Surfacing
It's been more than two years since my last post here! Holy cats! I am, however, actually alive and kicking--and even writing!
Sort of.
Since my last post, I've been swamped with meatspace-life stuff, but I haven't been completely detached from writing, at least in 2015: Last year, I published one more book (Tesserae) and a short story (Bryn's Folly, which is set in Harper's universe.)
The other works in progress I mentioned in the last post are still chugging along, albeit far more slowly than I'd like. I'm about 12,000 words into Harper's sequel, tentatively titled Thora, and have done some outlining and other architectural design for the other two books in the Mythic Cycle. Tesserae's sequel, Worlds Away, is about 75% done. It needs just a bit more expansion and a few revision passes before it gets sent off to my editor. I'm hoping to have one or the other of those out sometime next year. The next standalone book, Mother of the Moon, is getting its chapter-by-chapter outline, and there are a good half-dozen others I'm doing synopses and bibles for.
Still, bandwidth to write has been in short supply lately--as has bandwidth to read.
Writers, like all creators, are supposed to be well-versed in the other works in their field. This isn't just to check out the competition, but to keep one's own skills sharp by observing other writing styles and story angles. Over my lifetime, I've read hundreds and hundreds of books, of course, but in the past few years, my to-be-read pile never seems to get any smaller. I have been keeping up with stories in other formats: There are probably 10 TV series I watch, as well as following the MCU movies and other big-screen flash and dazzle, and I certainly do read an awful lot of non-fiction in the form of news and current-events commentary. But actual books? Not so much.
In the past few days, I've finally started digging in again (and will be updating my "currently reading" list shortly), and I've realized what, aside from sheer time, energy and focus, the big roadblock to doing this has been: When I read, I want to write, and for the past year, I simply haven't been able to.
As some reading this may know, I have ADD, among a handful of other things, and for a writer, that can be pretty darn debilitating. When you're trying to weave together several different character threads and plots and do necessary research and go back and revise when something's not working out, having a brain that won't let you just sit at the damned keyboard and do it is aggravating.
When I'm in writerbrain mode, I can write for literally 12 hours straight, and tend to do a lot of all-nighters, as I focus best when the rest of the world is quiet. When there's other stuff going on around me, it's all I can do to barf up a political-rageflail Tweetstorm, rave about some show or other on Tumblr, or make a Facebook post about something hilarious my kid said. I've been trying to keep my writing skills from disintegrating by doing a bit of fanfic here and there (hey, it helps!) but anything longer than about 1,500 words takes far too much mental bandwidth to complete. It's possible I could switch gears and start doing more short stories like Bryn's Folly, but when I'm doing original fiction, I tend to have long-form plots that need more room to grow, and I haven't had the chance to let that happen because of other stuff going on in my life.
I'll spare the irrelevant details, but the short version is that we've had some icky day-care issues, which has meant I've had to put my work aside for a while to concentrate on caring for my son. This is a sacrifice I knew I might have to make when we made the decision to adopt (and which I will have to make again, as we're working on the process to adopt another baby within the next year), and he is my first priority, but it's still a bit frustrating. I hadn't realized how much I would miss having the freedom to write whenever my muse started thumping the inside of my skull.
It seems that in my efforts to keep that muse from turning my brain into mush, I've also inadvertently started avoiding anything that would inspire her too much. While I get inspiration from just about everything I do and experience, and also get plenty from video and other storytelling media, a book is the one thing that is guaranteed to make me want to go park myself in my office for days on end. Ergo: trying to pretend I don't even have a to-be-read pile. The only book I've managed to complete in the past ten months or so is the novelization of The Force Awakens, both because I loved the movie and wanted to see some expansion on it, and because it was written by one of my all-time favorite authors, Alan Dean Foster. Everything else I've tried to get into I haven't really gotten more than about a quarter of the way through before the drive to put it down and go write something of my own got overwhelming, and I had to stop.
The fact that I'm writing this post, however, is a good sign that things might finally be looking up. It hasn't been an easy transition, but I think we may have finally found a decent pre-school situation for our son, which means I will finally have multi-day stretches of free time in which I can actually let myself exist almost entirely as a brain and a pair of typing hands. Bedtime reading of other folks' work thus is also ramping up. If I get an idea, I can make a note about it on my phone and then have a fair chance of actually expanding on it the next day. What freedom!
As this happens, I'm probably going to be head-down doing my damned job, and thus won't really have the time to be an active presence here, but I do hope to try to keep things more regularly updated, especially as I start getting closer to actually releasing something again. I may of course totally disappear again should my son's care situation not work out, or should we get chosen by kid #2's birthparents much sooner than we would expect (it usually takes about a year), but for at least the next few months, I expect I'll be regularly putting on my author pants again. And oh, how I am SO looking forward to that!
