Progress Notes, 2/4/09

I failed to update on the end of last week (very successful, actually), or to provide my notes for this week. So instead, we get to start with the mid-week update. I guess that's kind of like time travel, or something.

Day 1: Complete. Wrote 1,000 words for the aforementioned secret project.
Day 2: Complete. Wrote 1,400 words for same.

Day 3: Edit "Those Who Don't".
Day 4: Edit "Those Who Don't".
Day 5: Edit "Those Who Don't" or write 1,000 words as proclivity dictates.

Goals: To get the Project into working order for editing, and to get as close as possible to finishing "Those Who Don't". The hope is to have the story ready for submission before Valentine's Day, but I naturally won't push that if it means making the quality suffer.

Pretty soon, I will have to go back to Eyes of Stone, but I want to have good headway on the Project first. I realize I'm being cryptic, and that this is in danger of causing a serious case of Hype Aversion; but I don't want to say too much now, because if this idea tanks I don't want to have gotten hopes up too much. Regardless, my point is that this longer project is why I have not gone back to the novel, which is ultimately fine with me--it's giving me a chance to get my chops back together and venture into some wholly new territory before I get back to traveling a path I've mostly already paved.

2008, In Review and Memoriam

Right. Today is going to be, as is tradition, insane; so I'd best get this done right now.

2008. What to say about 2008? Not a whole lot that's polite, really.

If I had to pick a single word for this year, I'd say it was Change. If I had to pretend I knew something about the Tarot, I'd say this year's card was Death.

You can see it in the American Presidential election and the polarized reactions to Obama's victory; the idea that while we're still in stormy waters, we've got the rudder pointed in the right directions, and the opposing idea that Obama is just going to sail us in deeper. We're mewling and squalling right now as a people, but we're on something like a track to real change.

Everyone I know had their life change this year, in a major way. Relationships ended and others begun; jobs applied for; apartments rented; hobbies shifted and renewed and left by the wayside. I heard a lot of revelations come out of my friends' mouths, a lot of decisions that we've all known were a long time in coming; and I've seen a lot of friends who are still struggling with what they should do. My own life is synecdochal: new house, new town, new routine, new friend. I dealt with some awful things, and some great things, and I shed a lot of tears over both.

Major, tough decisions were made this year, and plenty of questions are left for when we all open our throbbing, underslept eyes on the first. It's been a year of sadness, and pain, and (to go back to that Death card) rebirth; it's been a year of shaky first steps and horrifying first falls.

But as much as it hurt or is hurting, I know that these are steps that needed to be taken. Call them birth pangs, if the first steps metaphor doesn't stir your coffee; but I know that the world that is coming to be, both immediately and globally, is going to be a better one.

I plan to focus a great deal more on my writing in the New Year; I've been bad about letting some things flounder and soften. This blog is a place to shine the spotlight on the weird, but it's also a chronicle of a dream; and frankly, I don't think it will have done its job if it those first few commenters don't get to say "I knew him before...". Even if the ending winds up being "he owned that many guns".

So, prepare for more story submissions, and hopefully a few more story publications; prepare for more complaining about the travails of writer's block; prepare for more shouting and more heavy-handed prose. Also prepare, in the grand tradition of Cherie Priest, for progress notes--because you folks deserve/have been punished with a little more insight into my creative process. But don't think this means the link salad will end.

Goodbye, 2008. You've been a bastard of a year. Tonight, I'm going to drown you in Guinness, and make a crown out of a Page-A-Day calendar, and go out on a balcony in Milpitas and tell you you got what you deserved. You slapped me around when I needed it, and for that you deserve a proper wake.

And for all of you who aren't a unit of time, I leave you with two thoughts: first, that my current long project, Eyes of Stone, sits at 49,700 out of 90,000 words. Second, a bit of positivity to end the year--the knowledge that wit and eloquence can get you somewhere in this world: everyone, I give you Sir Terry Pratchett.

Happy New Year, folks. Have a drink for me.

The Scraps

It has come to my attention that I need to stop using the word "never", at least in reference to this blog; for it turns out, upon reflection, that nearly everything I insisted I would never do has come to pass, and that my capacity to actually keep to my Thursday updating schedule is roughly equivalent to my capacity to fly. This is, I guess, a lesson from the universe.

It has also come to my attention that it is Thursday, and I should be updating. The trouble is, it has been a grueling work week thanks to two folks being on vacation (not their fault), and I have spent eight hours a day feeling as though I've had my skull filled with glue while someone with no grace or etiquette force-fed me bricks. The frenetic energy this stress fills me with has been channeled into working on Eyes of Stone, which is still a beast but is at least a tame one. So I'll be posting later, I hope, provided that I am able to find something clever to say. That is, I will be posting "later"...it's just "later" in this case may mean "Saturday".

Until then, I give you today's xkcd, and the world's most expensive coffee table book. Click in good health.

Eyes of Stone, You, and Draft Zero Point Five

This is another process post; if you find those boring you are welcome to move on.

For those who don't know, I'm back at work on my second novel, Eyes of Stone, which I consider proof of both hubris and a strong streak of masochism. It's a rewrite of a novel I wrote when I was much younger (read: five years or so ago), which I realized had great potential but some elements that were, to put it bluntly, complete dreck.

To say the process is being beastly is an understatement; it has been a long time since I found myself working under this strong a mixture of confidence and doubt. I keep thinking I need to start over, and I keep telling myself I shouldn't; and rather than spiral downward I'll just be throwing this out here, because everyone knows that posting it on the Internet will make it real.

I am christening my current work on Eyes of Stone Draft 0.5. It's enough of change from the original to constitute a whole new draft, but it is not making the full jump from Draft Zero to Draft One that I had hoped for (and that, I am accepting now, it was ridiculous to hope for).

So the project now, to put it simply, is to allow the story to write itself out; to tell the story with all the characters, all the twists, all the turns and toils and triumphs; and to allow it to sit the way I let Draft Negative One sit for a while, before I bust out the bone-saw and the cautering iron.

I can do this. I mean it. I can really, truly do this. But as I will often say: this is why so many authors drink.