Here’s something Lisa sent me a few days back. Interesting (and, as she said, Cute!)

But today nothing seemed to want to come.

Then I struck on a sentence that did not have anything to do with this story I’ve been working on. Not having anything else to do, I opened a new file and wrote down the sentence. Then came another sentence, and another and … well, you get the idea.

So now I’m a thousand words into a story that I have no idea where it came from or where it’s going. Really strange feeling. Is this what woke me up? Did this story demand that I refrain from going to sleep again? Did it know that if I lost consciousness again it would be gone for good? Was it fighting for its life there in the early hours of Tuesday morning?

Am I just over-analyzing the snot out of this?

Maybe the answer to all of these questions is the same.

But it’s also a major time sink. And given that time sink, it’s also a major worry. that worry being this: if I’m not participating, I’m not succeeding.

As you can tell, I’ve been away from the keyboard often recently. The day job has been monstrously huge for the past six weeks or more, and there have been vacations and events and travel both within the US and international. I barely have enough time to write a little, better yet read, and better yet keep up with the blog and my fledgling attempts to absorb what Twitter can do for me. And that’s the order of priority–family & work, then writing, then fitness, then reading, then socializing, then anything else.

I admit that I’ve gotten a bit worn down the past couple weeks, and allowed the “anything else” to step in front of socializing–just because it’s easier to sit like a lump on the couch than to actually think.

Regardless of any particular order of priority, I wanted to take a moment to say that one of the things I don’t like about this new and wonderful world is the aspect of competition that seems to be inherent in this social element of the game now. By that, I mean that by stepping out of the blog for a week or two, I find myself feeling that I’m losing ground to everyone else–that going silent is akin to not swimming in the tides required for success as a writer in today’s new world. The intellectual side of my brain says that writing a good story is still the main element of success in this field–that if you write as well as you can write, the rest will take care of itself. But that’s not what the emotional side of my brain says (and I’m apparently one of those weird people who is not dominated by one side of my brain or the other, instead they just bicker back and forth until settling on some compromise).

The intellectual side of my mind says this world of writing fiction is not a competition, but my emotional brain looks at the intellect and semi-calmly calls bullshit.

This is my current little paranoia as I settle back down into something that almost resembles a normal cycle of life and working. I’m sure I’ll recover just fine, and be back to it around here in no time flat.

In the meantime, I suppose I should not that I’ve been progressing moderately well with my efforts on the latest novel. I have one issue that needs to get resolved before I can say I actually know the full story, but these things have their ways of working out.

So fear not, those few of you out there still wandering around here, my silence does not mean that progress has stopped. Only that time is in short supply.

Humans should get along on a couple thousand a day, for example.

These dogs, it seems, can also modify their systems to begin to dram energy from those calories directly from the bloodstream rather than letting it go through the liver first. Pretty danged fascinating, eh?

Anyway, the story got me to thinking about what would happen if humans used genetic material from a dog, which then got me to remembering a story I had written some time back. It was sitting firmly in my trunk, but I dug it out and looked it over. It is a story that uses the idea of building humans with genetic code from a specific animal in order to make use of its genetic processes.

I’m not in the habit of doing this because most, if not all, stories I put in my trunk are put in there for some very good reasons. This one, though, I decided I liked. And quite honestly, I’m a better writer now than I was when I first wrote it. I could see lots of big issues. But I’ve spent the last two days cutting it up and doing it over again.

And, of course I’m pretty happy with it. It’s always good to have a new story to put in the post.

Still, I don’t think I’ll be trunk diving anytime in the near future. Too scary as a rule. [grin]

Enough about Picasso’s Cat and all that stuff. What about your actual progress? Are you becoming a slacker, or what?

The answer is, well, uh … maybe a little.

But it’s not bad, really it’s not. At least I don’t think it to be bad.

Between work and travel and spending time on marketing novels and the collection, I admit I haven’t had enough time to actually create words. There’s a much longer blog article coming on this topic sometime soonish, but I’m not going to go into it now. Not the time and place.

What I will say is that the spree of discovery writing on the novel I spoke of last is clearly broken, and so I’ve spent most of the last two mornings at the keyboard beginning to get into the design of the actual story. Thinking, you know?

So that’s my progress report.

Not brilliant, but steadily working. [grin]

progress:

My original thought was that I would do a couple short stories next, but instead I’m finding my mind wants to concentrate on a novel I’ve been thinking about for some time. So that’s what I’ve let myself do the past few days. Now I’m three pseudo-chapters in and having a little fun, which is good.

I’m calling them pseudo-chapters because I’m not thinking about the words I’m writing right now as if they are actually part of the story. Instead, this is pure discovery writing. I’m letting things flow and seeing what happens, and every now and again I stop and jot some bigger plot ideas down as I go. This isn’t even a draft. It’s a thought exercise. In this way I’ve found myself stretching the story out a little.

Isn’t creativity strange?

Focus, Ron. Focus.

I did manage a few words on another project–and they’ll all add us eventually, right?

The fact is, though, that when you’ve been into something deeply the brain does sometimes take a little while to fully change gears. In that light, here’s a fluffy piece of science reporting that suggests that all us writer-types may be in for a rude awakening more rapidly than some of us would like to think.

Personally, I’m not worried about the ebook idea itself. I think people will always want stories–and, in fact, I think the idea of shorter novels is fantastic. I loved the old short 50-60K books that you could sit down and read in a day and still have a little time left over. I think there’s some likelihood that stories delivered on bits and bytes may eventually reduce the need to see a big-ol’ book spine on the shelf, hence liberating the short novel once again.

Hey, it’s as good of a dream as any.

What I don’t like about ebooks and ebook readers today has everything to do with the need to play with formats. It’s not hard to click a few buttons and get your material into the format of your choice, but it’s annoying and the format conversions are not always so glorious.

Reading something should never be annoying.

It’s okay. Really, it is.

Anyway, I was up earlier this morning speaking to folks from China, which is pretty cool from about a hundred angles when you think about it a little. When I first started working, the idea that I would ever have collaborated productively with people in China would have completely boggled the mind. Now the idea of NOT doing so is passé.

The rest of this morning was about listening to the B-52s while finishing up bits and pieces that I’ve left to fall into the cracks as I was pressing to finish the last novel rewrite (which is now officially done for good–I think [grin]). This means I’ve put a submission together, and put my desktop back into something that resembles order. I updated some of my status files regarding submissions and whatnot.

It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’ve been busy all morning.

Give it a try for a bit. See what you think.

What have you got to lose?

Progress: I think I’ve about wrestled phase II of the light rewrite to the ground. Down to the last fifteen pages, which I hope to finish tomorrow AM. I’ve also received and responded to the back-cover copy of Picasso’s Cat & Other Stories. So it’s been a bit busy.

BTW … I already posted this on FB, but I happened to see someone has a copy of Dragon #140 available on E-bay, which comes complete with fiction by lil’ ol’ me.

With that warning …

I spent part of the past few day’s thinking about “Gene Splice” and the overall purpose of the story. I think it holds together pretty well, but for some reason I still felt it wasn’t quite where it should be. Tuesday I think I came to the understanding of why I felt that was the case.

So, to make a long story short, I’m back to another small rewrite.

The fact was that I felt like I needed to amp up the main character’s changes over the course of the story. They were all there in my last effort, but upon reflection I worried they weren’t strong enough for someone who wasn’t me!

So yesterday I took a mental scan through the entire plot line, and identified five areas the I felt I could make prudent changes that would make this element shine.

This morning, I dealt with two of those five.

It’s going to cost me about a week, but it’s worth it.