Sort of.
Since my last post, I've been swamped with meatspace-life stuff, but I haven't been completely detached from writing, at least in 2015: Last year, I published one more book (Tesserae) and a short story (Bryn's Folly, which is set in Harper's universe.)
The other works in progress I mentioned in the last post are still chugging along, albeit far more slowly than I'd like. I'm about 12,000 words into Harper's sequel, tentatively titled Thora, and have done some outlining and other architectural design for the other two books in the Mythic Cycle. Tesserae's sequel, Worlds Away, is about 75% done. It needs just a bit more expansion and a few revision passes before it gets sent off to my editor. I'm hoping to have one or the other of those out sometime next year. The next standalone book, Mother of the Moon, is getting its chapter-by-chapter outline, and there are a good half-dozen others I'm doing synopses and bibles for.
Still, bandwidth to write has been in short supply lately--as has bandwidth to read.
Writers, like all creators, are supposed to be well-versed in the other works in their field. This isn't just to check out the competition, but to keep one's own skills sharp by observing other writing styles and story angles. Over my lifetime, I've read hundreds and hundreds of books, of course, but in the past few years, my to-be-read pile never seems to get any smaller. I have been keeping up with stories in other formats: There are probably 10 TV series I watch, as well as following the MCU movies and other big-screen flash and dazzle, and I certainly do read an awful lot of non-fiction in the form of news and current-events commentary. But actual books? Not so much.
In the past few days, I've finally started digging in again (and will be updating my "currently reading" list shortly), and I've realized what, aside from sheer time, energy and focus, the big roadblock to doing this has been: When I read, I want to write, and for the past year, I simply haven't been able to.
As some reading this may know, I have ADD, among a handful of other things, and for a writer, that can be pretty darn debilitating. When you're trying to weave together several different character threads and plots and do necessary research and go back and revise when something's not working out, having a brain that won't let you just sit at the damned keyboard and do it is aggravating.
When I'm in writerbrain mode, I can write for literally 12 hours straight, and tend to do a lot of all-nighters, as I focus best when the rest of the world is quiet. When there's other stuff going on around me, it's all I can do to barf up a political-rageflail Tweetstorm, rave about some show or other on Tumblr, or make a Facebook post about something hilarious my kid said. I've been trying to keep my writing skills from disintegrating by doing a bit of fanfic here and there (hey, it helps!) but anything longer than about 1,500 words takes far too much mental bandwidth to complete. It's possible I could switch gears and start doing more short stories like Bryn's Folly, but when I'm doing original fiction, I tend to have long-form plots that need more room to grow, and I haven't had the chance to let that happen because of other stuff going on in my life.
I'll spare the irrelevant details, but the short version is that we've had some icky day-care issues, which has meant I've had to put my work aside for a while to concentrate on caring for my son. This is a sacrifice I knew I might have to make when we made the decision to adopt (and which I will have to make again, as we're working on the process to adopt another baby within the next year), and he is my first priority, but it's still a bit frustrating. I hadn't realized how much I would miss having the freedom to write whenever my muse started thumping the inside of my skull.
It seems that in my efforts to keep that muse from turning my brain into mush, I've also inadvertently started avoiding anything that would inspire her too much. While I get inspiration from just about everything I do and experience, and also get plenty from video and other storytelling media, a book is the one thing that is guaranteed to make me want to go park myself in my office for days on end. Ergo: trying to pretend I don't even have a to-be-read pile. The only book I've managed to complete in the past ten months or so is the novelization of The Force Awakens, both because I loved the movie and wanted to see some expansion on it, and because it was written by one of my all-time favorite authors, Alan Dean Foster. Everything else I've tried to get into I haven't really gotten more than about a quarter of the way through before the drive to put it down and go write something of my own got overwhelming, and I had to stop.
The fact that I'm writing this post, however, is a good sign that things might finally be looking up. It hasn't been an easy transition, but I think we may have finally found a decent pre-school situation for our son, which means I will finally have multi-day stretches of free time in which I can actually let myself exist almost entirely as a brain and a pair of typing hands. Bedtime reading of other folks' work thus is also ramping up. If I get an idea, I can make a note about it on my phone and then have a fair chance of actually expanding on it the next day. What freedom!
As this happens, I'm probably going to be head-down doing my damned job, and thus won't really have the time to be an active presence here, but I do hope to try to keep things more regularly updated, especially as I start getting closer to actually releasing something again. I may of course totally disappear again should my son's care situation not work out, or should we get chosen by kid #2's birthparents much sooner than we would expect (it usually takes about a year), but for at least the next few months, I expect I'll be regularly putting on my author pants again. And oh, how I am SO looking forward to that!
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