I write so you don’t have to

Luxury Before Winter

Life, ah, finds a way…

My wrists ache. Yesterday was 5k worth of portal fantasy, and I’m sure today will be similar. Sometimes a story just wants to be born and there’s nothing one can do. Of course, I’m also letting the Muse have her way because the weekend will be taken up with proofs and come Monday I must begin revision on Gamble, so said portal fantasy will have to take a back seat.

I’ll still moonlight with it, of course. Yet stolen time, while delicious, is not the same as being able to luxuriate in a whole day writing only what the Muse wants.

Also, the rains have moved in, so the torpor of late summer draught has been broken by a furious burst of activity. The squirrels are busy gorging themselves on fallen apples, the compost heap is sending up trails of steam on chill mornings as the damp makes life easier for beneficial rot inside, I am producing words at an astonishing rate…and the moss, not long ago dead-dry and brown on granite shoulders, has burst into luxuriant green.

We all spent a long time waiting. Now it’s the busy season before winter’s long dream. I’m ever so ready, and apparently the bryophyta are too.

Have a lovely weekend, my dears.

Hangover to Resentment

I appear to have gone straight from the “book hangover” stage to the “resenting anything keeping me from writing this other book” stage, with very little pause between. I’m not quite upset with this turn of events, as the resentful stage is in many ways the easiest and most satisfying–except for, of course, the resentment itself–but it would help if the book possessing me was actually one I’d planned on writing instead of a bloody portal fantasy.

Frankly, I blame Elric of Melniboné. Reading all the novels for the first time in basically one go gave me the blinding realization that if other writers can do variations on a theme to that degree, why on earth can’t I? So another tale of the Underdark is busy cramping my fingers and destroying my wrists right now. I had planned to put Cain’s Wife in that particular working slot, but since trad publishing is dragging its feet, I can slide that trilogy to later and get another book out of the way now.

It’s better to keep the Muse happy, and this is apparently what the bitch wants now. Plus, if trad isn’t going to run itself with proper business hygiene, why should I give it priority?

I can hear my agent’s long-suffering sigh as I type. She would point out, quite correctly and not for the first or last time, that this is the state publishing is in at the moment. It’s always been a dilatory endeavor on the publishers’ part, and since I can’t personally change it the only thing to do is trim my sails for the prevailing gusts. And she’s right–as ever, as always.

I’m also right not to wait around. Or so I devoutly believe, since the damn book is burning in my brain and fingers. For some reason, my “variations on a theme” experiment is taking the portal fantasy route, which is partly Elric’s fault. (Yes, I’m blaming someone else’s fictional character. I think Mr Moorcock would be pleased at the independent life that particular prince has taken on.)

Anyway, 3k words dumped out of my head yesterday on Chained Knight, even with all the socializing. Normally days with a heavy social component drain the internal pressure and energy needed for that kind of effort, but in this case I think the bleedoff actually helped? Heaven alone knows what damage I might have done to myself without the distraction of playing nicely with other humans. I’m making decisions about the worldbuilding in Cain’s Wife as well, letting that process happen organically before I put another word on the page, and of course Highlands War is going along at its own pace. (I believe a couple giants are going to start whaling on each other in the next scene. That’ll be fun.)

This morning is a fog-wreathed wonderland, common in certain autumns. Warm days and damp, very chill nights mean the earth exhales vapor as the sun rises. I like heavy fog, though I’m not fond of driving in it–not for the earthbound cloud itself, but because of other drivers. It’s good writing weather. I know what happens in all three on-deck books, though I’m only going to pay attention to two of them today. I suppose I can also use the portal fantasy’s pressure to power other stories by holding off on it until I make other daily wordcount, a balancing act I’m quite familiar with.

So much of this career–or even adulthood itself–is finding out how to game one’s own responses. I’m going to file that under “using one’s powers for good” and carry on with getting this protagonist scared out of her wits by a giant castle, a man wrapped in iron (I used the term “chain burrito” yesterday, then just about laughed myself into a coughing fit), and clockwork knights. Oh, and if I can get two giants, both possibly treacherous, to beat each other up with axes and warhammers, it’ll be all to the good. Plus Boxnoggin would really like his ramble sooner rather than later, Mother.

My schedule, she is packed. I suppose I’d better gulp the rest of this coffee and get to it.

The Gift of Moderate Damp

Spent the weekend gathering up bits and pieces I’d left behind in the mad scramble to finish Gamble. Of course, since my brain is the way it is, a portal fantasy started bothering me, and I had to get at least a throat-clearing out of the way on that. All part of the recovery process, but I’m still a little unnerved by the way this story is forcing itself to the forefront.

I suppose I just have to trust the Muse. Of course, I have enough bloody work on my plate, why am I adding more? (Don’t answer that.)

Now comes the hard part–leaving a finished zero alone for a week or so, turning my attention to other things so that when I go back for a revise I can see some of the forest for the trees. I’ll spend the time getting Highlands War situated correctly, I think. We’re 52k into that and about to start the second (and most crucial) third, where the extended Macbeth allegory comes into heightened play and stakes are relentlessly risen bit by bit. I have to make sure all the building blocks in the first third are arranged correctly to support that architecture and what I plan to do in the final act.

So today is a blazing run through the first third, looking for dropped strings and incorrectly arranged blocks. Good work, and should keep me from overstrain. If I play my cards right I’ll also have a little time to steal for the damn portal fantasy. My recent Elric read convinced me that I can bloody well play variations too, and I really want to. Might as well do three loosely interconnected portal fantasies, because the one that’s in my head now naturally begs the question of a third and anyway I’m mucking about with fairy tales (again). We all know how repetition goes in those.

Repetition, and bloodshed. This one will be a little gorier than the first, I think.

