Last Night in Mister Moon’s Drive

I was out last night.  It was another in a long line of visits where I go out, have pizza, chat, and watch shows that either invite snarky commentary about plot holes (Prisoner of Azkaban, why walk back to Hogwatts when someone could have apparated Peter back?  Why not have someone go back and get Dumbledore?  Why not just take Peter to Hogsmeade, which was right next door?  Why did Lupin conveniently forget there was a full moon that night?  Why was the story plot hammered like it was being run by a bad GM?) or something more interesting (like two episodes of Season Two of Sherlock).

Then came the drive back after midnight.  For some reason there was almost no traffic, and my drive home was one of just letting the cruise control do its thing just point the car down the road.  There wasn’t a need to touch the brakes, so I drove and thought . . .

I had a waxing gibbous moon on my left shoulder for most of the drive, and it struck me that this would be my last moonlit drive for 2012.  And it was strange because on so many moonlit drives, I’ve been with characters who have made my stories shine, with ideas that drive me on to produce good stories, and plots that I hope work out once I put them to paper.

I had none of that last night.  It was just me, and a few of my thoughts.  Not that there was anything wrong with that, but as perfect as the night seemed, I really wanted to have someone alongside, sharing the experience.

This is has been a long year, with plenty of ups and downs, things to be remembered and forgotten.  There has been exhilaration and doubt.  Particularly the doubt, which has seemed to increase in the last few weeks.  Don’t ask why, because I don’t know myself.  It’s the way my mind works, and it’s not ways a good thing, that.

The thing about being a writer is there is always doubt.  Is this story good?  Are the characters believable?  Does any of this make sense?  Is the cover nice?  Is this damn thing going to sell?  It’s the nature of the beast, these doubts, because creative people are like that.  Nothing is ever good enough for them; everything is “okay”.  Or, if they are really down on themselves, “not so good”.

Quite honestly, we’re all seconds away from an Admiral Ackbar moment, and it will drive you crazy when all the thoughts of everything bad that could happen to you come knocking.  I had a touch of that last night, then kicked them out of the car because I realize the more negativity you embrace, the longer it stays with you.  That was the problem with my last job:  it was a negative environment, and very little made me happy.

I don’t want negative:  I want happy.

It seemed that once I pushed the bad stuff out of the car, a couple of characters who I hadn’t thought of in some time entered my mind, as if to put me at easy and tell me, “It’s okay, love.  We all go thought this:  you’re no different.”  It was comforting that even someone fictional could bring a smile to my face . . .

Perhaps they needed someone to ride with as well.

The Coming Change

Doing some serious digging here . . . hold on . . .  Yeah, it’s what I thought.  Just did a check on the word count for Diners at the Memory’s End, and it’s just a couple of hundred words shy of ten thousand.

So lets do some math.  I’m on Part Five.  There are sixteen total.  Say I add another fifteen hundred word to this part–which isn’t all that crazy–that would take this part to about 11,300 words.  That would put me at 2,260 words per part on average.  So, multiply that by sixteen, and . . . about thirty six thousand and change for the total word count.

I’ve almost got another short novel on my hands.

And the thing is, I know there are a couple of chapters that are probably going to run longer than twenty-two hundred words.  I know Part Eight will likely run a little long.  I know Part Twelve is going to run long, because there’ll be a long stretch there explaining Meredith’s motivations.  Fourteen will also run a little long, me thinks, because it’s a long, detailed section which tells Meredith just what it is that Albert does.  And the last part, Sixteen, will be a good wrap up.

So with that . . . I might have a short novel on my hands, maybe around fifty thousand words.

Not another one of those!

Despite that fact that I’ve written shorter stories–if by “short”, you mean, “Stories the length of which most writers tend to do in two or three, or four, stories”–I believe I’ve always known I’m a novelist.  I know some people will say it’s because I can’t get to the point, but most of the time I feel like “telling the story”, and when I do that, I get–as my ex-wife used to say–wordy.  I don’t consider that to be a bad thing, as I used to tell her all the time.  Some people–like her–think this is a bad thing, but I could think of worse things to happen to a writer–

Like not get read.

Diners got off to a bit of a slow start, but I’ve had a ton of other things going on while I’ve begun writing it in earnest.  The thing is, right now, with two novels out on the Submission Trail–where I hope they don’t die of dysentery, as they would if this was the game Oregon Trail–I need to keep the pipeline going.  I gotta produce zee tomes if I want to get zee readers, and zee readers, they make the penmonkey dance, no?

As I told someone last night, I want to finish Diners at the Memory’s End, then I want to do a little hop back into erotica with one of two stories, one of which I might be able to turn into a series.  Then, after that, I need to do a massive edit on Book One of Transporting, and see if I can not only find a buyer for that sucker, but see if they’re interested in the other two books in that series.

Getting Transporting sold is important, because that’s a lead-in to both Echoes and Diners.  Sell the first, and the rest will follow.

I said almost six months back that 2012 was going to be a year of change for me, that a huge number of things were going to happen to me.

Trust me–

It’s coming so fast, I don’t know if I can keep myself in check.