Five A.M.?

I am decidedly not a morning person, so it was with some dismay that I found myself wide awake sometime before 5:00 this morning and unable to go back to sleep.  After a while I gave up, got up, and started up my computer to do some more work on the last round of edits for my novel.

In my CD player: Aarktica's No Solace in Sleep.

Visitations

I was sitting at my PC, doing not much of anything since I've got a headache, when I suddenly heard an owl hooting. Since I live in the suburbs, this isn't exactly an everyday occurrence, and since I love the sound of owls hooting I stepped out the back door to hear it better. While I was looking for the owl (a great horned owl, by the sound of it), I saw a large, bright falling star, which streaked due west from almost directly overhead. I love shooting stars, too, and this one would have been worth sitting outside and waiting for, but there it was, right when I stepped out of my door. Then the owl took off from its perch in a nearby tree and flew nearly overhead, an indistinct shadow against the dark blue sky, on its way to the neighbors' yard and beyond.

Tomorrow is Monday, and I'll be getting up early and trudging out to my day job, with the whole work-week ahead of me. But tonight is a night of stars and owls.

Surprised by sehnsucht

Yesterday I surprised myself by ordering the two Narnia movies on disc. This was something that, before yesterday, I had been quite sure I would never do, because the Narnia books have been my favorites since I first read them at age seven. I wasn’t sure I wanted the movies’ vision of Narnia to displace the one in my head, so I’d decided to limit my exposure to them.

As it turns out, it took only the tiniest of things to change my mind on this. Friday night (well, Saturday morning, actually, just before I awoke), I had a dream in which I saw part of one of the movies and, in the dream, changed my mind and decided to buy them. Later in the day I remembered the dream, and suddenly realized that, despite the films' shortcomings, I receive from them the same overall feeling that I get from the books--the feeling C. S. Lewis refers to as "joy" in Surprised by Joy.

While looking at a couple of reviews of Prince Caspian (trying to figure out whether the three-disc version had anything to recommend it over the two-disc version), I saw one that mentioned Lewis’s use of the German word sehnsucht for that same feeling. Apparently it has a significantly deeper meaning than the usual translation of “longing”; but I’ll let you check out its wikipedia page for more details on that. It’s probably the best reason I can think of for buying a movie (or a book, or an album, or whatever).

Where does the time go?

I just now realized that I haven't posted since November. Sorry 'bout that. I was quite sure I'd written at least one post sometime around Christmas, but apparently what happened was I started writing a post in Word, offline, and then forgot to finish and/or publish it.

So, here's what I've been up to:

While plotting out my next novel (the one I was expanding from a novella-length rough draft), I kept thinking about a different story idea. It's an idea that's been in my head for at least ten years, and which I've been putting off working on till I was a better writer since of the many ideas I have waiting in the wings, this one's my favorite.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that if it's my favorite, then it's the idea I should be working on right now, especially if I would like to be a better writer--because the best way to get better at this sort of thing is to take the idea you like the best and put everything you've got into it. The more you care about the idea, the less chance there is that you'll settle for second-best from yourself, right?

So what I'm working on now is preparatory research, reading books about folklore and the Middle Ages (among other things); this is all stuff I should have been already studying, since I knew I'd be writing this book someday, but I'm a natural procrastinator (as you can see by a quick glance at my posting frequency).

A larger story

I reread the novella that I’ve been trying to condense into a shorter story, and it was immediately obvious to me that there was too much going on in it to fit into one story, so I’ve been trying to split it into two separate, but connected, stories.

This, however, has not been working.  The different events are interwoven in the original version (more by accident than design), and separating them into two distinct stories seems to weaken both.  They need each other.

And so it is that I suddenly find myself working on a novel instead of a short story, which means doing a bit of outlining first to figure out which areas to expand and where new material needs to be added, etc.

I never expected to be the sort of writer who outlines novels before writing them, but in a way it’s turned out to be my favorite part of the process-- dealing with the plot as a single, fluid idea, rather than concentrating on the details.  It’s like sketching out the composition for a painting with broad, free strokes, working fast and loose.  It’s the part where I get to figure out what happens; writing the novel itself is usually a task of translating the vision into language (though there are still surprises, such as when I discover a character can’t follow the original plot because it requires them to do something that they wouldn’t actually do).

