Sunday: Classical music and tea

I'm late today -- just warming up for today's reading/tweaking of Apocalypse. My last thorough pass-through, I hope. I plan to get halfway through the second half of the book; all the way through if my eyes don't start to bleed (that's meant figuratively; don't panic.)

I don't like the phrase 'warming up' on days like this because it's dangerously hot this weekend in Missouri. Like 100 degrees hot. I haven't even gone to work at the cafe this weekend because that's too hot for me to go outside in. (Ok, fine, I could go outside in it but that much heat makes me lazy.)

The drink du jour is Ten Ren No. 913 King's Oolong/Ginseng tea, a good solid Taiwanese tea a friend of mine gave me. It's amazingly refreshing hot tea. My frumpy calico cat Girlie-Girl (of the six, the one most attached to me) sits on the couch right behind me, cleaning herself. 

Playing on the stereo: Concerto in A Major, Bach. In my life, Sunday mornings lend themselves to leisure and tea/coffee and classical music in a room cluttered with hobbies and cats. 

The Daily Submission

Strangely, the daily rejection submission gives me more hope than might be expected.

To those who haven't been following my log, I have started submitting flash fiction/poetry and short stories I've written on a daily basis, one per day, using Submittable. This means that, given the odds of being published with all the submissions coming in, I have been receiving a rejection a day.

I don't focus on the rejections, strangely. I focus on the fact that I, at the moment, have six submissions (counting Prodigies at DAW, a manuscript for a novel) out. 

I don't know how much longer I can continue this exercise, because there are little readers fees nickeling and diming me -- four dollars here, six dollars elsewhere. But so far, it's given me hope. 

Updates June 28, 2019

I've been raising the stakes on the final battle in Apocalypse, and there's a body count. I could be done with the big revisions by end of Saturday, and then there's a big read-through for flow, continuity, and things I forgot to tweak. 

The book has become quite dark, but that's to be expected given that it's the freaking Apocalypse. I'm hoping it's improved. I'm hoping it turns out really good. 

I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to maintain the daily entry but I wrote my first piece of flash fiction yesterday.

Not much else to say -- I have five submissions out (including Prodigies) and didn't get any rejections yesterday. 

Talk to you later!

No Excuses Today

I can't avoid writing any more.

I had excuses the past couple days -- "I'm tired from writing my final"; "I'm tired from driving down to Kansas City and back to visit my intern" -- good excuses, both of them, But, honestly, I need to get back into the scheme of things.

Another excuse I've made to myself is that I'm used to working at the cafe, because it's out of the house, it's novel yet familiar, and there's coffee (admittedly there's coffee at home, but it takes work). I haven't been able to work at the cafe lately because of the need for two screens at this point in editing. I need one screen to look at the  marked-up Word copy of Prodigies and the other to make changes to the Scrivener copy (I keep my work on Scrivener because I can print out manuscripts and the like as needed.) We have an office, a claustrophobic affair with two big screens, but it's easier to avoid working there because I can quit right after I've started without having to pack up, pay my tab, and drive home. (Those items are disincentives to leaving, believe me.)

Richard got the idea to utilize my old (and unused) iPad as a second screen for mobile editing. It's a great idea, as it turns out -- even though the screen is small, it will show enough information for me to work with. The software to do this, which must be installed on both the iPad and the PC, is called Duet Display and the details are here: Duet Display. 

So I have no excuses today. I only have a meeting in the morning, and then I'm free. I have a system to work with to help with the dual display need, and I have a place to go.

Now to steel myself to the fact that I need to stack all chances against the poor residents of Barn Swallows' Dance and kill a few. 

****************

Note: I have gotten a couple of rejections since yesterday, but I'm okay with it. They weren't big things, and one of them was hastily written to meet a theme. I'm still waiting on big stuff.

A Rejection a Day

I think I'm becoming more sanguine about rejection. 

I'll never like rejection, although one woman I met at Gateway Con said that she loved rejection because it meant another person read her stuff and knew her name. 

