Dragging Myself Out Of My Cave
Jan. 6th, 2013 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madwriterI'm not dead, as the saying goes, I'm just mostly on Facebook.
Busy-ness and forced not-busyness over the past three weeks, two of which I was off for Christmas Break, and only one day of which saw any writing (1800 words in an hour's writing sit-down between a day spent running errands and such). My schedule has changed indefinitely for the better where writing is concerned, though, so I may be able to do some catching up starting this week.
The busy-ness, the good reason for lack of writing productivity: I spent six days over the holiday with my sister, niece, and nephews. This has been a tradition every year since my brother-in-law died five years ago and left behind my sister and three kids who were just wee things then, but those visits are usually three or four days. Six is a nice new record, and not something I would mind repeating either over another holiday or when I come for extended visits during the summer.
The first full day after I was back from the visit is when I knocked out the aforementioned 1800 words, part of chapter 8 ("Copper Heart") of Arizona. The words ended 1856 and pushed me past the 225,000 word mark. That night I started getting sick.
It wasn't the worst ailment I've ever had--worse than a regular cold but much easier to deal with than the stomach flu, so borrowing the curse word that isn't, I simply refer to it as the Phuntugranous Crud. It didn't make me so uncomfortable that I couldn't stop reading, and I even did a bit of Arizona outlining. But it did fog my head enough to keep me from writing, and the Writing Room isn't heated anyway except passively via other rooms, so I didn't suspect trying prose would be a good idea.
I can at least say that on midnight of New Year's Eve, I was on a mountain. It just happened to be the mountain we drive over to get home when coming back from Laurie's folks' house, where I'd spent most of the day curled up on a couch under a blanket.
Not to mention I haven't been home much because we effectively have no water in our house. Actually the water comes in just fine, but it doesn't want to leave. Run it for more than a few minutes, or flush a used toilet, and it backs up into the basement. The last two back-ups included sewage. So laundry is courtesy of a laundromat, showers are in other houses or with a kettle heated on the stove, and bathroom trips require some elaborate and extensive logistics. My only visit to the Writing Room today was to snag a library book that I was returning.
But there is hope on the writing front. Starting tomorrow, my normal schedule--going in at 2 p.m.--gets bumped back to 4, since we don't have any student workers closing the library this semester during the week. I do my best writing in the late morning to early afternoon, so the later start means more writing time. The complete opposite of last year, when I spent six months working 10-12 hour days. This is all assuming the drainage issue gets fixed, but at least it opens up more time when I could run home and snatch some prose.
I've been working on Arizona for 15 months now, and my intent is to finish it this year. By summer, preferably. At that point The Matter of Camelot will be out barring any problems, and I want to be able to devote a good bit of time to marketing it, including finally gritting my teeth and having an author webpage by then. Having the Giant Novel's first draft finished by summer would certainly make the business side of this business go a lot more smoothly.
Busy-ness and forced not-busyness over the past three weeks, two of which I was off for Christmas Break, and only one day of which saw any writing (1800 words in an hour's writing sit-down between a day spent running errands and such). My schedule has changed indefinitely for the better where writing is concerned, though, so I may be able to do some catching up starting this week.
The busy-ness, the good reason for lack of writing productivity: I spent six days over the holiday with my sister, niece, and nephews. This has been a tradition every year since my brother-in-law died five years ago and left behind my sister and three kids who were just wee things then, but those visits are usually three or four days. Six is a nice new record, and not something I would mind repeating either over another holiday or when I come for extended visits during the summer.
The first full day after I was back from the visit is when I knocked out the aforementioned 1800 words, part of chapter 8 ("Copper Heart") of Arizona. The words ended 1856 and pushed me past the 225,000 word mark. That night I started getting sick.
It wasn't the worst ailment I've ever had--worse than a regular cold but much easier to deal with than the stomach flu, so borrowing the curse word that isn't, I simply refer to it as the Phuntugranous Crud. It didn't make me so uncomfortable that I couldn't stop reading, and I even did a bit of Arizona outlining. But it did fog my head enough to keep me from writing, and the Writing Room isn't heated anyway except passively via other rooms, so I didn't suspect trying prose would be a good idea.
I can at least say that on midnight of New Year's Eve, I was on a mountain. It just happened to be the mountain we drive over to get home when coming back from Laurie's folks' house, where I'd spent most of the day curled up on a couch under a blanket.
Not to mention I haven't been home much because we effectively have no water in our house. Actually the water comes in just fine, but it doesn't want to leave. Run it for more than a few minutes, or flush a used toilet, and it backs up into the basement. The last two back-ups included sewage. So laundry is courtesy of a laundromat, showers are in other houses or with a kettle heated on the stove, and bathroom trips require some elaborate and extensive logistics. My only visit to the Writing Room today was to snag a library book that I was returning.
But there is hope on the writing front. Starting tomorrow, my normal schedule--going in at 2 p.m.--gets bumped back to 4, since we don't have any student workers closing the library this semester during the week. I do my best writing in the late morning to early afternoon, so the later start means more writing time. The complete opposite of last year, when I spent six months working 10-12 hour days. This is all assuming the drainage issue gets fixed, but at least it opens up more time when I could run home and snatch some prose.
I've been working on Arizona for 15 months now, and my intent is to finish it this year. By summer, preferably. At that point The Matter of Camelot will be out barring any problems, and I want to be able to devote a good bit of time to marketing it, including finally gritting my teeth and having an author webpage by then. Having the Giant Novel's first draft finished by summer would certainly make the business side of this business go a lot more smoothly.
