Dog-Day Retrenchment

Significant wordcount on Sons of Ymre 2 yesterday. I suspect the book is spiking for a finish and it can’t happen soon enough. I want the blasted thing done so I can throw it in a drawer to rest, finish a few other projects, and then come back to the mess. I know revisions will be hell–at least, the first round will, since there are a lot of notes in double brackets and I have to figure out the exact geographics. I know precisely where Book 1 was set though it’s not really mentioned in the text, but Book 2 is being somewhat cagey about the whole matter of location.

Of course, this book–like the last few–has had to endure somewhat acid-test conditions. The news cycle has not been kind to my productivity, nor to what passes for my sanity. And to top it all off there’s another heat advisory for today. I’ll be crouching in my office, hoping the AC doesn’t give out and feeling the sun press against my house-walls, attempting to slither through and strike.

All I want is for the rains to come back, and maybe some pumpkin spice.

Boxnoggin is sprawled on the office floor, listening to birdsong filtering through the window. At least it’s cool enough to open the house in the early mornings, changing out the air and bringing the temperature down. We won’t need to close windows until 10am or so. At least, that’s the hope.

I still have plans for the Moby Dick reading–Chapter 1, with commentary, it’ll probably be a two-parter–which still sounds like a lot of fun. And I’m still eyeing Filmora if I want to do certain other types of readings. I can’t believe I’m actually considering video editing; the entire prospect sounds like a deep circle of hell but the end result will be nice. (Like so much else in life.) And of course this will cut into what little spare time I have, but what else am I doing with it?

Watching true crime and scaring myself, that’s what. All sorts of ideas and observations are floating around inside my head; eventually I’ll stop blogging about the damn weather and move on to other things. I do like the throat-clearing aspect of blogging; it forces me to clear out the gunk and get the word-engines humming first thing in the morning, which is valuable. And I like the idea that a peek into the life of a working writer helps readers understand just what it takes to make these stories they enjoy.

Still, sometimes I think about…not blogging anymore. Or moving over to Pillowfort and doing a private journal, or or or. Don’t worry, I’ve no plans yet. It’s just that after near-daily blogging since ’05 or so (first on LJ, then on my own site mirrored to LJ, then my site got hacked, then just on my site after LJ was bought out and turned into a hive of villainy, then downloading and deleting everything before ’16 because it was getting unwieldy…) I might be ready for a change. It does rather seem a case of diminishing returns, like so much else authors are forced to do. I suppose I’ll continue as long as I like doing it, as with so many other things.

I’m not sorry I closed down comments, however. The daily sorting through spam and harassment on the back end reached nasty levels even with a few plugins mitigating the flood, and while I enjoyed the rest of the comment culture, dealing with the firehose of bullshit (largely invisible to readers, thank goodness) took too much time. I haven’t regretted shutting that off, and every time I realize I don’t have that particular chore to attend to my heart recovers a little of its usual song.

I suppose the end of summer is always a time of retrenchment, so to speak. Spring and the very tail-end of the dog days are good for looking at what one’s spending energy on and doing slight course corrections to avoid larger ones later.

The coffee has cooled and Boxnoggin is eager for walkies. I also need to get a run in before the heat becomes unbearable. The itch to go back to the second Sons book and just go until it’s done, no matter the cost, is steadily mounting. It will be nice to finish another zero draft; I need the dopamine hit from considering something “done for now”, even if the snapback will be deeply uncomfortable. Taking a break to talk about Melville (and his “NOTICE ME, SENPAI HAWTHORNE”) will be irksome but actually valuable, forcing me to take a break and rest the mental writing muscles. So…maybe I’ll slap on some extra eyeliner and do that today if the book doesn’t behave. Maybe.

Basically things are up in the air, and I won’t know what the hell until I arrive somewhere. You’d think that with as much time as I spend in this particular state it would be old hat, but it’s a surprise each time. Maybe once the caffeine soaks into my starving tissues things will appear differently. They generally do, after all.

See you around.