I've been practicing my rejections. I've got Submittable (a submissions software) bookmarked on my computer and I try every day to submit a little something -- a short story, flash fiction, a poem -- to see if anything gets accepted. I'm hoping for acceptance. So far, I've been getting tiny rejections, and that's not bad.

Of course, I know myself -- I'll be good about rejections till I get a major rejection. Like the one I'll probably possibly get for Prodigies. 

But even then, I know that a rejection doesn't mean that my writing is bad, but could mean that my writing was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means that it's time to examine the piece and try, try again.

About Waiting

Sometimes, all you can do is wait for something to happen.

You've put out resumes, or queries, or submissions to a literary magazine. You put yourself out there, and then you wait.

While waiting the interminable wait, how do you look at your venture? Do you assume the worst hoping that you'll be pleasantly surprised? Do you bask in a glow of possibility, entertaining the fantasy of success? Are you one of the few who can go on as if you haven't handed your heart and soul out to strangers?

I myself wait impatiently to hear results, giddily checking Submittable and Query Tracker and email too many times. This is how I know that it was exactly 113 days (or 9763200 seconds) since I submitted Prodigies to DAW.

I have three other submissions out (two short stories and a poem) and one query out (Prodigies again). I know from the conference that rejections may not mean one's work is not good, but that it doesn't match current consumer demands. The odds are high given the number of competitors that I will get rejected all the way around. But I remain optimistic, because I need that vision of a change, of the possibility of bursting out of a cocoon having remade myself into an author, to season my days with sweet cinnamon and success.

I feel like a murderer.

This edit of Apocalypse is a bit harder than I thought. I need to make our unlikely heroes more unlikely, and by that I mean they need to struggle more. They need to be less successful.

More of them, in other words, need to die. 

I don't like killing characters. Not because of sentiment; I would kill major characters if I didn't need them for the plot. I'm just bad at writing death. 

But my dev editor is very, very correct. This battle is going to have to be stacked against my protagonists and people are going to have to die. 

Funk and an old white lady

I didn't know it was called funk when I grooved to it as a child. I didn't know that I, a white child, wasn't supposed to groove. I just felt the thumping play and the sense of play, and I wanted to shake my booty, which the adults around me considered slightly scandalous. I listened to that top 40 Chicago AM station and got caught up in its infectious rhythms; I didn't know their names as well as I knew the Beatles' catalog, but they became part of the background music of my childhood. I know their names now: "Flashlight" by Parliament, "Fire" by Ohio Players, "Mr. Big Stuff" by Jean Knight, "Tell Me Something Good" by Rufus and Chaka Khan (which gave me goosebumps as a child).

Years later, in college, I followed a community radio show that dealt in blues and funk, mostly funk. The first time I heard Parliament's Aquaboogie, I sat there with this goofy grin on my face wondering "What the hell is this?" and called the DJ to ask. That was my introduction to Parliament/Funkadelic/P-Funk.

As I studied the genre (as an adult, I study everything) I discovered that funk, in addition to being playful, was sexy. And political. And inspirational. For example, P-Funk melds aspirations of political dominance ("Chocolate City") with tales of survival ("Cosmic Slop") and perseverance ("Aquaboogie"). The politically incorrect "Superfreak" rubs elbows with the motivating "Yes We Can" from the Pointer Sisters.

I'm very aware as I listen to the music that I am, as P-Funk would have it, devoid of funk. I do not have the shared experience of slavery and discrimination that funk seeks to rise above; I don't even have the ice cool of David Bowie, whose "Fame" fits the genre. (I detest the song "Play that Funky Music White Boy" because it seems to be blatant co-opting.) I think about this because I'm going to see George Clinton and his P-Funk All-Stars tonight on his closing tour, knowing that I was not the audience funk was written for. I hope funk will accept me as a respectful tourist.

***********

This is for Steve Emmerman, who was the DJ for that long ago funk radio show on WEFT.

