Thought-Drive

Seems like that time of year again. My editor for the next release contacted me, and I was relieved at her thorough professionalism and evident experience. The people I've met thus far that are near my age I can count on one hand, but in every respect age does not equal expertise, or even experience. Writing seems to come and go with people, stay with them in their youth and then vanish, only to reappear again in the middle of life, perhaps after children. I made sure to at least ask for advice, and she was very nice, and shared with me some of her experiences and thoughts. And she thought the novel was "pretty solid" as well. "It was an interesting and exciting read... Overall, it reminds me of the King's Dark Tower series." Admittedly, I've never read the series in question (although I picked up the seventh book for super cheap, and at one point intended to collect and read them all). And also, there was half a paragraph between those two complime...

Writing and blogging seem to go hand in hand. It's been weeks since I wrote last on the current project, and I imagine it's been about that long since I updated this blog as well. I did a lot of planning recently, spent a lot of day-befores making I-swears to myself. That's about it. I did a lot of planning and very little implementation of what I came up with. That changed this morning. Brushing my teeth, I tried to think of a less crazy way to say it than, "I heard the voice in my head again." But that's really the best I got. I knew what the next chapter was about, at least in the beginning so I felt confident about putting something down. Then, before I actually did, I began to hear narration in the back of my head on that very same subject. Almost like with an interactive file, I stopped and started the recording, editing where I saw fit. I rinsed. I spat. I looked myself in the eye while wiping my face and thought "well, I guess I should go write...

The work got done this past weekend, I'm proud to say. I also feel like I learned some things. Like about the idea of a brief, open-door policy to unagented submissions for a major publisher. The actual activity required some additional information which was surprising at the beginning, and understandable toward the end. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, but even as I was trying to get in things early, I could see evidence that the submission portal was under duress, trying to shoulder the load of everyone trying to access it. It occurred to me that the idea might have been something they had lightly discussed doing, then pulled the trigger on just to see what it would be like. Then, in the place of the river they expected, an ocean swelled up, threatening to crash their servers. If a publisher underestimated ebooks, I thought, it might have even more traction than anyone suspected. Then, once the portal was even accessible, it required a synopsis of the book, a query letter...

Sometimes I dream when I'm awake, about award speeches and magazine interviews. In those times, I practice the things I tell, because I don't want to regret things I might say. I don't want to leave out anyone I mean to thank. Tracing the events that led to where I am is getting trickier by the season. This, for instance , was an opportunity I only heard about because I'd been somewhat active in an online writer's group which I was only invited to because I tried to apply myself during a web party for a book release. And that's one of the shorter lists of degrees of separation. And that's where I've been over the last few days. With a two-week window, and their openness to accepting any manuscript of the genres they're looking for, I'm putting all my feet forward, and I'm doing my best to make sure they can be as good as they can be. Needless to say, work on the current project took a hiatus briefly. Submissions to agents are out, naturall...

I've written to the end of my outline. It isn't necessarily good or bad, but it is unexpected. Stitching together different but relevant stories into a (hopefully) cohesive quilt is an old habit that I might have been better served growing out of (in lieu of finding a better way to tell stories). As it is, there are times when I'm so keyed in that I don't necessarily need to look at the outline, and thereby can forget that I am guided by it. As it was, yesterday I finished chapter 9, with nary a glimmer or vision of the next project hounding me. I felt good, good enough to glance into my notes and see what was up next. That's when I was greeted with the infinite potential of white space. Was somewhat similar to leaping, then looking. Up that high, there aren't crickets, either, just the occasional and indifferent breeze. In addition to that, I have begun finalizing the requisite materials to finalize my third publication. Writing blurbs and choosing excerpts ...

Been awhile, though, I haven't been very busy. And it feels lately that every time I jot out one of these the impetus behind it is "Alright, now it's time to get productive." Not that I haven't been writing. I just haven't been writing as much as I could be. Should be. Would be, if only... For months now, scenes of a book have been occurring to me, and I was satisfied with that, because keeping ideas at bay is part of what I do. The other day though, the thing inside my mind became ferocious and insatiable. It insisted, and that is a bit of a problem. I'm working on chapter 8 of the current book, and if experience tells me anything at all, it's that my books round out at somewhere between 25 and 30 chapters, which means that I'm only a third or a fourth of the way through this one, with another bearing down on me. It's time to get productive. Despite all this though, I have yet to be sad about such things crowding in on me. It feels more...

The local convention has come back around again, and all the ambitious thoughts I had this time last year seem like the rest of my dreams. I have a list of things I should have done, and it syncs nicely with the list of things I would have done had I the chance of a re-do. Oops. On Sunday, the fourth draft of the short story I wrote was sent to the contest, an entire month before the deadline. This was not done entirely to give me something useless to fret about, but mostly to let me focus on some real-life things that have become most pressing. I had some good talks with people who read it, and learned some things about my constantly improving style and feel. I've been told I'm getting better at tap dancing the knife edge of showing just enough and telling too little. And, crushing onslaught of reality or not, the voice in my head spinning sentences for the novel returned this very morning and I was happy for it. It's looking like this weekend will be productive on th...