Category Archives: WIP

Mid-November update

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Boring, NaNo, Personal, Self-publishing, WIP, Writing

≈ 8 Comments

My dad called me this morning to point out that I haven’t posted to my blog in a while. (Hi, Dad!) It’s only literally been a week since my last post, but maybe it was a long week.

In my life, the week included a lot of writing, some good time with a writing friend in Merritt Island, and an unfortunate gluten-reaction. I’m assuming now that it was a gluten-reaction, because yesterday I was pretty sure I would never feel healthy again and today I feel pretty okay. The fast recovery, for me, is one of the hallmarks of a gluten response. There’s no long, lingering malaise, just a reasonably swift move from “I’m clearly seriously ill” to “hmm, I think I’m okay.”

I’m glad I got back to “I think I’m okay” today, because I decided last night that I might have to reschedule Thanksgiving, which I could obviously do — none of my guests would be heartbroken to eat their turkey on Saturday or Sunday instead of Thursday and no one is traveling long distances to join us — but still, there’s something nicer about celebrating holidays on the day when everyone else is celebrating, too.

The combination of being sick and hitting the murky middle of Cici was not particularly good (nor tremendously bad) for my writing goals. Cici is currently floundering around in a spaceship, contemplating her life and ethical choices. I suspect that if I ever decide to let some beta readers have at her, the honest responses will range from “it drags a bit in the middle” to “it gets really boring at about 35K words.” Fortunately, it’s NaNo and I don’t need to care about that — all I need to do is keep pouring words out onto the page and hit that end-of-the-month writing goal.

After that, I can think about what comes next for Cici, whether she gets shared with a few friends or revised mercilessly or stuck in a random folder on my computer, to languish unseen. Or, possibly, sent off as-is (more or less) to drift unnoticed on the sea of casually self-published books available on Amazon. She’s not in a genre likely to sell much, so it doesn’t make any practical sense to spend months polishing. Plus, I’ve got other impractical promises to keep regarding my time, notably for poor Fen who has been waiting years for her turn on the screen. But Cici has some very entertaining moments, at least to me. It’s been lovely to be flat-out amusing myself with my words and not worrying about anything else.

Another snippet:

She screwed up her face, wrinkling her nose. Her mouth felt weird. Her lips, in particular. She tapped them with her fingers.

Yep, weird.

She tapped her cheek. Also weird.

“Was that drink poisonous?” she asked.

Huh, those words had popped right out, too.

“The algaro? No.” Seven returned to his chair and frowned at her. The other two were doing something with the trough and the dogs were doing something, too — eating, probably. Cici hoped they weren’t eating the people. But she couldn’t hear any screaming, so they were probably fine. Her eyes didn’t want to focus and it was taking all her concentration to keep Sevyn in sight.

“Feels like poison,” she said. She didn’t feel particularly emotional about it. She would have thought that being poisoned would be upsetting, but she didn’t feel upset. She felt quite tranquil, really. But maybe that was a side effect of the poison.

“It is not poison.”

“Alcohol is poison, though.” Cici tapped her other cheek. Did they feel different, her two cheeks? Was one more numb than the other? She tried the first one again. No, they were about the same. Both feeling very weird.

“Algaro is fermented blood. The level of alcohol in it is very minor.”

Cici stopped tapping her cheeks and replayed his words in her head. Fermented blood. Fermented…

“Ew!” She jumped to her feet in protest and nearly fell over. Her feet were numb, too. “Fermented blood? Why would you feed me that? That’s disgusting!”

“It is an honor offered only to Players.” Sevyn put his hand out as if to steady her, but Cici batted it away.

Blood-drinkers.

They were blood-drinkers.

There ought to be a name for that. A disgusting name. A name that implied horrible things.
A name that revealed them for the monsters that they were.

“Mosquitoes,” she spat out. “You people are mosquitoes.”

Yep, I make myself laugh. 🙂

Cici and the Curator

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in NaNo, WIP, Writing

≈ 12 Comments

I meant to write a blog post yesterday, being as it was Monday and all, but I didn’t. (Obviously.)

I did, however, write 2468 words on my NaNo project. Per my usual daily word counts, it would have been an absolutely spectacular day — I consider myself doing okay anytime I break a thousand, doing well when I break 1500. However, on Sunday I wrote almost 2600, so yesterday wasn’t even the best day of the week. On November 4th, I wrote 3457, possibly making it my best day of all-time. (Not a sure thing, since I don’t generally track word count like this, but definitely close.)