What I'm up to

What I've been up to lately:

Yesterday I wasn't feeling it -- at least not feeling like revising Gaia's Hands or trying to figure out if another old book, Gaia's Eyes, was worth resurrecting (as a short story, novel, birdcage liner, who knows what.) 

So I entered a couple short story contests and a flash essay contest. I always feel more optimistic when I have things in the pipeline, whether they be queries or submissions. I still don't know about DAW. I keep hoping.

I got the dev edit back for Apocalypse, and my work is cut out for me there. But it's so promising now, and I want to get it in the hands of an agent. I'll be proofing that starting today after I give platelets (or instead of platelets if my hemoglobin is low). 
*******************
I have a problem with this blog right now. I keep getting visits from some Eastern European porn site blog. The one time I thought I'd isolated it, it was from Ukraine. The sad thing is, I get random hits now from other Eastern European countries like Moldova and Asian countries like Azerbaijan (sp?). I'm afraid these addresses aren't real and are being spoofed by the porn vendor. Sigh, time for that marketing plan. (Although I'm likely to wait till I have product.)

Wait for it.

So what happens when you come out of an affirming moment into ordinary life?

If you're me, you feel like someone launched you out of a cannon into ... a field. A muddy field. In the middle of nowhere. With cows placidly munching on grass.  

"What should I be doing in this field?" I ask, realizing that a chair and my laptop have materialized in the field beside me. I sit down; the chair sinks into the mud about an inch or so, and I realize these shoes will never be the same. 

I set myself to writing on a story, but I don't know which one to write on -- the serious rewrite of Gaia's Hands? The attempt to write a short story out of the long lost Gaia's Eyes?  Some other short story? A new novel? 

I ruminate: Will I ever get an agent? Will I ever get published? Is there a reason for all this? Is this God's will? Is there really a God, and if so, doesn't She have something better to do than land me a writing career? A placid bovine eyes me with sympathy.

Restless, I stand, setting the laptop on the chair. The cows low about me. Disgruntled, I take a deep breath and remind myself:





I am out standing in my field.

Slush Pile

Prodigies is still sitting at DAW, probably in a slush pile somewhere, as the status hasn't changed since I sent it in.

DAW publishes science fiction and fantasy. They're one of the big publishers for fantasy and science fiction; the others being Baen and Ace. The interesting thing is that these publishers will take submissions without an agent, and ask for the whole book instead of a query.

But submissions begin in a slush pile, or a pile where unsorted books get a first read, and most people don't make it out of the slush pile. What gets the book out of the slush pile and into another set of hands is less how good the book is (though that helps) but how sellable salable the book is. 

I admit I fantasize that my book is on someone's desk, a someone who has influence in making decisions. Or in a meeting. Or on the "Congratulations!" pile. Realistically, however, it's probably still on the slush pile, waiting. 

At least it hasn't been rejected yet. There's always hope.

Working on a marketing plan

Even if I don't have a book to sell yet, I (optimistically) will. So I'm going to start playing with a marketing plan here.

Who is my audience -- other than my current followers here? 

• Readers of intelligent contemporary fantasy/magical realism.

 Where do I find them? (I have 20 regular readers of this blog and 100 readers of my page on facebook -- I don't think new people will find me if I don't look for them).  So where are they hiding?

• fantasy writer groups on facebook
• fantasy READER groups on facebook

  What will I talk about?

• being a writer
• progress on books
• anything published

 
How will I present the message?

• craft messages/blurbs about my writing
• consider excerpts of my work
• use hashtags: #gardenofeden #archetypes #prodigies #talents #fantasybook
• use instagram and twitter (I hate twitter; I don't ever have good pictures for instragram, but time to up my game)

   How often will I send messages?

• continue to blog/hootsuite the blog to twitter and facebook daily 
• newsletter monthly

 Ha! A marketing plan!

Not home quite yet

Two hours into my drive, I needed to stop because I got too sleepy to drive safe. So I'm about to leave the Holiday Inn at the edge of Columbia for the rest of the ride home.

