Say, that doesn’t seem like a very productive week, does it? Well… let me counter that impression with a couple of pictures. The first is slightly misleading.
Why is this misleading? Because it implies a mathematical precision exists in the growth of what is, really, an organic structure. We don’t look at a basketball player and say, “That person is 114.3% tall,” right? So, on to the other, more completely accurate picture:
Yep. END. The story has run its course, the protagonist slumping off to face the rest of his life in the wake of the harrowing events laid out on the preceding 802 pages†, and I get to have a beer to reinforce myself at the prospect of the second draft (which I was already dreading as part of an entry in May). It may only be 97.9% of the projected length, but for someone who hasn’t a lot of novel-ing experience, and who a couple of times thought the plot was gurgling out of him much too briskly, I’m fairly proud to have landed that close to the target.
I’m trying to decide now whether I give myself a bit of a break and work on a short story or two, or if I should just get onto the smoothing of this roughly-gouged bit of word-granite into something that actually looks like a viable novel. I believe that I’ll decide this at leisure, over the course of the weekend. Under the influence of large beer and strong drink. You know, like those writers you see in movies.
†You see the format of all those pages, of course. If my estimates are near correct, that’s just shy of 300 pages of legible, typed material. I ain’t no Stephen King, nor any George R.R. Martin (yet)‡.
‡This parenthetical barnacle may be considered a sign of raging hubris. I’m sure I’ll get over it as the magnitude of the work ahead of me becomes apparent and notes from my helpful readers begin to appear.
This popped up a lot over the weekend. It’s a little dated, and a little stilted perhaps, but it’s still worth a look, especially if you find yourself uncertain in your thinking on events in Charlottesville .
I try to not use language here, but I’m stealing a policy statement from another, much better known, blogger:
Fuck this fucking Nazi bullshit.
And to expand a little, because I like to think of myself as a tolerant guy, I’ll point you to an article which I agree with on the subject of tolerance. Some behaviours which are inherently intolerable.
A short week, we having celebrated “OK You Can Have A Long Weekend In August” Day on Monday. That last entry was actually run out at home, making it one of perhaps a half-dozen generated there. I expect I’ll be doing some work on the novel tomorrow, rather than my usual lunch out, to satisfy my own sense of devotion to the work. Here, have a look at how things stand:
I am, as it happens, right in the middle of the climax. This is fantastic, from a standpoint of the climax landing just about exactly where I’d hoped it would, but it is also amazingly frustrating because I have all the words surging about in my head right now, and if I could actually convince the whole world to ignore my existence for… I’ll say a solid five hour block of time, I could get it all out in a single session rather than stuttering along for a few pages before Mr. Slate yanks the pteranodon’s tail to announce the end of lunch. And I can’t just say to the family “I’m not actually here” in the evenings, because my wife has a role in a stage production of A Turn of the Screw and rehearsals are every damn night this week– the son wants a companion and the wife can’t drive. I got duties.
I came to discover recently that I have been letting my site slide into squalor. Of course, with a vast media empire such as mine, it’s not surprising that some elements suffer occasional neglect from the not only the owner, but even the managers and frontline staff.
…all of whom is me.
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone seeking a thoroughly incomplete but slightly helpful set of data which resides on my page for Swan pens. Or rather, it should reside there. The sender of the note had been disappointed to find instead a sullen note from Dropbox that they’d stopped letting all and sundry wander into the castle, tracking up the carpets and pointing in an ill-bred manner.
Oh, dear.
I thanked this confidential informant and set to work on fixing the problem. Once I had it sorted on that page, it struck me that I was using Dropbox for several useful little tidbits, mainly scans of instruction booklets from ages past that I wanted to share with the world. The problem had become a hydra. Then, as I landed on another page that needed attention, I found a deeply unlovely image where there should have been a picture:
Do NOT go to that URL
On the older incarnation of my site, I had trouble uploading images, so I relied on… the service named above. At the time, that service was fairly benign. When I committed the overhaul of the site, the uploading of images was not longer a challenge and I had taken fresh pictures in which one could make out little details like “Which end is the front?” What I forgot was that there were several images over on that service which I deemed at the time sufficiently adequate in illustrating a point to bring over. Thus, as word that this service I decline to name (to keep from helping their search engine score) had ceased to be benign and was in fact a heaving mass of pop-up ads and annoyance filtered into my consciousness, it never occurred to me that I should react. It is also likely that the lazy element in my subconscious glanced at the news, decided it would be too much work to do anything about, and concealed it from the more active parts of my make-up.
