Nights of Sorrow and Confession

One of the themes I tend to follow in my stories that is no one is perfect.  It doesn’t matter if you’re human, non-human, or something a little special:  every now and then you’re gonna screw up.  If you’re human and you mess up, you might be out of some time and a few hundred bucks.  If you something non-human, your screw up might cost someone their life.

Such as it is with my muse, Erin.  She did something bad, and now her charge is paying for that screw up.  At least she feels bad about what happened.

The novel is moving into some dark territory before it climbs out into the light.  It’s night time, Erin is upset, and she’s got a senior goddess breathing down her neck.  Are there senior goddesses?  Of course there are:  someone’s gotta run those people.  You even find out that Erin has a boss, and it’s probably not who you think it is, because these guys don’t hang out with their own mythological neighbors.  No, these people have the run of whatever world they run, and they don’t give a shit about the ethic lines that worshiped them.

Unlike the last few chapters, where I struggled to get my feeling out on the page, time time I’m kinda zoomin’ the chapter.  I’ve written nearly twenty-five hundred words in the last two days, and were it not for an important Skype meeting tonight, I might have actually finished the chapter.  I’ll still get in some words tonight, but it looks as if the finishing of the chapter comes tomorrow–and the finishing of the story may happen on Sunday.  Maybe Monday, Tuesday at the outside.  But I see the end coming, it’s just around the bend.

Maybe this chapter is going so well because I’m feeling the sorrow these days, just like Erin.  Things are happening around me, a little to me, a little to people I know, and it’s weighing on my mind.  That’s probably why I was up at four AM again today, with my brain playing its little games of, “Hey, listen!” and keeping me up when I should be catching the snooze instead.  It has done this to me for the better part of a week now, and the early morning chicanery is getting old.  I need sleep, and I need it soon, because the drive home is killing me.

It also doesn’t help with the creative process.  The ideas seem slow these days, as if all the befuddlement I’m feeling from getting up so early every day is whacking my imaginative juices.  I will say this about hanging at The Undisclosed Location:  I always seemed to have something bouncing about in my brain.  These days, I seem to have . . . emptiness.  Or, at the least, a bit of fogginess, because things never seem as clear as they once were.

It’s time to get past these blocks.  Perhaps after I do my next edit the brain will open up.  Or maybe that’ll happen after I get some sleep.  Though I ended up not getting a lot of sleep last year–

And writing wise, that didn’t turn out all that bad.

The Absence of Mind

No dreams to talk about today, because there weren’t any.  At least none that I could discuss.  You see, I didn’t get much sleep–

Correction:  I was back to getting about three hours of sleep last night.

I fell asleep about midnight, woke up about two, tossed and turned until about five, and the alarm went off at six.  I got a little dream time in during the hour before the alarm went off, but today is a seriously sleep deprived morning.  I was so out of it driving into The Cubical Hell (where I discovered that radio streaming has been blocked, which means it’s over to YouTube to listen to albums) that I was really afraid to be out in traffic.

So today is one of those days where the mind feels like it’s checked out and gone off on holiday.  I feel like I have the chills running through my arms and legs, and time is some relativistic entity manipulated by gamma factors.

Not the day I was expected, but it’s the day you get.  You make the best of it, and hope that by noon, you can get some coffee into the body and pick up a little steam that will carry you into the evening.

This evening I’m going to need it, because today was the start of the two-week push to get my novel nice, pretty, and polished, before I send it off to Harper Voyager for consideration.  It’s never good to try and edit when you’ve a mind full of cobwebs, and today I’ve got Metebelis Spiders–”All Hail the Great One!”–roaming about in my brain.

Yeah, you deal with the day you get, not the one you want.

Then again, being a little tired–or a lot–makes you focus on your work.  I’m not writing new material, but polishing, editing, getting my story in final form.  I’m certain there are things I’ve missed, and I’ll get them.

Twenty-four chapters in fourteen days.  Very doable.  Now is the time to make that push, so that by 30 September, I’m ready to submit.