I have documents to edit (kill the ellipses!) when I get home, a small business plan to make (with help from our local small business council), a marketing plan to make,  30 pages to shoot to Marisa Corvisieri, hope DAW can let me know what they thought of my manuscript (probably a rejection) ... 

The Conference

Sorry I haven't written for a couple of days, but I've been busy busy at the conference. It's been a very positive experience, and here are some of the things I've learned:

• A lot of the people here write science fiction and fantasy. And the stories are all very different from each other.
• Character may be more important than plot in hooking an agent in.
• My work is good -- I was told by one editor that my work was "going places." I hope so.
• The same editor told me I need to back off on the novels (high effort) and start writing some short stories to submit to journals. I have 5-6 novels, none sold yet. He is probably right.
• The same editor teased me about my character padding her calves to look like a man, saying that several females he knew had more muscular calves than he did. Well, shit.
• Comp titles ("Twilight meets Hunger Games") really exist for a reason.
• I made a friend who's about my age who introduced me to Broad Universe, a writing space for women (love the pun) and might get me into a critique group if there's a space. 
• I made another friend in Kansas City (about my age) who writes stuff with similar worldview quirk (turning mythologies on their head).  
• I need to put the fact that I was a runner-up in Cook Publishing's Short Story contest in my query letter.
• I need a business plan
• I need a marketing plan (this blog is part of it)
• I need to quit using so many dashes -- and ellipses ...
•  The conference has coffee service ALL DAY.

That's probably not everything, but the experience has been affirming and I'm a little giddy thinking about it. I'm sure the impostor syndrome will take hold tomorrow, but for now, I feel like a writer.

Waiting for Things to Happen

I'm drinking coffee in my room while I write this, hoping for a productive conference.
The writers' conference starts at 9 CDT and I already have some ideas for places to get peer reviews. I have to remember to give business cards -- I have plenty. Networking does not come naturally to me, especially as I have a hearing problem that's getting worse with time.

During the conference, I have a pitch session and a session with an editor during the conference (short selection, not the whole book) and a 5x5 critique session during this conference.

Anything to get better -- my only fear is that my book doesn't have good bones. By "bones", I mean the bedrock of the book. Ok, enough of the metaphors -- the basic idea and structure of the book, the language, the characters, the plot. 

I still have a manuscript out at DAW (Prodigies); not expecting them to bite, but there's always hope. Apocalypse is back in dev edit, and the editor is doing a thorough pass after all the changes I made. My dev editor (shout out for Chelsea Harper here) says she believes in Apocalypse. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Short note

So the writers' conference is tomorrow. I'll be going out there today because it's a five hour drive from here and I'm impatient. I'm as prepared as I can manage -- all packed, with copies of the first few pages of Prodigies for further critique/editorial exercise, business cards, my pitch (which I really need to memorize, because it's succinct as it should be), my business casual garb. 

My friends assure me I'm already a writer, so I have this. I think my idea is to have fun with this and see where it gets me. 

Thank you, friends!

 

Petrified

I'm going to this writers' conference this weekend, and I'm petrified.

I shouldn't be. I have been to many professional conferences, presented my work in front of other professionals in my field, taught 25 years of classes -- but I'm petrified of going to this conference.

I can count the reasons:

• Because now I have to admit I'm a writer
• Because I don't know how I come off in person
• Because I'm going to be around real published writers, of which I'm not one
• Because I have handed off ten pages of Prodigies in an editorial review and I don't know what ELSE I'll be expected to change.
• Because I'll be giving a verbal pitch to real people instead of just online
• Just because 

I have no choice but to go. This is going to be a learning experience for me. Probably not my big opportunity, but a learning experience. 

Deep breath. 

Riding the Struggle Bus with my Novel

I'm struggling with Gaia's Hands again. 

I just don't get a feeling of cohesiveness. I feel like I'm blobbing paint on a sculpture randomly and it's not smoothing out. I'm not sure what to do about it.  

If ever a novel needed to be burned in a bonfire, this is the one. Or is it?