In other words, my NaNo project is going well. I’m learning some interesting things along the way. Some of them feel like things I knew when I was writing fanfiction but forgot when I started writing for publication, namely 1) the person to amuse is me, and if someone else reads it someday and is also amused, that’s just icing on the cake and 2) get the story down, fix the words later, and if later never comes, so what?

But some of them are absolutely new to me. The most important of those is that choosing to go along with the story is so, so, so much more fun than demanding the story stick to the script. I had intentions for this story and multiple times now I’ve done something that three paragraphs or two pages later, I’ve had to say, “Oh, no, X won’t work, I screwed up.” In past projects, I would have gone back and fixed the problem or I would have deleted pages. Frequently, in past projects, I’ve gotten stuck for days at a time, finally decided that I was headed in the wrong direction, and deleted chapters or more. In this project, I keep saying, “I guess I’m headed someplace else,” and letting the story take me where it will. Obviously, I have no idea whether this project will ever even be readable by someone else, but I’m having enormously more fun writing it than I’ve had while writing in… well, years.

And yes, that does mean I’m questioning my life choices again. Writing is more fun when it’s for me than when I have to care about the people who are going to leave me one-star reviews and let me know they’re disappointed that I didn’t write a better book and tell me all the things I did wrong and suggest that I should have spent more time editing. Ha. I have to admit that specific review kind of made me laugh. Seriously. Seriously! I’m glad I believe in karma.

I haven’t gotten very far with said questioning, though. At best, it’s realizing that I’d rather not have money thoughts mixed up with story thoughts, but then realizing that I seriously don’t have time to worry about that this month. This month, I have 50,000 words to write. This month, I have an entire novel to finish. This month, I get to have fun with the words.

And so, a random snippet, because while the words are imperfect and flawed and a rough draft (blah-blah-blah, excuses), they’re mine and I love them.

(The story begins here.)

Cici and the Curator snippet:

“One?” Cici asked brightly. Human generic but something about his attire looked familiar, as if it were a uniform she ought to recognize.

“No, thank you.” He pronounced the words carefully.

Not a native speaker, then.

“I search for my captain,” the man said. “It is that I believe that she came here a few days ago.”

Cici’s heart stopped beating.

Not literally, of course. If it had literally stopped beating, she would have been dead. But it felt like it stopped beating, like every drop of blood in her veins froze in place.

“Oh?” she asked, keeping her voice as casual as possible. “We don’t allow guests to stay in the exhibit overnight.”

“No, of coss not.”

Not unexpectedly, it was the same slithery accent as the blue woman had. But this man looked nothing like the blue woman.

Cici felt almost indignant about that. If he’d been blue, if he’d had orange eyes, she might have had some warning. She would have known what to expect. She would have been prepared for trouble.

But this guy just looked like a guy. Well, maybe his skin was slightly purple-tinted and his eyes perhaps were more to the yellow than those of the average human being. Still, she wouldn’t have recognized him as related to the blue woman.

The man held up a picture. It was the blue woman.

“Can you tell me if she was here?”

To lie or not to lie, that was the question.

Cici licked her lips. “She was, yes.” She hoped she didn’t look anywhere near as nervous as she felt, but her skin was prickling like mad, and a dangerous heat was rising in her chest. “With two big dogs. Very big.”

“Yes!” The man flashed white teeth at her, looking delighted. “That is good news, very good news.”

“I didn’t let her in,” Cici said.

He deflated. “But no?”

She lifted a shoulder, looking apologetic. “The dogs, you see. We don’t allow pets in the galleries.”

“I see.” He frowned. “My captain, she is very…” He paused, seeming to search for the word. “Persistent.”

“She was, yes.” Cici didn’t say anything more. She let the silence stretch. Partially it was because she was trying very hard to channel her mother — no one in ten systems would dream of trying to interrogate her mother, she’d wither anyone who dared with a single look — but mostly it was because she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
Not one.

Her brain was totally blank, except for thoughts of the dogs sleeping in the lunchbox practically under her feet.

Please let them keep sleeping. Please let them have had enough lunch. Please let them not hear a familiar voice and come out to investigate. Cici had no idea who she was begging for help, but every thought she was capable of having was running along the same lines: Please let the dogs be good.

Good? A sleepy voice said in her head. Guard? Work?

With each word, the voice got a little more alert.

No guard, Cici said, trying to keep her mental voice calm and soothing. Sleep.

Sleep. Cici could practically hear the dog’s mental yawn.

Sleep, Cici repeated.

