I feel like I should start this post off in a very Garrison Keilor sort of way. Maybe something like, It was the first cool day of the season and it you could smell cold, like an old friend that had been absent for too long.
Cliched though it may seem, I think it's true.
I got some writing done this morning, and I think I'm pretty pleased with it, and though I'm in the middle of a tough sequence, I like what I'm doing. I'm writing this part where the narrator is in the main action, which I realize I haven't yet done. It's a scene that I meant to write much earlier in the story, but there were other things that needed to be done then, and it make sense here. I like the way that the narrative voice of the story is flexible, even if this section is a bit harder to write.
In other news, sort of rethought how TealArt is going to work as we go forward. Rather than be a blog in it's own right, it's going to be a portal--and umbrella--for a host of other projects, including this site, a very similar one that I'm pushing Chris to start, as well as projects like Station Keeping, the knitting project that I've been blathering about, and maybe a roundtable-style podcast that a group of blogging friends and I have talked about.
This is really just a reflection of the way that it's been for a long time, I'm just being more explicit about it, and I've tweaked how people enter the site so to shape this impression a bit, and I'm kind of happy with this. It solves a lot of angst, and is on the whole a good thing. I like how this frees up a lot of time in my life to concentrate on tychoish, which is a great deal of fun, and my fiction writing, which is really important to me.
The other thing that this lets me do, is be a contributor to other blogs, and projects, which is something that I've not had a lot of mental energy left over for, because I've been so intent on doing my own site. While this isn't a bad thing, and indeed rising tides do raise all boats, I think it's unfair to divide readers' attention with so much information, and I think at the moment it's more important to foster a collaborative spirit than it is foster an "every man for himself" kind of approach.
It just feels right. Like the first whiff of cold in the fall. I'm ready for this: both the coming winter and this next stage of creative/development.