Sometimes, my negative notions of a book I'm writing are based more on how I'm feeling at the moment than the book itself.  So I have to ask myself if the book is really as bad as I think it is, or whether I'm just feeling discouraged. Conversely, I have to ask if the book is as good as I think it is, or whether my opinion is being buoyed up by a bubble of optimism. I don't come up with many answers, which frustrates me.

My husband is not much help. No matter what I write, he says it's good. First draft, good. Twenty-times edited manuscript, good.  Never great, never bad. 

So I have to go back to that beast of a novel and try to smooth the random lumps:

• Does the relationship between Jeanne and Josh (given the 25-year age difference) make sense? (This is a fantasy novel; suspend your disbelief.)
• Are their connections with Gaia developing at a reasonable pace and/or precipitated by plot factors? 
• Is the plot with Growesta/her department (the bad guys) developing?
• Does anything feel just "stuck in there" for no reason except to pad out the word count?

I didn't understand what editing was all about for the longest time. I copy-edited (proofread) and considered it editing. Now that I know what real editing is like, I understand why editing takes longer than writing the book. It's challenging, and often bereft of hope.

Wish me luck, folks. I'm considering building that bonfire.

Interrogating my characters: Josh Young

I arrived at my favorite chair at the coffeehouse to find Josh already there, mug in hand.

"You're looking for me, I take it?" I asked, setting my things down.

He looked up at me, brown eyes laughing. "You were looking for me."

"You are going to give up my chair, right?" 

Grinning, he moved to the other chair.  "You have some questions for me, right?"

I study him -- a slight young man with brown-black hair barely long enough to pull into a tail; big brown eyes, slightly oblique;  a long nose, a full lower lip, a fey smile. 

I cut to the chase: "Why Jeanne?"

"You make the assumption everyone does, that there's no sane reason I should be in love with someone old enough to be my mother. Is there a sane reason to be in love with anyone?"

"Probably not, come to think of it," I muse. 

"So, let's look at the insane reasons," Josh continues. "No woman has ever stood out to me the way Jeanne does. It's like walking through a forest in a fog, and you can't see any of the trees clearly so they don't seem real, and then there's one tree you see with perfect clarity, and you realize that's the tree you're looking for."

"Except the tree is a woman, and the woman is Jeanne."

"Exactly. And she wasn't just a good enough tree -- " Josh chuckles. "Enough of that metaphor. When she said we should just be friends and see what happens, I couldn't be mad because that's what needed to be said. And that's another insane reason -- we balance each other. Like the taijitu -- the yin and yang. My yin, her yang and vice versa.

"And then there are the visions ..."

"Visions?" I ask.

"When I first met Jeanne, I had a vision of her as the tender of a riotous garden with vines and plants and trees laden with fruit. More greens than I could put a name to, and she, a voluptuous woman, stood in their midst. How could I not engage with such a woman?"

I consider telling him he's not the typical twenty-year-old male, but that goes without saying. "What do you think the vision is about?" I ask.

"I think," he reflects, "it's about Gaia."

Bonus post: Interrogating Jeanne Beaumont

(For those of you relatively new to the blog, "interrogating" is when I interview a character in my novel to get insight into their character and motivations.)

I sit on my favorite easy chair at the coffeehouse, musing. How do I explain a relationship -- a solid relationship? -- between a twenty year old male and a forty-five year old female? Is that even possible? The biology is against it ...

A sturdy woman with greying chestnut hair in a ponytail sits down at the chair next to me and sets her latte on the table. "You want an explanation, don't you?" she shrugs. "What if there is no explanation?"

"Jeanne," I caution her. "There's always an explanation. Even for you and Josh."

"Look, I'm a biologist. A plant biologist, maybe, but I know at least some of the animal side of things. A sociobiologist would say my relationship with Josh shouldn't exist -- he should be looking for a young thing he can make babies with, and I -- well, I shouldn't bother looking. Older women are obsolete in the biological world."

"You don't buy that," I challenge. "You and I are both here, and biologically, older women notice young men. After all, cougars exist."

