Thought-Drive

Recently, I had the opportunity to do a podcast. It's still being edited, I'm told, but I will not fail to post the link here, and in other places when it's done. My first thought after finishing it was that I will be much less critical of other interviewees in the future. It was a new experience for me, having a conversation and imagining an audience. I didn't think I would feel such pressure to make sense, to answer the questions, to be persuasive and inviting. I wish I could do it over again. I wish I had followed a much earlier thought and jotted down some notes. As it was all I thought to have with me was water. That I learned from the artist talk I did back in Februrary, how quickly I become dehydrated when speaking. At least, I understand where you're coming from, Senator. In other news, the fantasy novel has taken off. In the Wright brothers' sense. It's not touching the ground, but I don't know if anyone in the current era would quite call it...

I'm going to have to do something unpleasant to one of my characters. Well, that isn't entirely accurate, but I do have a lead on what has to happen next to improve the short story. It is a personal weakness of my craft that I struggle with writing less likable individuals. Evil, I can do, because I've always thought that evil depended almost entirely on perspective. One woman's trash, or treasure. Heroes can look a lot like villains depending the jersey the beholder is wearing. But for this story, for this character, to capture the perspective I am trying to highlight, I really need to make the narrator wrong-headed. Which is far afield of the person being unreliable. There can be some fun in unreliability. This will probably not be fun. And a particular weakness of mine is that I struggle moving forward with unpleasant tasks. Maybe that's why there was significant movement on the next novel idea. I woke up at midnight a week or so ago, and things all began fal...