Dust and Fear and Fun and Power

March 25

Sunday morning

It's been a good couple of days, mostly. I wrote some on Friday-- Rangergirl persists in her non-linearity, but I'm dealing with that, and it's okay. The writing is fun. I'm just a bit afraid that I'm going to wind up with a pile of the literary equivalent of carpet remnants, and be unable to stitch them into cohesion. I should just trust the process, I think. After my crashing failure to complete Ferocious Dreamers, I'm a little novel-shy (hell, at some moments, I'm a lot novel-shy). I need to tap into that deep well of arrogance that I know still exists in my mind. So today I'm going to work on the novel, primarily. I have a lot of free hours in the day, and I'm going to try to get this stuff all straight in my head. I have a few e-mails to answer, but after that, I'm cutting myself off from the Internet. I'm going to Pergolesi, and I'm not taking any books-- that way I won't be able to convince myself that I'm "just going to read for a minute" and lose the whole afternoon. I will be Productive. I may not produce reams of wordage, but I'll figure out what the hell's going on, in my head and on the page, at least.

Despite having written a 17K novella on the characters, and writing about 5000 disconnected words on it this week, I still don't feel like I've really started this book. That will change after today

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Timprov and Marissa, my peeps, came down yesterday. We had Chinese food, and a reasonable amount of frolicking, and then we settled down outside at Pergolesi and talked writing. Oh, such loveliness. And I had a mocha chai.

Congrats to Karina on her new gig as the Speculon e-book reviewer! That sounds like mad fun. And, on a related note...

I am now poetry editor for Speculon! Timprov wants to start running poetry in the June issue. My other project for today is writing guidelines for that. I'll let y'all know when I'm ready to start accepting submissions. I'm excited! This is gonna rule! I've really wanted to get my nose back into the poetry world, and becoming an editor is a pretty cool way to do it. I edited the student poetry publication back in college, and that was fun, even if most of the poems were angsty and not very well-written. Editing a 'zine for speculative poetry, though... oh, so much a better gig.

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I was going to write an entry last night... but then the widescreen version of Psycho came on American Movie Classics, so I had to watch that instead. Then I went to bed.

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I'm almost done with Dreamcatcher. I probably won't finish it today, as I have other priorities, but it won't be long now. It's settled down into a rather standard suspense/chase plot at this point, though there are still some felicitous weirdnesses to keep it interesting. The ending seems really predictable at this point, but maybe King will surprise me.

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I'll probably write to y'all again later tonight, to let you know how the day went. Hope you're all having a marvelous Sunday.