“As ye sow, so shall ye reap” is not quite apt here; the usual crop of laziness is loads of extra work, and I don’t see the equivalence. In any event, when I realized what a dog’s breakfast some of my pages had become, I grasped the nettle and did what I could to put it right. If you flip through the site, or indeed the back issues of this little enterprise, you will find no other reproductions of that nasty extortionist of an image, and so far as I can discover no disappointing billets doux from Dropbox.
However… I know that the real solution is to host my own images, and this I have not done. My brother and I both have lamentably image-intensive sites, and neither of them brings in vast heaps of money (his more than mine), so I’m loath to suggest that we pay for more storage, and even more loath to suggest that I take over more of what’s there. Thus, I’ve made a problem for another day by stuffing all these things on what are currently benign third party storage.
I just hope Google and WordPress don’t get all grabby about their monetization, the way… that other service… did.
That is the catch-phrase for an old radio programme, called Lights Out, which presented listeners with creepy stuff. What stands in for this week’s film is not an episode of that; it is, however, a reading which I think you would do well to listen to in a dark room with no other distractions.
If you hear a slight humming noise, it may well be me in my excitement at being so close to finished the first draft. The climax is not quite underway, but the fuse on it is burning and about to enter the touch-hole.
That’s a rather better week of it. The summit is at last in view, too– I’m only about 90 pages from my goal. This is good news, because what little I know about pacing is shouting at me that delaying the climax much based on where the story stands now is not wise.
I also want to be slightly self-congratulatory about this weeks perseverance, as yesterday saw an honest parade of painful stupidity at Regular Job. I was able to grunt through it for the noon writing session, but at the cost of forgetting completely to reply to some emails from people seeking work on their pens. I’d best get at that, eh?
18 manuscript pages (thin air up here. Thin indeed).
The annual summer silence is about to descend on this enterprise, as my two weeks away† from The Regular Job begin on Monday. Of course, the way things have been running lately, the interruption will be almost imperceptible. As it ever the case, I’ll hope to get some writing done around the expectations of family and fabric of the house without expecting to. This will make for a good deal more physical work than last year, carting the giant heap of paper home and then shifting it out of the way while doing whatever it is that gets in the way of writing is; we remember that another translation of codex is “lump of wood.”
We will try to overlook a more colloquial use of the word by native Latin speakers; blockhead. I’m sure I shall feel like one in a fortnight when I’ve failed to advance the work beyond its current state, however much I hope to.
Here’s a chap messing around with a pen. I occasionally do stuff like this… in one corner of a page, for about two minutes. I don’t devote quite the level of resources to it that he does, either; nice paper, boutique ink. Very inexpensive pen, though, which is worth pondering.
The trick will be to not see any of that stuff when you close your eyes to go to sleep tonight.
This week was a bit of a struggle, and not for want of inspiration or direction. I knew exactly what the scene at hand was to be, but I was doing something terrible to the protagonist. I’ve done plenty of terrible to other characters, mind you, and the protagonist has been dealing with the fall-out from it, and even witnessing some of it, but that’s all comfortably fictitious supernatural terribleness. This week the terrible was of a true-to-life nature, the sort of thing that happens all the damn time in the news and which makes us all shake our heads and wonder at the base nature of humanity.
What made this hard is that it wasn’t something that was done to the protagonist; it was something he did. Given who I modeled him on, and who the inspiration for his victim is, it was a steep bit of the path to the summit. All the more so because I can imagine the sort of assumptions that will get made post-publication; if the author wrote this, then doesn’t it stand to reason he thought thus?
No. No it doesn’t. That’s why the slow progress. I was axle-deep in cognitive dissonance.
Also, you’ll note there that I flatter myself with the notion that there’s going to be publication. Vanity still has a seat at my table.
OH! I forgot, in all that– srtuggle or no, I’m out of the red at last:
