Category: death

Rehab

After not formally writing for a week and half, I feel as if I should be entering rehab; I have (looks about) five pages of notes from downtime at DayJob and quiet times about my house but when I just didn’t the time to sit down in front of the laptop.

That came to an end today.  Daughter #2 off on a cancer fun-raiser, wife doing something about the house somewhere… I’d no more excuses.  I fired up the pellet stove in the basement and came down thirty minutes later to write.  So far, it’s working.  3k words of Faustina’s recover in the Knoxville hospital flowed right out.  There’s much there:  her physical condition, the reaction of her family to her injuries, and her fervent desire to return to “her boys” as soon as she is able.  It will be a balancing act for her, in, I think, three parts.  Here’s part one.

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Savannah 3/3

Needs work.  Couldn’t quite get into the proper groove of things this weekend:  post Christmas and Daughter #1 back to college.  It was nice to have her home for three weeks; of course she’ll be back in five days as she wanted to come with us to Ohayocon on the 10th-12th.  That’s my weeb girl!

This is enough that when I rewrite it and edit it into a novel that it will work.  As any regular reader knows, I keep things sparse and terse.  It might be a little too terse here.

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Accelerationism

I have a small, local Author Fair coming up on 9 November.  What if, I wondered, I not only had “Worlds Without End” finished – in less than ten day from now – but what if I also had “Crosses & Doublecrosses,” the third novel I began but set aside over three years ago as 1) I was not old enough to write it, and 2) it is a god-awful story I hated living in, complete?  Is that possible?

I just completed the basic MS.  Grammarly is chewing through it in the the background while I write this.  I have reached out to my current cover designer to sound him on this; that will likely be the determining factor.

Still… I would be something:  a novel and novella, 100k words, all commercially out in less than six weeks.  Irrational deadline drive me; can I make this one?

Below the fold is the last thing I wrote for C&DC:  its Prologue.  There’s closure for you.

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Satur-Date!

Finally!  Saturday and it’s time for Arpad and Lily’s date!  Here’s the lead in and parts one and two.  I’m hoping to see part three (when they talk together in the park) later today and tomorrow.  My goal is have their last scene – which is going round and round in my head – no later than Tuesday.  After that I will turn my attention to my “Worlds Without End” edit to get it released by 30 September.

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Departing Friends

I am, by many measures, a failure as a human.  I have no empathy, no sympathy.  I am not emotionally expressive.  This past weekend we saw Daughter #1 formally off to college.  My wife was a wreck.  I gave my girl a hug and said “call or text if you’ve problems; later.”

It’s not that I don’t have and express emotions, it’s that I choose where to do it and even then can get blind-sided.  I thought the short story of “Old Friends” was going to be a harmless reunion.  Until I was more than halfway into the project did they show me that John Brunelli was unwell.  Nichole’s reaction to that was so severe that I was unable to write.  Yes, you read that correctly:  a character’s reaction to a revelation in my own head was so strong I couldn’t function properly.

I was finally able to sneak up on it in pieces.  I could split it, but why make y’all any more miserable than I was?  Here’s the last part of “Old Friends.”  I so need to write something light and fluffy next…

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