Jeanne burst out laughing. "I'm hardly a cougar.  I'm a pretty solid woman who's grown comfortable with her single life. And then came Josh." She took a long sip of her latte. "I can't find an explanation. Society says -- those pesky sociobiologists again -- that women should have no patience with young men because they don't know where they're going in life. But then again ... " Jeanne paused for another drink of latte. "Then again, isn't the belief that any of us know where we're going to be tomorrow a bit of an illusion?"

I think of my marriage late in life, my developing career as a writer. "I think you might have something there."

"Understanding that something, anything can interrupt our trajectory frees one up to look at a situation differently. Stability has to be balanced with resiliency. Although evolution favors the random mutation that happens to work with change in lower creatures, humans can adapt on the fly to changes. So someone like me can be an outlier and maybe that's a good thing."

"Enough of the biology, Jeanne," I chuckle. "Why you and Josh?"

"I have trouble believing in mysticism, you know, but it's almost something like that. Like, when he showed up at that table that night, we connected. I do alone pretty well, listening to the music and typing on my computer, but when he showed up, I wanted to be in his presence. It was a momentary ego trip spending time with such a beautiful young man, I suppose, but it was more than that. It was like he said to me, 'I know where I want to go, and I want to go there with you.' And what he said made perfect sense, if I wanted to tell society to go hang. And I did. I never have regarded what I'm 'supposed' to do with much love."

"So you and Josh were supposed to be," I teased Jeanne. "Which flies in the face of biology."

"You would have to say that," Jeanne muttered. "I feel foolish looking at it that way."

"But that's the way Josh would look at it."

"Yes, it is," Jeanne mused. "And he might be right."

Pessimistically optimistic

I miss the boundless optimism of hypomania, that magic feeling when I step out of the house in the morning, and the sun shines just so, and I just know something magic will happen, because I'm blessed that way. 

I don't miss it enough to go off my meds, because without the meds my moods shift from elation to irritability to despair within a few hours. I have rapid cycling bipolar 2, so moods develop fast, like a volatile weather pattern. And that optimism could crash into suicidal ideations with the smallest speed bump in my life. The meds help, but anything from lack of sleep to a major stressor could derail my balance.

As a counter to my hypomanic pixie dream girl optimism, I have how I was brought up in a repressively Germanic family. The motto of my family was "Don't look forward to anything, or you might get disappointed." So normal me without the buoyant giddiness or the crushing despair hides in a coccoon of "This enterprise is doomed."

I have to learn how ordinary people experience optimism. I have a manuscript out to a major science fiction publisher. It's been there for three months. I expect to hear about it any day now. Because I've put so much work into the book I think it has a chance, I feel optimistic -- but I don't trust it because it looks like mania. Because I've gotten a number of rejections from this iteration of the novel from agents, I feel I should be pessimistic, but pessimism takes a lot of energy to maintain and optimism feels better.

So I'm waiting for a report on Prodigies, trying to tell myself that I'm going to get rejected and being answered by a bubble of optimism that I don't trust. My only answer is to hold onto hope and keep trying.
 

How I started writing novels

Well, I finally wrote/revised for three and a half hours yesterday, fueled by copious amounts of coffee. I didn't accomplish that much word-wise -- maybe 1500 words at most. But I think I'm getting closer with Gaia's Hands. Lots of work to go, though.

Gaia's Hands is my first novel. It's always been a problem child of a story. When I wrote it, I had no intention of writing a novel. I had written a short story based on a dream I had about an encounter between myself and a younger man. (If you think the dream had to do with the fact I was approaching my 50th birthday, you'd be right. And the dream was far more bizarre than anything I wrote from it.)

I wanted to know more about the dream, so I started doing a Gestalt dream analysis method where one tells the story from the viewpoint of the different characters, and even the important inanimate objects of the story. (I didn't go that far). During this set of writing exercises, a story developed. And then another.

After the third story that developed from the dream, my husband Richard looked at me and said, "You've got all these stories. Why don't you write a novel?"

