It really took this long for me to get back on board with the book. Wednesday I finished the alpha build of a chapter and began doing what will be, for now, a final revision. It’ll be edited and rewritten at least twice more before I’m happy with it, but that’s left till once all the chapters are done – no point doing final editing when I’m not sure what’s going to happen yet.
While I’m happy to have gotten back into the grind a little bit, I’m rather disenthused that a full three weeks passed without me getting anything done. Compare that to January where I managed a chapter every week. I’m not sure whether the blame lies more with school eating at my available hours, the exciting but time-consuming increase in outside consulting website work, my endless frustration and rage at Mid-Hudson, or just a general lack of dedication. I get distracted and pulled away when I otherwise shouldn’t be.
At the beginning of this year I outlined all the writing projects I wanted to tackle:
1. Continue to publish the short stories that I’ve written. It’s an easy project and I’ve had some amount of success with my recent KasmaSF publication. There’s also another story currently in the strongly possible maybe stage.
2. Continue to write short stories as the ideas crop up. So far I’ve had plenty of ideas, but no completed stories.
3. Finish the novel I’m working on above – a story I’ve dabbled with for three or so years now.
4. Edit some of my other stories and manuscripts – I’ve done this somewhat but not to the degree that I’ve been hoping for.
5. Finally, I had another substantial novel idea that I want to work on. As always the issue is time, but in this case I may have solved the problem. First, I set up a WordPress Install to use a note-taking platform. Second, I opened up part of the site to a friend of mine who had some interest in fleshing out the world. Third, I’ve set myself up a once a week quota for putting in entries. By bounding my own time (on both ends) I hopefully won’t stress myself out too much, but I’ll still be pushed toward an eventual end goal of collating everything together, smoothing out the transitions, and editing it into a final manuscript. Best part is I’ve got some help – I’m excited by using technology to facilitate a collaborative creation. The section is only pseudo-public right now so no links just yet – mostly because I’m worried about spam bots taking on my submission forms. Once I have those locked down I’ll see about showing off the terrible whirlwind of nascent ideas that forms my usual cognition.
Two final items:
I feel, if nothing else, a historical obligation to mention the Japan Tsunami. Watching the videos, you get an idea of just how shoddy our movie level CGI actually is – the real thing is still a thousand times more frightening and powerful. I’m not sure whether else there is to say – I haven’t seen too many of the numbers and no one quite seems sure about the extent of the devastation. The best I’ve heard is that the engineering was by and large phenomenal which probably saved a lot of lives. That’s even more impressive when you consider how rural the affected area mostly was.
Lastly – my favorite part of the internet for this week. The body as a machine. It reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes comics with the operators in Calvin’s body. Also I like the artwork – very Art Deco.