Then once this is out of the way, it’s time for my Halloween story, and getting ready for NaNo.  The end of the year push when the writing picks up, and carries you through the end of the year, and into the next.

There is something else on the way as well:  my 500^th post.  This post is number 495, so come Saturday, I’ll have five hundred in the books, on the Internet, and I’ll be ready for another five hundred.  Well, another two hundred and fifty, at least:  I’ll do another special post when I reach my 750^th, and then another when I reach the 1000^th.  After that, who knows?  Maybe I’ll retire from blogging.

Ha!  Fat chance.

Though that makes me wonder:  how much longer will I keep at this?  I’ve been going strong for a year, and making another five hundred posts will take about fifteen months.  Sure, I can keep running at the fingers, but what will I talk about?

You know what I’ll talk about–

Anything I like.

Chasing the Fear

What I want to know is–why am I up at 4 AM?  Again?

The entire life seems to be in flux at the moment.  Project with work that seems to go on, but is still so close to the end.  Work in progress that seems to go on, but is still so close to the end.  Novels out for review, for a possible purchase . . .

So close to the end, but it seems like it’s so far away.

Ah, it’s just like everything else in my life:  it’s moving from one sort of set up to another.  It’s just that it’s taking so much time, and I want it now!

Time to learn patience, Grasshopper.  Otherwise it’s going to pull you apart, and it’s going to be messy when it’s all over.

Part Ten of Diners at the Memory’s End started last night.  I hopped in pretty well, getting almost 700 words done before the need for sleep caught up with me and forced me off to bed–which, if you’re following this post right now, didn’t do me much good, since I was lying away for about an hour before I starting writing.  I would have gotten into writing a little faster, but I needed to look up something about a local in the story, and that meant I needed to pull up something from Transporting–

I spent about an hour going through the chapter in question, reading what I’d actually written twenty years before, and edited a few times since.  There is something about the writing:  it’s sort of wild and raw, but you can feel the main character’s feelings coming though so well.  You can see the relationship with Cytheria beginning, building little by little during what was, pretty much, a very drunken dinner with a fellow doctor.

And the chapter was long:  about 5,600 words.  But so much was said, that I’d loath to cut any of it, because it is all so very good.

Can’t wait to sell this.  Of course, that means editing it, and that means getting all my other projects out of the way before I can do that.

So what needs to be done:  finish the current story, then maybe do another–I have an idea for something that’s either going to be straight-up erotica, or maybe erotic fantasy–then get ready for NaNoWriMo.  Then when that’s over, launch into editing Book One of Transporting, and maybe start shopping it–and the rest of the books in that trilogy–out come the start of 2013.

Yeah, really seems like I have it all down pat, doesn’t it?

The fear here is that none of this will amount to anything.  That I’ve written all these things, or that there are things out there to be written, and in the end, no one, outside of a small circle of people, will ever see them.  That they will linger forever on the Internet, or maybe even on a bookshelf of a store, and nothing will ever come of them.  They will be an experience in my life that went nowhere, and thousands of hours will have been spent chasing an endeavor that was all for naught.

The money can be something that would keep me writing, but I really want people to see my work.  Be entertained.  Be amazed.

Maybe even fall in love with the characters who dance in my imagination, and make life worthwhile.

So I chase the fear, and hope for the best.  Hope that, at the end of the road, there is something waiting for me.

I’ll ask Cassidy and see what she says–

Even though I know she’ll tell me to keep running.

Nothing Much is Nothing At All

Nothing.  That’s what this weekend felt like.

While Saturday wasn’t that bad, Sunday was a total waste.  I was fighting an infection in my left earlobe, and this general feeling that nothing was right.  I was tired, because I wasn’t catching up on the sleep that I haven’t been getting down at The Undisclosed Location.  I ended up munching away on junk food when I pulled into the apartment, and I was up until midnight before going to bed.

And when did I rise this morning?  About 4 AM.  Finally got out of bed at 4:30.  Still the same.  Three, four hours of sleep, and a day full of exhaustion.

The worst was that yesterday, other than the blog, I wrote nothing.

