I’ll try to post something more substantial than my metrics at least once a week.

Tentatively, I’m going to schedule something for every Monday, and then we’ll see.

Commitment

1.

Starting a book is a commitment.

It’s a commitment to telling a story.

2.

And it’s like getting married.

You work at it, you cry over it, and you scream at it. You fight with it, you love it, and you want to kill it.

You don’t give up, unless the alternative is a billion times worse.

3.

If you do quit, if you do decide that it’s not worth it any more, you may feel guilty.

But you also feel incredibly relieved. Which possibly makes you feel even more guilty.

4.

Whether you quit or not, your self-worth takes a hit, because you must have done so many/everything wrong otherwise it would have been much easier…right?

*Inspired by Nadia’s recent marriage to Evil Hero Material, henceforth known as her better half. *g*

1.

I have partially solved my twenty-years in 80k words problem.

At least, I’ve solved the first part. I haven’t gotten to the second part yet.

2.

Not sure what this means. Maybe I should just leave the first section as it is, and proceed to the second.

Or print out the first, clean it up, and move on.

My epiphany came late, so the earlier words I already wrote need to be drastically re-written anyway.

3.

Fuck. Now I’m up at 0115 when I was supposed to be asleep hours ago.

1.

I want to write a book with wizards in it.

I am not, however, going through a Harry Potter phase.

But wizards! Funny hats! Beautifully embroidered robes!

2.

My sooperwoman’s mind is like a fortress. I can’t see into it at all.

There are scenes when you just know that they are meant to be written in her POV, but you can’t. So you either you skip it – which I generally try to avoid – or you write it in some other POV, which just feels wrong – which I also generally try to avoid.

So it’s making it difficult for me to write.

3.

I need to think about patterns. It’s something that should have come to mind earlier, given that I sew, but it didn’t and I feel like a million times an idiot for it.

4.

I’m not really making my daily minimum goals. It’s more like not writing, not writing, not writing, and bang! make up for several days at once.

Futuristic

1.

My current novels are set somewhat in the future.

I’m not sure that I know how to deal with that.

2.

After an urban war, I can’t imagine that any city would look the same again.

I thought that would make it easier for me, to set it in London.

It hasn’t, really. Especially when one of my brighter ideas was to have Imperial College, London ‘reused’ as some other kind of building – Imperial being only an example, but I had/have plans for other university buildings in London and other cities.

Maybe not after all.

3.

There’s the technology. It’s not something I really thought about at the time, when I decided to pick up the story wholesale and set it down fifty years later.

I was writing a scene today and I wrote about the books that filled the shelves of my sooperwoman.

Then it occurs to me that maybe she doesn’t have books. Real books, that is. And it’s ironic that I wrote that because I love ebooks more than I do print.

4.

The structure of the sexual relationships is surprisingly archaic.

At some point, said sooperwoman becomes sooperman’s mistress. The stereotypical Other Woman.

In sooperman’s circles, pretty much all marriages are contracted for politico-economic reasons. In regular people circles in the same part of the world, it’s usually because the couple is genetically compatible.

Sooperman’s marriage, in particular, was contracted because of the first, though the latter also held true.

Then in the next section, which begins a minimum of 20-30 years after this one, the pendulum swings the other way. All the other way.

5.

I think when you’re writing something like that, at some point, your past/present will collide with the future you are creating.

In my construct – a term I prefer to world – reincarnation is a continuous process, and given certain conditions, each person (character? damn. this gets confusing sometimes) remembers all of their past(s).  So that collision happens almost constantly.

I don’t know how to handle that either.