finally opened the box and made that possible future a reality. It was as pleasant as I imagined.
Then came the time when I would normally write. The coffee shop seemed unappealing, even the notion of writing itself was strange and foreign. I wanted to play.
I'm happy to say that I did play, but only after I worked. I triumphed over that urge, but in leaping that hurdle I could better examine its dangerous nature.
But while I was thinking about that I came across another new notion: talking shop. It's been more than a year (by a smidgen) since my first book came out, and during that time I've come to realize even published authors, among published authors, exist in a hierarchy. I saw a contest, in fact, that was for "new authors" except, to those judges, that meant authors with less than four books. This didn't jibe with my reaction to people's question "How long have you been writing," because when I thought about it, the answer that always came to mind was "as long as I can remember." Yet, I'm still new.
Anyway, as I was meeting more and more people, I finally got around to discussion of sales, and the numbers of such. I was encouraged by some authors' responses and discouraged by others. As I had long ago intuited, it all came down to networking, but it was nice to have my assumption realized. The gap between the actual skill level of stitching together sentences and sentiments was not so distant from writer to writer, but the margin of networking was huge. Networking determined net worth, to a certain extent. Still, even knowing now what I have to do does not necessarily guarantee that I'll do it. That's how much I dislike it. But, what else is a person to do when they are in disagreement with the universe, but change?
Yet what I sat down this morning to write about is my new understanding of the power of names. As I said, this past weekend I did write, and it went well, but what I was most pleased with was some real headway in conceptualizing how I would change my fantasy series, what words I would change and why, to create the effect I had envisioned for it from the beginning. Just like that, I became newly invigorated, and now can power through the last few chapters and even lay the groundwork for a continuation (somewhat complexly, I've set out to use my initial trilogy as an introduction to an even larger cosmology and my hope is that in depth discussion of one world will account for my glossing over others when I mention what they are, how they are, etc.).
So today sees me dancing the dance of change again.
A week at my new place, I finally opened the box and made that possible future a reality. It was as pleasant as I imagined.
Then came the time when I would normally write. The coffee shop seemed unappealing, even the notion of writing itself was strange and foreign. I wanted to play.
I'm happy to say that I did play, but only after I worked. I triumphed over that urge, but in leaping that hurdle I could better examine its dangerous nature.
But while I was thinking about that I came across another new notion: talking shop. It's been more than a year (by a smidgen) since my first book came out, and during that time I've come to realize even published authors, among published authors, exist in a hierarchy. I saw a contest, in fact, that was for "new authors" except, to those judges, that meant authors with less than four books. This didn't jibe with my reaction to people's question "How long have you been writing," because when I thought about it, the answer that always came to mind was "as long as I can remember." Yet, I'm still new.
Anyway, as I was meeting more and more people, I finally got around to discussion of sales, and the numbers of such. I was encouraged by some authors' responses and discouraged by others. As I had long ago intuited, it all came down to networking, but it was nice to have my assumption realized. The gap between the actual skill level of stitching together sentences and sentiments was not so distant from writer to writer, but the margin of networking was huge. Networking determined net worth, to a certain extent. Still, even knowing now what I have to do does not necessarily guarantee that I'll do it. That's how much I dislike it. But, what else is a person to do when they are in disagreement with the universe, but change?
Yet what I sat down this morning to write about is my new understanding of the power of names. As I said, this past weekend I did write, and it went well, but what I was most pleased with was some real headway in conceptualizing how I would change my fantasy series, what words I would change and why, to create the effect I had envisioned for it from the beginning. Just like that, I became newly invigorated, and now can power through the last few chapters and even lay the groundwork for a continuation (somewhat complexly, I've set out to use my initial trilogy as an introduction to an even larger cosmology and my hope is that in depth discussion of one world will account for my glossing over others when I mention what they are, how they are, etc.).
So today sees me dancing the dance of change again.
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