Timing out of Mind

Last night wasn’t bad.  It was a bit tiring, but not bad.  I saw the story expand, but I was just a touch short of the nightly goal, only hitting about nine hundred words before saying the hell with it and heading off tot bed.  The mind wanted to work, but I was getting hung up on something, and I couldn’t seem to get the words out that I needed.  Not so much writer’s block as it was my brain saying, “You know you’re going to screw this up if you try to write it now, right?”  Right.  So I was happy with what I’d put down, and slinked off to bed.

Today will be one of those busy days where I’m doing a bit of running around, but I’m not actually getting anything done–at least none of the stuff I want to do.  I have writing to do, but I’m going to have to fit my thousand in wherever I can find it, ’cause I don’t think I’ll have many opportunities to write today.  Which is a shame, because my mind has been nagging at me since before I work up.

I was having a lot of strange dreams, one of which seemed to do with trying to pick someone to take over an open superhuman opening, hanging with Brad Pitt, and telling someone who I worked with that their manager was a ninja doucherocket, and had been ever since I’d worked with them at my last job.  Then I woke up, and The Muse was there, bugging me.  (Should note, my Muse is not the same as the muse I’m writing about.  The muse in my story is a real goddess; I’m the only one who thinks my Muse is a goddess.)  What was she bugging me about?

Time.

No, not the sort of time we all waste like crazy, but time like one would encounter if you were time traveling.  There’s a simple explanation for this.  During the week I was sick.  Monday I was out of it, but Tuesday I was so down that I had to stay home and crash and burn.  But since last Sunday, when I started coming down with this (now, I hope) dissipated cold, my mind has worked.  What else is it going to do?  I’d love to be able to shut it off, but I can’t.

So, in that time, I came up with two stories revolving around my Transporting series, which I’ve yet to public, but will.  It seems like a strange thing to come up with more stories for that series, because I’ve already written four novels and one novella for it, and I have–wait, let me bring up the document . . . eighteen more stories to write.  Two more would bring it to a very neat, round twenty stories, and it’s not like I have a lot to write already, but, really, do I need more?

To show you how caught up I am in this stuff, I pulled up the timeline I have for the stories–because they cover a lot of time–and realized I didn’t have the reign of one character down in my time line.  So there I go, having to fix things.  Now I have the character accounted for, I have my timeline fixed–

Save for these two stories the Muse is bugging the hell out of me over.

Since I have time to kill before I get out to do other things, I know I can add those stories to my time line, and get my descriptions down, indicate when they’re going to happen . . . yeah, I keep track of all the stuff.  Because I think I can actually get all this stuff written in the next twenty years.

I probably can–

If I get to work.

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.