So I think I mentioned to y’all that I was doing some exploration to see what other foods in my diet are aggravating my inflammatory response other than beef. I’ve had a watch list and have eliminated a bunch of stuff. This weekend I was happily able to add bacon to the safe list. WOO! Y’all, you just can’t even know how happy that makes me. Because taking away beef AND bacon is just cruel. So, as far as I’m concerned, there is no higher point to my day today.
And that includes going to see the new Star Trek with hubby and FIL. Although I AM much excited by this. Benedict Cumberbatch has one of the best voices EVER. I love him in Sherlock, and I’m really excited to see him as a villain. But, yeah, bacon is that important.
I’ve been all busy busy busy getting stuff DONE this weekend. Yesterday I made dog food (a new experiment–Daisy’s getting on up there, and I’ll do ANYTHING to keep her as healthy as possible as long as possible), a fresh batch of potato soup, did dishes, 4 loads of laundry, rewired a lamp, did some grocery shopping, and gave Daisy a bath (which should TOTALLY be on Sparkpeople’s list of exercises you can track).
I’ve still got some stuff to do today before the movie too. In a bit I’ll start the chicken stock in the crock pot (from the chicken I used in the dog food yesterday). And I’m making a batch of blueberry ricotta muffins from the fresh blueberries I got on special yesterday. Need to finally list the old laptop for sale. I got the memory wiped last week, so it’s ready to go once I Windex off all the fingerprints. And we need to clean the inside of the grill. I forget what we cooked in the last couple of weeks that made a mess, but something. Need to clean it off before it gets practically permanently baked on. Then MOVIE TIME! Would you believe this qualifies as a relaxed weekend for me?
On a writing front, the high point of the week is that I finishedRiven. First draft came in at just under 55k. Took 100 days of actual writing, spread out over 241 days (I actually began this bad boy last September as a secondary project while I was writing DOTH, and then set it aside). It’s off to the Hammer and the Gobsmacker for critique, and I’m working my way through the toolkit for my next project. Whee!
Hear ye, hear ye! Yesterday I wrote “The End” on Riven.
It is no mistake that Snoopy is dancing with bunnies because that’s exactly what my brain is doing right now. During the last several months, I’ve been attacked NUMEROUS times by various and sundry plot bunnies. Mostly novel projects. A few short stories. I had a plan for how things would go next.
1) Send Riven off to CPs for feedback (done).
2) While it was getting critiqued, begin work deepening all the outlines for the various short stories I briefly plotted. See, we are beginning the hell months at work. We have SO MUCH GOING ON at primary EDJ with one project, another grant got funded (Yay, we all still have jobs!) and we’ll be hitting the ground running with that in July as soon as present crazy is over, and I’m still finishing up development of my new class to teach for fall for secondary EDJ. It doesn’t make sense to work on anything long or complicated. I figured I’d write a few short stories for release and be plotting out my next long project to start come August (which, due to said intensive planning, should go faster and smoother than DOTH did).
Someone woke me up. A very loquacious someone who was spilling out details of her story so fast, I couldn’t get to the pen and notebook on my bedside table fast enough to scribble it all down. I’d forgotten what this was like. Because the last time someone woke me up, it was Elodie, and I got Red out of the deal. The easiest book I’ve ever written. A book that was simply open vein, insert quill, take dictation. I haven’t had that since Red, probably because of that whole stint I took turning myself into a machine instead of a writer.
I’ll take this as a sign that I’m back on the right path creatively. Not going to make any assumptions that this book will be as easy as Red. There’s necessary worldbuilding–lots of it–that needs to be done. Some historical research. An alternate history to write. It’s a lot more up front work than Red was (and, let’s face it, Red was a very simple and straightforward kind of story, set in our world, where the only huge decisions were what the origin of the curse was). But I am SO FLIPPING EXCITED about this book.
Sela’s (Sela is the shero) been trailing me around all week, talking non-stop. I have created a toolkit for the book, a playlist in Spotify, a seekrit Pinterest board for inspiration, have done spreads on my shero and hero, both general personality stuff and character arc. All while trying to tell her, “Girl, I really have to finish this other book first. If you’ll stop waving that gun at me, really, I can get this out the door and give you my full attention.” Finally, she did.
So that’s it. That’s the great derailing of my sensible summer plans. I won’t be writing short stories (well, I might try to squeeze in one). I won’t actually even be writing any of the books that I thought I’d be writing next. I’m wholeheartedly embracing this rabid bunny and making it my own, crazy bulging eyes, pixie stick-ridden nose twitch, and all. It’s big, full length, and complicated.
And I can’t wait.
As for Riven, as soon as I get that back from CPs, I’ll have a better handle on how long revisions will take. At present, I have -13 Faith in my ability to judge the quality of my own work, so I truly don’t know whether this will be a simple week’s worth of smoothing and tweaking, or if it will be something longer. I am trying not to think about what The Pink Hammer or the Green Gobsmacker might do to my book baby. The Hammer at least looked at it around the midpoint, so I am pretty sure it isn’t anywhere near the mess that DOTH was. Anyway, once it is back, I shall make revisions and then, THEN, dear, wonderful, patient readers, I shall release it into the world! That’s right, this is a self publishing project. It came out a weird length (planned as a long novella, ended up a short novel at 55k), and I wrote it to go with a cover I commissioned more than 2 years ago for a book that ended up NOT fitting the arc I created in the Mirus world (and let me tell you, that’s a challenge–thinking up a NEW story to go with the imagery and title of an already existing cover…). Anyway, I hope y’all end up loving Ian and Marley as much as I did.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just heard the cocking of a musket behind me. Sela says break time is over it’s time to get to work.
Sometimes I love the Universe because it dumps exactly what I need to hear in my inbox or my Twitter stream exactly when I need to hear it. So I had to share this week’s messages from the Universe with you, in case you needed to hear them too.
First up, David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, which offers up a valuable lesson to us all about how THE WORLD DOES NOT REVOLVE AROUND US, and we contribute to our own misery by thinking that it does, and how we have a choice to make in how we view the world. Anyway, go watch it, it’s awesome.
Second, the latest thought provoking post by Justine Musk that really hits on why so much of what I read just doesn’t work for me–it doesn’t GO THERE. Worth reading the whole thing (it’s pretty short), but the part that really gelled for me was this:
Origin means the point at which something comes into existence: the source. To write in an original voice means to write from your source. Every story in the world has been told a million times…except when filtered through the prism of your perspective, your experiences and talent and worldview, grounded in the details of your private landscape. To write this way, original and fierce, means to show yourself, and not the glossy and practiced persona but the creature who lives behind that.
Latest From Pots and Plots