Books and more books

The local library had a huge book sale this week, and today was bag day ($2 for as many books as you could stuff into a paper bag).  Somehow, despite trying to keep in mind the fact that I was already out of shelf space and didn’t have enough room for the books I already had, I ended up getting six bags.  That’s in addition to the forty or so books I’d already picked up at the sale earlier in the week.

I really need to build some bookshelves.  Er, except that would require cleaning out the garage....

Speaking of books, I found myself overcome this weekend by a sudden strong desire to reread Jeff Smith’s Bone, which I’m enjoying immensely.  One of these days I’d like to get a set of individual hardcover volumes; what I’ve got right now is a one-volume edition, which at more than 1300 pages is thick enough to be a little awkward.

Doing the library thing

I recently joined LibraryThing.  This is one of those rare situations where my tendency to hang on to practically everything because “it might be useful someday” has actually paid off:  I happen to have an old CueCat USB barcode scanner that’s spent the past eight years or so sitting in a box of miscellaneous stuff; I got it when the CueCat company was giving the things away in malls, essentially pushing them into the hands of everyone who passed by.  So I dragged it out, declawed it, and started scanning.

Of course, a number of my books are too old to have barcodes, or ISBN’s, so entering a shelf of books is rather time-consuming.  But not necessarily in a bad way.

Now, it’s probably self-evident that time I’m spending on LibraryThing is time I’m Not Writing.  But this is one of those cases where the distraction (frolicking through my library, so to speak) is happening because I’m not writing, not the other way around.  Real-life stuff has been interfering with my writing time the past few weeks (I really hate it when that happens).  It’s mostly (but not entirely) an issue of having too many other things bouncing around in my head to devote proper attention to my stories.  Which is a good time to do stuff like cataloging things and blogging and redesigning web pages.

Newer project

I haven’t quite got the novella rewrite off the ground yet.  It’s one of those things where I’ll sit at the computer with the file open for several hours but will mysteriously fail to accomplish anything.  I think it’s mostly an issue of not being able to get my imagination really into the story, so I’ll probably give up my plan to rewrite it without looking at the original first.

I’m also working on a new short story idea, something that occurred to me a few days ago.  It’s pretty bare-bones and needs some creative development before I can start really writing it; I’m hoping to switch back and forth between the new idea and the rewrite, concentrating on whichever seems to be working best at the time.

New project

I’m writing again.  Well, more or less.  I haven’t got back up to full speed, but that’s not unexpected with a new project.  Actually it’s something of an old project -- I’ve started rewriting a novella I wrote about six years ago.  This is my second attempt at rewriting/revising it (the last attempt didn’t get anywhere).  I expect it to end up as a short story, rather than a novella--which would probably be a good thing, since I have the impression that novellas are particularly difficult to sell.

This one’s being rewritten from scratch, in the sense that I’m writing a new version without even looking at the old one.  Right now I’m working on the beginning, and realizing I may not have a strong enough idea of the setting.

Okay, technically right now what I’m doing is writing a blog post, obviously, and trying to stay awake (I’ve just made coffee).  But you get the idea.

Also, I seem to be over the flu.

Cough, cough, cough

Since last post I did in fact begin cleaning my studio (with partial success).  But then I was slowed down somewhat by catching a cold (second one in the last two months).  Then I spent a few days in Ohio for Franciscan University’s Alumni Weekend.  No sooner had I returned home, however, than I came down with the flu.  Which I still have.

So.  Progress on pretty much everything has ground to a halt, and will no doubt stay that way until sometime next week.

What I do when I’m not writing

I had a blog on another site for a while, which I kept primarily on the theory that if I made semi-regular posts announcing the progress I’d made on my novel, I’d be sufficiently embarrassed by my “zero progress” posts that I’d step up and get some work done.

It worked (for the most part), and I finished the novel.  Finding myself thus between projects, I decided on a brief hiatus in order to get some other stuff done (such as cleaning my studio), and I shut down the old blog at the same time.

I figured I’d get the new blog started early, partly so that I could announce a getting-back-to-writing date (the most effective self-imposed deadlines are the publicized ones), but mostly because I’ve had time to do things like get my Blogger account functional.  (I’m still experimenting with the layout and design aspects, so bear with me for a while).

In mid-October I'll settle on my next project and start writing again; that gives me just under a month to clean out my studio and garage, get my hard drive semi-organized, and work on a number of other little non-writing projects.  I was planning to do some new work for an art show that’s happening in October, but the time’s getting kind of short on that and my studio area is currently unusable.  So we’ll see.