Meanwhile, with her actual voice, she was completely silent.

The man in front of her was moving his lips, soundlessly, and then he said, “Tell me what happened.”

Cici could almost see the waft of purple magic that flowed from him like air. It reached her and hesitated, flowing up and over her.

She didn’t change her expression, but her panic hardened into annoyance.

Magic? On her? How rude!

It was probably a truth-telling spell, or maybe a total-recall spell with a nudge of persuasion to force her to talk, but what kind of person used mind magic on a total stranger without permission?

She was tempted to turn him into a toad. Very tempted.

But that would just be doubling her problems.

In related news, in my spare time I’ve been having fun with cover designs. 🙂

Unrelated to anything…

12 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by in Randomness, WIP, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

Ilona Andrews had some great writing advice yesterday, of which my favorite line was Just write cool stuff to amuse yourself. And don’t look back until you are done.”

Today, I set out to follow said advice, which meant closing the two Scrivener files that I’ve been working on (which have not been amusing me) and looking for a file that I haven’t opened in a while, called something like Random Fiction. I should probably have just created a new file, because I wound up reading old story fragments instead of writing. I have a lot of story fragments. Trunk books, some people call them.

And you know, I was going to write something about common themes, things that must matter to me because they keep showing up in my random fiction words, but instead I think I’ll offer up another snippet and then go back to writing some more of those random words. I will just say, though, that it’s pretty clear to me that eventually I’m going to write a book with time travel in it.

A snippet…

Grace put her head in her hands. She could solve this problem. Of course she could. There was always a solution. She just had to think it through.

But her stomach felt like rocks had settled in it and her throat felt tight.

“I’m sorry to bother you, miss, but…”

Grace straightened so quickly that she nearly knocked the cup the old woman was extending toward her out of her hand.

The woman pulled it back quickly, but extended it again as soon as Grace was still. “I believe you might need this.”

“Need it?”

“Yes.” The old woman’s eyes were kind, her voice soothing. “It will help you.”

Grace’s eyes narrowed. “Help me how?” Her tone was unfriendly. The old woman might seem innocent enough, but Grace didn’t know her. And she had no reason to trust strangers. Not here.

The cup was a simple thing; plain white, but sturdy. The liquid inside it was a murky brown. The old woman pushed it a couple inches closer to Grace. “A warm drink always helps, doesn’t it?”

“Why do you think I need help?” Grace asked, but her hand lifted to take the cup.

“Oh, my dear.” The woman chuckled as she released the cup into Grace’s hand. “That man with you?”

“My father.” Grace stared into the depths of the liquid. It was dense, absorbing the light. She took a sniff. Nothing she recognized. Not floral, not fruity.

“He wasn’t exactly quiet,” the woman said. “Why I bet everyone on the square heard him scolding you. Not to mention your arrival. It was rather loud.”

“Was it?” Grace’s hand tightened on the cup. She could feel the heat of the drink through the smooth material. It felt nice against her palm. Comforting.

“Quite loud,” the woman confirmed. “Like an explosion. And then all that smoke. A bit messy, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t really have much to do with it,” Grace admitted. “That was all him.”

She looked around her. She hadn’t paid much attention to where her father had dumped her. He’d been angry enough that she’d been focused on him.

It wasn’t even her fault. Not really. Oh, sure, she had let that adventurer into the castle, but it had been cold outside. She couldn’t just let him freeze, could she?

Well, she could have. And she should have. But she’d been bored silly. It felt like winter had gone on forever and she’d been so sick of the snow and its eternal sameness. A stranger showing up had been a change.

And she hadn’t let him in because he was cute. Her father had been totally wrong about that. Sure, the adventurer was cute — Sam, his name was Sam. Sam was cute but it was not like Grace had known that when she let him in. He’d been all bundled up in layers and layers of winter clothes. She’d only discovered that he was cute when he’d warmed up enough to shed a few of his coats.

And it was so not her fault that Sam had gone exploring after she’d let him use the bathroom. What should she have done? Told him to pee in the corner, like he was a dog that wasn’t housebroken? Her father wouldn’t have appreciated that, either.

And how could she have anticipated that Sam would find the library? Well, maybe she could have predicted that. It was only two doors away from the bathroom, after all, and when she’d shown him where the bathroom was, the door to the library had been open, with the giant Book of Days open on a pedestal in the middle of the room. Maybe she could have guessed that it would look too interesting to resist.