It wasn’t just not writing–I didn’t feel like writing.  I thought about finishing off the scene I’m into right now, with Albert and Meredith in their game, whacking out aliens left and right.  I knew, however, if I did, I was going to produce some might crap.  Whatever was written was going to suck mightily, and that wasn’t wanted.  The idea is, when I write, not to suck, and if I’d written last night, it was going to suck.

Ergo, I walked away.  There was no way the story was going to get a crap section.

The last couple of weeks have been this way, a fight to get some sleep, get through the day, get through the story.  The lack of sleep is becoming an acute problem, because it’s affecting me throughout the entire day.  By the time I manage to pull myself through the day at work, it’s back to the apartment, eat, then try to write.  Sometimes I’m doing very well:  other times I feel the struggle to get anything done.

There’s no stopping, but there’s also the feeling that something is coming to a head, and it won’t take long to get there.

There is also the feeling I’m struggling with this story.  I don’t want to struggle, but it happens.  You work through it, make the words come out.  There’s the feeling I messed up the time line, which is possible, as I’ve thought about what should happen after this current part if finished.  Tonight I’ll fix this; I’m nothing if not anal about my time lines.

Too many things going on at once.  May was crazy; June is even more insane.  Who the hell knows what July is going to bring?

Something new and good is needed, and needed very soon.  For it does seem as if I’m working in a vacuum here all of a sudden, with no feedback, little human contact, and even less human touch.

It’s the feeling that I need some kind of confirmation that everything isn’t for naught.  That this is going to work for me, because . . . the alternative isn’t worth my time.  The alternative is The Downhill Slide–  I refuse to go there, however.  It’s never going to be an option.

So many thing happening at once; no clear resolution in sight.  It’s like life, only with a great emphasis being unreal.

We all know how much life can suck, even in the best of times . . .

Wordy on the Sly

My first wife–whom I affectionately refer to as “Audrey III”, which those of you with any sort of movie/geek background will get right away–had a love/hate relationship with reading.  She claimed, at least at first, that she liked reading, but there were certain authors she hated to read, because . . . let me give you an example.

I read a lot of early Stephen King.  Like, every time something new came out, I bought it and read it.  I have one of the original hardback printings of the first Dark Tower novels; there were like ten thousand printed, and they were, I think, $40 when they were first sold.  As you can see in this link, an unsigned copy is worth about $1200 today–and mine is in as good of shape as this book.  I have all of the Green Mile when it was first released as a serialized books, because that was the way King wanted you to read it–at least at first.

My then-wife hated King.  Not because of the stories, oh, no.  She thought those were fine.  She hated King because he was too “wordy”.  ”He uses too many words!” she say all the time.  I always took this to mean, “I’m too damn lazy to read”–which, it turns out, was really the case, since after a while she stopped reading altogether.  Maybe every writer got too wordy for her, I don’t know.

Now, it’s no secret I write every day, or at least try.  There have been a few times I’ve let that slip, but if nothing else, I try to get in a daily post, and then I work on my stories.  Usually blog in the morning, story at night.  I try to set goals as well:  at least five hundred words for each blog post, at least one thousand words for the story.  I always hit my five hundred on the blog; it’s important to do that, at least to me.

But the story?  I tend to slip there.  A lot of it usually involves my brain turning into various kinds of mush around 9 PM, or there abouts, and if I’m still writing, I suddenly find it very difficult to continue.  Even so, when that happen, I generally aim for at least five hundred words before I put the story aside.

Last night was one of those cases.  I was working on Part Seven of Diners at the Memory’s End, and I worked on a scene in that part where the AI of the spaceship that belongs to one of my main characters is working on the outer hull of the vessel, and she’s–yeah, the AI is a she–split herself into eight different parts, all of whom are dressed like the Inner and Outer Senshi from Sailor Moon.  There is a lot of description about what they’re doing, what they look like, and then a little banter, and then Albert and Meredith return to the main cabin, and . . .

I couldn’t remember a damn thing.

I knew Meredith was going to say something, and in order to change the subject, Albert was going to ask her a question, but I’ll be damned if I could remember where Meredith was going with her questions–and she does have questions.  Rather than struggle, I shut it all down, did a few Facebook posts, and headed to bed.