I had never written a novel before because I think in terms of short stories -- small plots with big twists, big themes. Novels have big twisty plots, and I wasn't sure I knew how to plot those. I wrote Gaia's Hands anyhow. Its original name was Magic and Realism, and it was heavy in theme and extremely light in plot. It was basically a love story, and although I have nothing against love stories, the characters did little more than hang out together.

And then I wrote more novels, some of which collapsed into each other (For example, Magic and Realism became Gaia's Hands, and then it subsumed another novel during the same time period called Gaia's Eyes and that's the novel I'm currently re-editing) and somehow I got better at writing big twisty plots.

It's been a lot of hard work editing and re-editing, and then getting help editing from a developmental editor and re-editing, but I've learned my goal has shifted from getting published to getting good, then getting published. I don't want to grow to regret anything I've published.

I guess now I can call myself not only a writer, but an author, because I have devoted myself to growth. And it literally, cliche notwithstanding, started with a dream.

Questions I ask myself

Questions I ask myself while writing:

• Do my characters ring true?
• Do their emotions and actions fit their character?
• Does their trajectory make sense?
• Do I care about my characters?
•  Does the plot deliver?
• Does the plot build in suspense?
• Does the action make sense as it unfolds? 
• Do consequences logically follow actions?
•  Does the story flow?
• Is the time and scene progression clear?
• Does it avoid getting bogged down?
• Is too much going on at once?

I feel discouraged looking at all these questions -- how can I manage to do all this? Much of this happens subconsciously, or by trial and error. Sometimes it's hard, because I don't (obviously) write the whole book at once, but by bits and pieces. A lot of this I miss with my own tired eyes, which is why I have a dev editor and I let others read my stories.  

So in actuality, it's a matter of trusting myself, trusting the process, and just writing.

Time to Write?

Did I mention I've been really busy lately?

Monday through Wednesday have been dominated by doing moulage for a National Guard/FEMA training exercise called Vigilant Guard/Shaken Fury (I don't name these exercises). My husband and I contracted under Human Domain Solutions. It's an odd thing for me, a Quaker pacifist, to work with retired military and current Guardsmen, but they put up with me. We learned a lot about moulage from a fellow worker who has been doing this thing for over 20 years. 

Then last night I had to complete my latest class assignment because classwork comes first. And I managed to put in another 2000 words (some of it a re-add of a subtracted part) into the edit of Gaia's Hands. And submit my revised Apocalypse to my dev editor.

This morning I meet with my TA who's helping me organize and move around my office for greater efficiency, and then -- then I get to write again on Gaia's Hands.

And then I'm going to a writer's convention next (not this) weekend...

DIscombobulated

I really want to write today.

But so far, my calendar seems to thwart me from all directions. I have (another!) dental appointment* this morning, followed by a meeting with the outfit that is sponsoring the National Guard training which my husband and I will be doing moulage** for.  And, depending on how long that will take (too long, I suspect; I have no patience with dawdling) maybe then I'll have time to write.

I had great ideas last night for my rewrite/character development of Gaia's Hands, and of course I forgot some of it and I'm trying to piece the rest of it together with Richard***. I need a good stretch of time to write with more coffee to fuel me****. 

I've written today's blog and I have promised myself at least an hour on Gaia's Hands. Hopefully, I will feel inspired.



* I was born with an enamel deficiency and rather soft teeth; I have all my teeth crowned, but one or two of my teeth have broken off and require further work.

** Casualty simulation; making up volunteers to look like victims for training purposes. This run-through is an earthquake simulation to train the local National Guardsmen. For the first time ever, we're getting paid for it. Woo hoo!

*** Richard is the husband previously mentioned.

**** We're currently drinking our way through a coffee blend that is supposed to taste like chocolate; no matter how we roast it, we aren't getting any chocolate notes, just something that tastes like really good commercial coffee. Sigh.
 

Help! I'm so BUSY!

I'm sorry I didn't get to write yesterday, but I had work to do for my online class (taking, not teaching) and got some writing on the novel rewrite. And I had more work to do this morning for the class. AAAGH! 

I will get some writing done today. I will. I will ...