Still, she hadn’t planned on letting Sam read the Book of Days. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong on purpose. She hadn’t deliberately disobeyed her father. She knew she wasn’t allowed to touch the book. And she hadn’t! Letting Sam touch it, well, her father had never explicitly told her that no one was allowed to read the book. Sure, maybe she could have extrapolated that if she wasn’t allowed to touch it, no guests would be allowed to touch it either.

But it’s not like they ever had any guests.

Really, it was her father’s fault. If he’d invited people to the castle now and then, like a civilized wizard, then maybe she would have known the rules for visitors.

But now this. She was sitting on the edge of a fountain in the middle of what looked like a major tourist trap. Cute little houses, cute little shops. It must be one of those historic recreation places. Like a Renaissance Faire, only not.

But as Grace spotted people peering out of windows at her, the rocks in her stomach sank even lower. The people didn’t look right.

Well, they didn’t look too wrong. Not like aliens or anything. They were normal people. But they didn’t look like the cheerful shopkeepers of a highly profitable, vacation destination. They looked like… shopkeepers of a small town in the middle of nowhere.

In the middle of no-when.

“What year is it?” she asked the old woman.

“Year? What do you mean?” The old woman looked confused.

“Year? Like, um, year of our lord, something or other, like that?”

“I don’t know what you mean, child. Perhaps you should speak to the priest?”

Grace bit her lip. Uh-oh. This was very bad news.

“Except…” The woman cleared her throat. Her glance around the square was almost a glare. “Except you might not want to do that.”

Grace followed her gaze. There weren’t lots of people, just a few. A sturdy man with a big red nose wearing a heavy apron, stained with splatters that looked like blood. A woman, hair pulled stringently back, wearing a less heavy apron sprinkled with flour. A lanky kid, taller than the woman, leaning over her shoulder. An old man, perched on a stump by a door…

Bad File Management & A Lonely Magic

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, A Precarious Magic, Cover design, Self-publishing, WIP

≈ 15 Comments

I started work on A Precarious Balance, sequel to A Lonely Magic, last week. I didn’t get very far, partially because I kept getting distracted by Grace, but also because I was flailing a bit. I’ve got lots of notes, and there were things I’d already written that I wanted to re-use, so I compiled everything into a Scrivener file and got started. But as I tried to write, I was having a tough time finding Fen’s voice.

I finally decided two days ago that I needed to re-read the book again and refresh my memory on all the details, not just the ones that I’d put into my notes.

I didn’t like it.

That was a weird experience. I don’t always like what I’ve written (understatement, yes), but I LOVED writing A Lonely Magic. It was so much fun and I liked being in Fen’s head so much, and her adventures were so surprising, and such a beautiful blend of things I enjoy, science and adventure and fantasy and romance. But four years later, I’m re-reading and I didn’t like her at all. She’s bland and a little whiny and annoying.

And then, at about the halfway mark, I read the line, “Her own reputation had been shot to hell even before she dropped out and she hadn’t given fuck one.” and the “fuck” was startlingly out-of-place. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the word, but it was pretty close. And I realized that the version I was reading — which was in Vellum, which is the software I use to create ebooks — was the version I had once-upon-a-time tried to delete all the swear words from.

I wrote about it at the time. I was tired of getting negative reviews about Fen’s swearing so I tried to edit it into a “clean” version, and I realized partway through that Fen’s cursing is part of her, that it didn’t work to clean up her language, and I stopped. It REALLY doesn’t work to clean up Fen’s language. She goes from a character who is internally tough, a fighter despite her relative level of helplessness, to a… well, leaf in the wind.

In the hotel room scene, Swearing-Fen is stuck because she’s considered her options and she can’t find a way out but you know that she’s still fighting, even if it’s only in her head. (She never swears aloud in that scene, it’s all in her inner dialogue.) In the same scene, Clean-Fen is stuck and she’s passive and helpless about it. She’s going along with what other people are deciding for her future because she’s got no choice. Losing her inner obscenities takes her from edgy and angry to blandly accepting. She is not an interesting character to me when she’s being bland.

Largely, I think, that’s a good realization to have. I can’t write a book with Clean Fen. She is not someone I want to spend the next six months with. But it was not at all a happy realization to discover that the version in Vellum was the bland version. That means that the one available online is also the bland version. I know that because I only have one Vellum file and it has the latest cover. But oh, what a screw-up. I suppose it doesn’t matter terribly if I publish another version online, but these were non-trivial edits. They changed the flavor of the story. I don’t even know how long that’s the version that’s been available. Sigh.