Total word count for what I did was 1045 words.  People told me how prolific I was–

I always feel like I’m doing nothing.

NaNoWriMo was a huge thing for me.  That was the first time I wrote a novel, and finished it.  I did 85,000 words in 25 days, and blogged about doing it.  I averaged 3,400 words a day, but that’s because there were a few days when I was writing 4,500, 4,800 words.  Oh, sure, there were a couple of people who wrote their whole fifty thousand in two days, and then went on to brag they wrote a couple more novels in the remaining time, but . . . where is that novel now?  Sitting in a draw?  Lost on a computer somewhere?  Mine is out to a publisher:  what about you?

Maybe it’s because I have so many thing going on these days that I don’t think there’s anything out of the ordinary about writing a thousand words a day–fifteen hundred if you add in the blog, although my word counter is telling me I’m about 725 right now, so it’s going to be higher today.  Maybe when I get to where I’m doing this all the time, I’ll get into those mind spaces where I’ll be doing two, three thousand words a day again.

‘Cause right now, it always feels like I’m playing catch up, an no matter how fast I run, I can’t seem to keep up.

The Dreamland Bypass

Busy is my name today.  There’s so much going on, I don’t know where to start.

Time change is starting to get to me.  I was up about 5 AM local, which is 6 AM down where I work, and the chances of me getting a good night’s sleep are diminishing by the day.  I’ve sort of given up on the possibility of ever getting a full night’s sleep anymore, and as I get older, that’s going to become less and less an occurring.  Yes, there are things I can take to help me sleep, but the following morning I feel groggy as hell for most of the morning.

Though I feel groggy as hell right now.  Have you ever had to write when you’re mind is floating around, wrapped up in a nice, little cocoon of fuzz?  It’s totally charming; you should all try it sometime.  It’s wonderful!  Although I will say, if nothing else, it does make you focus like hell on what you’re doing.  You can’t let your mind wander when you’re cranking out a post (like here), or writing a story (like I’m going to do later), or creating a query letter (like I’m going to do much, much later).  When you’re full of energy, and your mind is clear, you’re usually mind jumping from one thing to another.  When you’re on the verge of loosing your shit, and you feel like, at any moment, your eyelids are going on strike because you’re keeping them up beyond their bedtime, you get your mind locked in on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Like, you know, trying to hit your thousand word limit on your story for the night.

Diners at the Memory’s End is getting big.  It’s also getting to be another story I’m enjoying a lot.  I think it’s because of the character dynamic I’ve created between two of my main characters, Albert and Meredith.  As I’ve said elsewhere, when I wrote this story the first time around, Meredith was something of a conniving little bitch, and she came off as being very unsympathetic, at least when I look at the story in retrospect.  Meredith is a person who’s in a very difficult position, and when her moment to be a little–well, maybe “bad” is the right word . . . when it comes, it’s going to happen for reasons other than, “I’m a nasty quim!”

Though I’ve always said my character are not in charge of me, I think they need to be seen in a very real light, and Meredith needs to be viewed with something akin to reality.  And the reality is, sometimes people do thing because it’s there, and they want it.

It doesn’t make them bad.

I also have a blog post to write later, and another one to format for publication on Monday, and this query letter–damn, man.  I need some rest!  Though I might just hold off on the blogging until tomorrow, that query could be money in the bank, and money is good.  Which reminds me:  someone I used to work with IMed me on Facebook yesterday, and the first thing they said was, “You making any money doing this writing thing?”  It’s not always about the money, folks.  If we didn’t like writing, we wouldn’t do it.  If we wrote only for the paycheck, we’d be monkeys.  Or, as Chuck might say, “Penmonkeys”.

But the biggest reason I’ll be busy today:  I have a teenager in the house.  My daughter turns 13 today, and there will be much merriment.  Shopping and lunch at a Japanese restaurant, then back with a couple of her friends to enjoy a Portal Cake (which is not a lie), and then having fun playing games.  Ah, to be that age again.

It’s a great time to be alive, is it not?