Sometimes you suddenly realize you’re approaching the ending…
…and sometimes you realize you’ve got elements to pull together.
This necessitates thinking.
A lot of thinking.
So……….I’ve been thinking. And thinking. And watering the plants. And thinking.
I needed certain people to fess up what they’re up to and talk to me, if not to Bren.
It’s amazing how, once you’ve gained that, you realize the answer is in there and has been, and that’s what your hindbrain has been seeing for a week that your eyes just haven’t spotted. Lizard-brain has a lot to recommend it.
Meanwhile Jane’s river-viewing lantern has fallen over, dumped its top into the pond, and dropped the protective net down onto the surface, so I am going to have to go out there in the cold and the rain and fix it: having the net on the surface is hazardous to the fish, the lantern can’t spend the winter in the pond, being only painted concrete, and I’m going to have to put on the rainsuit (if you have to work outdoors in spring and fall I cannot recommend these suits highly enough: get them in the ‘hunters’ section at Walmart) and do some postponed maintenance. A high wind threw over Jane’s pretty new garden swing and bent two of the canopy supports. I think we can get a new bit of aluminum tubing for that, painted with Rustoleum.
Jane’s helping me get Rusalka into shape for release. I’d done the original file straight into html, and it turns out there’s no way to coerce that into a 6×9 inch fixed-page format for PDF. PDF hadn’t been one of the formats we were using when I set this text up; but it is now, so Jane is fixing it—she was ahead of me in that. So I’ll do the wandering around in the rain and the cold.
We are both soooooooo tired. The ‘vacation’ we had wasn’t a vacation: it was a working trip, and I exited it twice as tired as before. She was tired-er than I was. So we’re both just falling on our faces. We haven’t gotten back to the rink yet—the living room is a mess. I have a stack of boxes of books to sign that came I think in July and those need to go—but sometimes things just become karma, and they’re depressing. We had the kitchen all cleaned up and then all the plants came inside for the winter and occupied the breakfast table, the plant table, and now the side table, besides sending Jane to the ER and shedding all over the kitchen, and now I barely have room to work in there. We’re just drowning in things we have to do, and there seems daily something that we just concentrated all our effort on that’s become inundated in another tidal wave of ‘stuff’ that’s not where it needs to be and shows no inclination to move on its own. I’m behinder than I was, which is going some. I’m oversleeping by 3 hours every morning, and it’s still not helping…whine, whine, whine.
Just gotta get off my butt and do it, is all.
My thoughts on the progress are that you will get it when you get it. If all you had to do was sit and write all day, and have no other cares, such as taxes, publishers letters, etc., etc., then I would say, yes, you’re whining. But seeing that you have many things that you need to do, as well as want to do, before Old Man Winter comes knocking, then I think we can be patient with Bren’s progress. after all, you just got Deceiver out this spring, it’s only been 6 months, and you’ve been working on Closed Circle, getting the eBooks done, working on the pond, the yard, the basement, everything else.
Get your proper rest. Otherwise, there might not be any more books in Bren’s future because the author is burned out.
Second that. Take a few days to organize your thoughts, recover from all your hopping about, take care of small stuff that will give you a feeling of accomplishment without being too onerous. Recovery time can be just as necessary as task time.
I hate when I get stuck thinking for weeks. Well, it feels like weeks anyway. I often find a change of perspective is necessary. In art sometimes we draw what we think we see, rather than what is really there in front of us. Human nature, I suppose. So in order to break past that falsity of vision, it’s useful to turn the painting upside down, reverse it in a mirror, look at in in black and white. Something about that change causes the brain to seek new connections, measure more accurate proportions, and ultimately find what was missing.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple in writing. It’s a completely different part of the brain where those ideas live, one that can sort out those connections given enough time and space to ruminate. A nice feeling to have captured the elusive answer, with or without Bren’s insight. I hope it means a tricky plot twist he never sees coming….
I commiserate with the both of you on the rest of it. Life is hard. Having stuff is hard. Having stuff that has no home is the worst. Maybe you guys can start over in small ways that wouldn’t feel overwhelming. A tiny bit of sacred personal space each that is free of household disaster for the benefit of your mental well-being. I can almost manage it in my studio if I absolutely, without fail, put everything away and clean up Saturday mornings. By the end of the week, it’s always disaster, but it’s not endless disaster. Every Saturday afternoon it’s a very nice place to be. 🙂
I believe Ilisidi might recommend that you eat, rest, exercise. Didn’t she once tell Bren something of the sort? We who love hearing Bren’s story will wait.
Here’s a suggestion for how to go from HTML to paginated PDF. This won’t work for Windows, but if you have a Mac, you can open up the HTML in Safari, and set the page size. Then Print, and Save As PDF. If the layout is relatively simple, like your average novel, it should work pretty well. Doing the same thing on Windows is a little trickier. If you have a tool for creating PDFs, you may be able to do something very similar. Of course, by now you’ve probably already done this or something similar.
OpenOffice can do it, I think. I know it can save in PDF format, and it can read both HTML and Word (not the most recent formats, AFAIK, but certainly older ones).
Pottery and writing use different parts of the brain, but putting stuff on the back burner can go a long ways toward solving a problem. I find that messing around with pond, pool and plants *really* help. At present I am getting the sunroom cleaned and plants in before the hysteria of first frost, while thinking about a bunch of whistles I need to decorate. BUT, sometimes it takes staring out the window and letting my mind go blank to solve a problem. Then I just have reconstruct my generally cryptic notes. 8)
Take care of yourselves. It sounds like you both are close to empty. This may be a dumb suggestion, but do you think that a few hours spent skating might give you more space? )-D
@rbriggs1201, thanks for the suggestion I like it. 😉
If I recall correctly, Bren has to let things simmer on his “back burner” to let the subconscious figure out what the heck is going on behind the scenes. That’s his “tingling” feeling, or whatever it is that signals he needs to stop trying and let it come when the facts get sorted out and the path is clear.
Pick up your guitar, dust off the strings, rebuild your calluses, get some of that back, then maybe Bren and company will be more cooperative.
The universe is like a novel, and we’re the characters in it. It was set up to write itself; I wonder who reads it.
Perhaps, Mana-Yood-Sushai, when we wakes?
Little off subject. I was just looking on Amazon. I see that they have “Betrayer” listed for an April release
Thanks, Tin. I never know these things!
To be more precise, “Betrayer” is listed as being available on April 5th. The same day as Jim Butcher’s next Harry Dresden novel “Ghost Story”