The good news, I guess, is that it doesn’t really sell much — 100 copies in the past 12 months — so not many readers are going to know or care. Yay for being an unsuccessful author, I guess?

It is interesting, though, as a writer, to discover how such a seemingly minor change can become so important. One of my favorite occupations is playing with ideas for book covers. I’ve got probably at least a dozen designs for A Lonely Magic that I’ve toyed with — it’s literally been published with at least five or six different covers, but I’ve got a bunch more that haven’t seen the light of day — but I’ve never been satisfied, because somehow I’ve never found one that conveys the feel of the book to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t really know how the book feels?

I do know that the last time I read the book, which was in a print edition just a few months ago, I laughed when I got to the ending. Despite all the reviews that criticized the cliffhanger ending, I never believed it ended in a cliffhanger, not once. Fen found family, she found magic, she’s in a safe place, she knows who wanted to kill her, she’s defeated the bad guy — what the hell is a cliffhanger about that? Except it’s totally a cliffhanger, because when I was reading it with the perspective of time, I ended it really, really wanting to know what happens next. Everything with Malik is interesting and even though he’s the bad guy, and his resolution technically doesn’t matter, I absolutely want Fen to figure out how he’s bound and how to get him unbound.

A few of the many covers for ALM that I’ve made and never used. Which one looks most like the story to you?

Sample cover for A Lonely Magic

another sample cover for A Lonely Magic


Grayton Beach State Park

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Campground, Florida, Food, Serenity, Travel, WIP

≈ 3 Comments

Grayton Beach sunriseBeautiful beyond words.

I used my grill twice, once for a hamburger that I ate with baked white sweet potatoes, and the second time for bacon. Bacon on a grill was… fiery. That feels like the wrong word, but I can’t find a better one. I had to throw some away after it turned into charcoal, and while I didn’t burn myself, I honestly don’t know how I managed not to burn myself. Seriously, the flames were leaping high. So that was an interesting experiment, and I will not be repeating it. I guess bacon is just not a food I get to eat while I live in a camper. But if yesterday was my last bacon, at least it was delicious: I mixed it in with scrambled eggs with cilantro, rice, and hot sauce, and it was very yum.

I met some fellow Travato owners and had a very pleasant hour or so chatting with them and seeing their camper. They’ve got the other model, the G, and they’re about two years ahead of me in traveling. It was so fun to hear their adventures — their favorite ghost town in Arizona, the restaurant parking lot where they spent the night in Malibu, the tram parking lot with the view of the mountains, the Walmarts & the beaches. They love their Travato for the flexibility, for the ability to just stay anywhere, and they’re very forthright about asking if they can park for the night. When they got here last night, the campground was full, but the ranger let them stay in the overflow lot — they were right on the water this morning, with a view that must have been amazing.

The writing is not going well, much to my frustration, and I’m starting to strongly suspect that I’ve caught a cold. But it is wonderful to be on the road again and going places.

Today is six months since I started this journey, an anniversary I very nearly missed until I was about to post, and blinking at the calendar wondering what was significant about January 25th to me. I meant to write about the highs and lows of my first six months when this day rolled around, but… well, I wasn’t thinking about it. And I actually feel like I’m kind of too busy living in one of the highs right now to write about the lows. I don’t even have words to express how beautiful this campground is, how perfect the weather, and how content and serenely happy I am to be here. I’m moving on today, though — the next campground is beckoning to me! — and that makes me serenely happy and also sort of bubbly with adventure excitement. Life is good. I guess that’s pretty my summary of my first six months on the road, too: life is good!

St. Augustine

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Boring, Florida, Pets, WIP

≈ 7 Comments

I am staying at a campground, a state park, on the beach. The lovely ocean with miles of sandy beach is easy walking distance away. And yet, I haven’t touched it and have only seen it once.

Traveling with dogs is totally worthwhile, but also more challenging than I expected. When I say “easy walking distance,” I mean easy walking distance for Zelda and me, not for Bartleby. It would be a long, long walk for him and an even longer walk for me if I wound up carrying him. But that’s irrelevant because dogs aren’t allowed on the beach. If I wanted to go to the beach, I’d have to leave both dogs behind in Serenity.

Want to know what else is not allowed? Leaving your dogs unaccompanied at your campsite. And actually, I’m pretty sympathetic to that one: the chance definitely exists that both dogs would bark in misery the whole time I was gone, if I wanted to leave them, which I don’t.

