There was an art fair next to an local-artisan fair today, this morning, that I’ve gone to a lot when I’m in town. It’s sort of near where we used to live, though I don’t think we ever lived there while this was going on. I don’t tend to get things at art fairs, which is fine. It’s fun to watch people, and I like looking at art; having said that, I did get a bracelet and a necklace: two things which I’ve idly been looking for for a long time. The bracelet is a brushed stainless steel, very solid, and quite nice: I have a tendency to erode any metal that’s on my skin for any period of time. Call it my super power. The necklace, is just a blue and black glass pendant, square and black, with a blue thing in it. The cord is a thin black rubber thing, and I suspect I’ll move over to a black leather strap at some point, but for now it’s fine.
I’ve been reading through the novella, and making a few minor changes. I was inconsistent in my spelling of a character’s name. Don’t worry I’m not a weird SF namer, the name was Gus, I just thought it needed two s’s sometimes. I’m worried that the beginning and the end aren’t consistent with each-other in terms of tone and style, but this is a neurosis that I need to deal with. I want to sift through it so that I can catch the worst problems, but I’m not changing anything big, because I want to see how it all plays. I have a list of first readers that I want to get it out to really quick, so that I can take a break from it in earnest.
I’m still planning out the novel. This ones, sort of tracks some of the questions that I’m interested in playing with in my academic work, and I think the story is pretty interesting to boot. I’m still working on developing various elements and parts of the story. Every so often I take a page of the moleskine and say, “here’s what I know about this part of the story,” and I’m finding that there are fewer places where I sort of draw a box and say… “something happens big” each time. So I’m getting there, but I need to get clearer with the fact that this planning is really crucial to the writing process, and should count as writing. I think I get pretty caught up in the word-count as a marker of progress that I forget all of the “work in a generous sense” (yuck it up guys) that goes into this process.
One of the things that I’m struggling with is that I want part of a section to “feel” like a computer/video game. There are a number of reasons for this, which I think would require too much explanation, but I think it works. My issue? Never played a video game with a plot. Sure, I had some fun in some of the flight-simulator-esque games, where you fly around and blow things up, but I never payed attention to the story. I’ve come to understand that there are a lot of these games which are quite like novels in the way that they tell stories and what not. So I need to pick the creative mind of some game designer (is that the right word or does that mean the folks who write the programs?) Those of you with writing podcasts, cough Mur and Matt, take note.
And other than that, things are chugging along. I have an office that’s great, I have furniture in my room that you can actually sit on. I’m busy, which is a little stressful, but really I like it this way.
Be well, and I’ll be around more in the coming days.