So I’m at the beach, but not enjoying the beach. Fortunately, I am enjoying my campsite. It’s pretty and big and quiet, tucked back in a corner of a reasonably empty campground. Two nights ago I was a little freaked out by its isolation as I listened to very loud rustling in the bushes, but I finally dug out my flashlight and shone it out on the raccoons climbing the tree about ten feet away from my window. I was then still a little freaked out — raccoons are kind of big when they’re so close and there were two of them — but hey, it wasn’t a bear or a serial killer, so I did relax enough to go to sleep eventually.

I’ve also had some really lovely walks around the campground. There’s a loop called the Ancient Dunes loop, which is supposedly a pleasant half hour walk (presumably for people who aren’t being walked by a fast-paced Jack Russell terrier), but is a fun up-and-down trek on a sandy path through the Florida forest. Lots of mosquitoes, of course, and they do love me, and a few too many spiders who built their webs across the path — sorry, spiders, for destroying all your hard work, and ick, ick, ick, spider webs on me — but it’s so primeval that you can almost imagine yourself in the Jurassic. Well, or at least a few hundred years ago. I think the trees are probably all too small to be good dinosaur territory. And the occasional signs explaining the history and the plants sort of destroy the impression. But it’s still fun to be taking our usual morning walk through such different territory.

 

I haven’t made nearly as much progress on Grace as I was hoping for — it’s been hard to get back into the rhythm that I had going so well in Vero Beach and I swear that the mere existence of NaNoWriMo now causes my writing ability to freeze solid — but I’m hoping for today to be a better day. So hi-ho, hi-ho, off to write I go.

Quick post

20 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Randomness, Tassamara, Travel, WIP

≈ 6 Comments

For the past three months, I’ve written some… but I’ve also worried that my plan to live in a camper and write a lot was maybe not really going to work out. Because living in a camper is great, I adore it, but the temptations are endless, far more so than living in a house (where I was also not getting enough writing done!)

There’s always some new place to see, some new adventure on the horizon. And I’m not talking about big adventures — whitewater rafting or mountain-climbing — but little adventures. Taking the dogs to a new dog park, spending an hour exploring a new grocery store, finding a way to get my laundry done. And also, of course, visiting people and spending time with them instead of staring at my computer.

However, my plan to sit still for ten days and bore myself into writing has been working incredibly well. I am really happy with what I’ve accomplished with Grace. Lesson learned: I’ve now scheduled the next several weeks and they’re not going to be adventurous. Until Grace is finished, I’m going to sit in Serenity. But I’ll be living in Tassamara, at least in my imagination, and really, it’s a pretty darn fun place to be.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be back at this campground: it’s basically a parking lot and there are a lot of parking lots in the world to explore. No need to stay at the same one twice. But apart from the wonderful dog park, which we have visited every single day, I’ve really loved walking in the dark here. It’s the time of year — it takes forever to get light in the morning, so I’ve been walking Z before sunrise and it’s getting dark early, so I’ve also been walking her in evening darkness. But it’s been incredibly beautiful. The moon was fantastic the past few days, so bright, and the sky was clear enough to see stars, not by the hundreds, alas, but at least by the dozens. In the early morning walks, I cast multiple shadows on the ground, moonlight shadows and streetlight shadows and shadows from lights showing up in trailer windows.

When I write my Massachusetts stories with magic (someday, someday!), there will be at least one character who can send her shadows off to do odd jobs for her. And in a desperate moment, she will search for lights to create many shadows, and in another desperate moment, she’ll be trapped in darkness, unable to find a shadow anywhere.

Someday on this trip — maybe even before I make it to the Grand Canyon — I’m going to visit a place where I can see thousands of stars in the night sky. I want to have that moment of amazement and wonder, that hold-your-breath awe at the beauty that lurks above us all the time that we hardly ever get to see.

But today, I’m going to write some more Grace.

Vero Beach

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Bartleby, Grace, Pets, Travel, WIP, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

I’m attempting to bore myself into writing. So far… eh, it might be working, but if so, it’s going slowly. Maybe by Monday I’ll have made some real progress.

I’m staying at the same campground for ten whole days. And not a beautiful or fun or inspiring campground — a parking lot campground. In fact, when I first got here, I thought it was creepy as hell. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay even for two days, much less ten. The next day (aka yesterday) I realized the creepiness — a general impression of a ramshackle, disheveled ghost town — was the result of the hurricane. It’s actually been sort of fun to watch them clean it up, one stretch after another going from debris-strewn to neat and tidy.

Plus there is a lovely huge fenced field labeled a dog park. I’ve been working steadily during the past eleven weeks on improving the dogs’ stays and recalls and a big space gives them a chance to really practice. Alas, status quo remains: Z is a rocket scientist and B has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I tell Zelda to stay and she sits and trembles and waits as I get farther and farther away, until finally I turn and point at the ground and she barrels toward me at joyous hyper speed, her ears trailing behind her, as if she actually thought I might leave her behind. B, on the other hand, bounces along two steps after me no matter what I say or do. But hey, eight more days in this park gives us a lot of time to practice.

Especially because I’m trying really hard to not let myself do anything but write or knit. No reading, no television, no internet browsing. Walking dogs and any form of exercise, okay. Eating, yes (obviously!); planning and cooking elaborate meals, no. I’ve given myself permission to write anything so I’ve written lots of personal babble, but I’ve also done plenty of staring at Grace. And enormous amounts of daydreaming. I wish more of it was daydreaming about Grace, but at least some of it will work its way into future stories. I love lines of thoughts like “People who feel rejected do stupid things: if Fen felt rejected, I wonder what she would do? If you had magic and felt rejected, hmm…” And off my brain goes. It’s so nice to feel like my daydreaming might be useful.

My sister tells me that I write about Z a lot and rarely about B. I’m not actually sure that’s true but just in case she’s not the only one who wants to know how they’re doing with the traveling lifestyle…

B loves it madly. He is more energetic, more rambunctious, happier and bouncier than he has ever been. He gets adored in campgrounds: all small children instinctively gravitate to him and he takes their attention and sticky hands as his due. He has entirely stopped hiding under furniture and in closets, perhaps partially because there aren’t a lot of places to hide in Serenity, but he doesn’t even try anymore. Instead, he cuddles up next to me and suggests I pet him. And he’s looking great, too. People have commented that he’s lost weight and he might have, but he also just seems sleeker and shinier and healthier. And happier. In Massachusetts, I very confidently said, “B doesn’t play,” just as he tore across the room and grabbed a tennis ball ahead of Z before returning it to my uncle, tail wagging.

Z, on the other hand… I think she likes parts of it. She likes our morning walks. She likes exploring new places, sniffing new smells. But it also seems to stress her out more than I expected it to. She’s gotten even pickier about her food, often rejecting her kibble entirely, and she’s seriously clingy. She’s always been a very attached dog — the feeling is mutual, I’m very attached to her, too — but her level of worry that I might disappear entirely seems to have increased. As long as she’s touching me, she’s calm, but she seems more high-strung and anxious than she used to be. Her separation anxiety isn’t manifesting as destructiveness, thankfully, but it’s hard to leave her. Although now that I’m analyzing this, she has adjusted to Serenity as home. She’s fine about being left in Serenity now. She’s just not fine about being left in other people’s houses, which I’ve had to do because it’s been too hot to leave her in the van when I can’t run the AC. Hmm, so I just need to go to colder climates to keep the dog happy. Works for me. 🙂

But not until I finish writing Grace, so I had best get back to it!

Yoga

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in Grace, Reviews, WIP, Yoga

≈ 4 Comments

I haven’t been making it to yoga at the Y nearly as often as I would have liked. Partly that was motivation: with C gone, it was harder to get out of the house at the right times. Partly it was bad planning — I kept intending to go to evening yoga instead of morning yoga so that I wouldn’t be so tired in the afternoon that I didn’t write. But then I’d forget or be busy and miss the evening class. Last month, though, my favorite yoga teacher left the Y. And I knew that given my future plans, I’d be needing to come up with another solution if I wanted to keep yoga in my life.

So question one: did I want to keep yoga in my life? Easy answer: yes. As with any exercise, I struggle to get motivated. I don’t love pushing my body and it’s always easier to just sit and do nothing. But yoga enriches my life, brings me a sense of peace, helps me feel stronger and more competent, doesn’t push me harder than I want to go (hanging out in child’s pose is always an option in classes at the Y), and has generally been an all-around positive for me. Even though I’ve been going weeks at a time without making it to a class and haven’t been choosing to practice at home, I knew I’d regret it if I just stopped.

Voila, yogadownload.com. Holy cow, this place is a bargain! I didn’t want to only stream classes because I know my future life is not going to be friendly to streaming (mobile data plans are expensive and limited) so I bought the $90 elite membership, which gives me a year of free downloads of their own classes and streaming episodes from their content partners.

So many classes! So many options! So many choices to work any part of your body or to have whatever kind of yoga experience you’re looking for! I keep winding up downloading more than I can feasibly do because I’ll be looking for a class that fits one idea and I’ll see so many that interest me that I wind up with three or four. Dorm-Room-Yoga (to see if it could be future RV yoga), Moon Salutations (because it was short), Sunset Flow and Night, Night, Don’t Sleep Tight (because it was the evening), Yoga Break for Writer’s Block… I’m downloading ALL the yoga.

And so far the classes have been great. Clear videos, good teachers, reasonable expectations. There have definitely been moments where I have to pause and try to figure out what the instructor is doing and a couple times that I’ve been like, haha, isn’t that cute, NO!, to poses that abused my knees more than they could bear, but I am without question going to get my money’s worth from that $90. I’ve done yoga three days in a row, two classes on Saturday, and the reason I’m writing about it right now is mostly because when I woke up this morning, thinking about what I needed to do today and what I wanted to do today, yoga was at the top of my list. Yay! My Future Me is going to be very grateful to Present Me for being willing to include more exercise and stretching in our life.

Anyway, if you’ve ever been interested in learning more about yoga, but group classes seemed too ambitious or you didn’t want to over-commit, yogadownload offers some free classes or you can pay by the class or package if you don’t want to commit to a subscription. That said, the Elite membership is really a bargain.

In other news, possibly more exciting, I — for the first time ever — found an ending for Grace and Noah. I’ve had an ending for the book, a place where I thought it would close, and I’ve sort of had a scene in mind for Grace and Noah, but one of the reasons I’ve just been wallowing around in this closing third act for so long is that I didn’t see and couldn’t get to a HEA or even HFN (happy-ever-after/happy-for-now) ending to the romance. I think I found it on Saturday. Still not there, but it’s like sighting land at the end of an ocean voyage that’s been taking forever. So my other goal for the day — write lots of Grace! Get myself to that ending!

Mother’s Day

09 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Grace, Mom, Movies, Personal, R, Randomness, WIP, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

On Saturday, I was bracing myself for the Mother’s Day blues.

Five years ago, I didn’t see my mom on Mother’s Day. I called her, I expect, but I didn’t do flowers or a card or a gift — I was in grad school, quitting my job, life was busy. I didn’t know, because we so rarely do, that it would be our last holiday. I don’t feel guilty about that — she would scoff at me if I did. But I do think of her and miss her more on the holiday. At the best of times, it’s still a teary holiday for me. And this year, R was busy with finals, so I expected a solitary day. As I said, bracing myself.

Instead, there was an after-dark knock on the door on Saturday evening. I went to answer it with trepidation, that sense of ‘uh-oh, who could that be?’ But yay! It was R, home to surprise me, and a delightful surprise it was.

Instead of my solitary day, I made us a big breakfast and then we headed off to our annual Mother’s Day super-hero movie tradition. We saw Captain America: Civil War, which was unexpectedly good. I’d been careful not to read or see anything about it — I actually didn’t want to be spoiled, because my expectations were so low. I usually don’t mind spoilers, but in this case, I anticipated that spoilers would reveal things that would make me unhappy and I didn’t want to dread the movie, if that makes any sense. But it was surprisingly enjoyable and far more fun than I expected it to be.

Afterwards, he worked on his final papers and I thought about Grace. Didn’t write a word, but did finally decide to go backwards again. R came into my room at one point and I told him I was debating throwing the whole thing away and he forbid it, very sternly, so I guess I’m not doing that. But the last six weeks of words just don’t work for me, so I’ve deleted them from my file (saving them, of course, for when I change my mind again) and am starting over again from the point where I think it stopped working. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to re-use some parts, but I’m going to work on writing it as if it’s a clean slate.

Meanwhile, a friend taught me to knit on Saturday, so I have been knitting and thinking and knitting and thinking. No words written (unless I count these) but at least I’m not feeling frozen anymore which is how I spent the last week. I’m trying to remind myself to put progress before perfection, like a good positive discipline parent.

But I’m also thinking that maybe knitting would be a good metaphor for how I should be treating writing. Because in my knitting, I’m trying really hard to focus on process, not product. I finished off my first skein of yarn, and then I ripped it all out and started over. Not because I was worried about it not being good enough, but because the point of knitting for me is not to produce usable objects, but to have the mindful meditative process. I’m trying to find flow states, not create scarves. Maybe I should be treating my writing the same way. The goal isn’t to produce an end result that follows other people’s rules of storytelling and satisfies every single person who ever picks it up — the goal is to love what I do while I’m doing it.

Process, not product. It feels right. So now let’s see what the words are like when my only goal is to enjoy writing them.