Also on deck is the Ragnarok book, but that doesn’t want to poke its nose out for play yet. I could drag it hence and make it behave, and at a different point in my creative cycle maybe I would. I think there’s more to be gained by letting it incubate, at least for today and quite possibly for the week. It’s good to know when to pursue…but it’s also good to know when to refrain. And I have some questions about other timeframes that need to be answered before I can get its revised due date clear in my head.

All that is for later. The rains are moving in and I want to get Boxnoggin rambled before they hit. I don’t mind running in a downpour, but Box has had a busy weekend and I can give him the gift of only moderate damp instead of half-swimming. He will not view it as such, since he has no idea what I’ll be saving him from…but ’twill be a kindness nevertheless. In order to do so, though, I’d better get some toast chewed and the dregs of this coffee tossed down.

And maybe, while on walkies, I’ll listen to the soundtrack the new portal fantasy forced me to put together over the weekend. Bother and tarnation, I suppose I have to finish it at some point if it’s made this much of a fuss about music…

Off I go.

Wrench the Splinter Free

I am two scenes away from finishing Gamble‘s zero draft. Yesterday 3k fell through my fingers, and a number of problems were solved simply by saying fuck it, let’s ride down the hill and see what happens. The entire thing is a mess and full of brackets with notes like “what car was he driving again” and “this needs to go two scenes back”, but that’s usual. The uglier the zero is, the better things tend to go later.

Just have to get all the ugly out of the way early, I guess.

The firs are inky shadows as the sky grudgingly begins to take on some light. Boxnoggin was content with a bare modicum of cuddles and chest-skritches this morning, but also clearly impatient to get to the morning’s work. Which for him, right now, is napping. Soon enough he’ll be strutting through walkies, seeing what changed on one of our various routes since the last time he strolled past. As soon as we’re home he’ll shift to his major daily concern–protecting the house while I mutter and tap at the desk, creating whole new worlds.

He has absolutely no idea of what I do to bring his kibble home; his concerns are much narrower in scope. This makes them correspondingly more intense, perhaps. He takes Doin’ A Protec very, very seriously indeed. I think most of his anxiety comes from that, and the rest from the broken wiring inside his head that fuses and sparks whenever he sees the twitching of anything cat-sized or smaller. We really were the home of last resort for him, poor thing.

Anyway, I got Gamble‘s hero shot, and his too-clever-by-half wordplay with the heroine earlier in the book is going to come back around to bite him. Said heroine is very tired right now, but she’s about to get some reasonably good news–it’s not entirely good, because of how events have transpired, but it does solve some problems and brings the narrative to a fitting resting point. The situation will be back in equilibrium at the end of the book, and that’s all I ask for.

I may go on to write Grey and Jackson’s stories, though the latter unnerves me and I’d prefer not to. But we’ll see what the editor says. I know she wants another Ymre and maybe (maybe, don’t get your hopes up) some more Watcher books. The latter have some leeway because of the timeline; the original quartet was set in the early 2000s, Mindhealer just afterward, and Finder a little later. Since they’re in the same universe as the Society and Valentine series (Rowan and Delgado’s adventures are the early 90s, Danny’s are about 600ish years after the Watchers, with Selene almost a century and a half prior to Japh knocking on Danny’s door) a lot of the heavy worldbuilding is already done. I know exactly what advances are made in Watcher combat sorcery and in the world at large further down the timeline, but I do have to decide how closely I want to hew to our own recent events.

The answer is “not very closely at all, I am exhausted”, but that naturally presents its own set of problems. I’m sure the Muse has her own plans and I’ll just have to wait and find out what they are. As usual.

Anyway, thinking about that is a good way to fritter away the energy I need to bring this goddamn book to conclusion. Rambling with Box will give me time to sort out any remaining problems, so when we get home I can pour another jolt of coffee from Boris’s thermal carafe and get the waking-up-in-the-hospital scene done. I think the heroine’s bestie is about to threaten the hero again, with predictable consequences. The hero really does need to articulate a few things for his buddy.

…yeah, I’m more than halfway in another world, and struggling will avail naught. I just have to get through attending to Boxnoggin’s morning needs, then I can settle down and get this splinter of a book out from my skin. Another one will push up soon; I wrench them free as soon as they rise. Each time I’m afraid I won’t finish another, that I’m done, that I won’t have the endurance to get through one more spelunking expedition and drag something from the cave into daylight.

I’m happy to be wrong. Still, I could do without the fear. The only way out is through.

Guess I’d better get going, huh?

Pithy Little Terms

Fog this morning, full of the scent of autumn. No frost on the pumpkin yet, as my grandfather would say; if there was, I’d have to pop covers on the outside faucets and deal with the hoses. But that’s not a critical task just yet, and if I do it now ten bucks says I’ll need a hose for something before any freeze strikes. Murphy’s Law, Faucet Edition.

And oh, doesn’t it smell lovely. Stepping outside for Boxnoggin’s first loo break of the day and taking a deep breath restored a little bit of my soul. Summer is nice enough, and I know a lot of people like it. I just endure it.

After a couple of highly productive days, the books chose incubation yesterday. I know it’s because Gamble is getting ready for the spike to the finish, and long experience has taught me it’s better to just let the book do what it wills at this point. Didn’t stop me from waking up today and immediately thinking, “Who stays on the roof?” If there’s a three-man team guarding the cabin and one of them takes the eyrie, I have to figure out who’s up there when the real fun starts. Of course they’re all in communication with each other, and I have to think about that too. I know what needs to happen, it’s just a question of arranging the dominos so they fall properly.

I mean, I got the heroine out of the freezer with help from her pole-dancing classes, so the rest of this should be easy. Right?

Despite knowing this is a part of the process, I was in a state of high frustration (almost approaching dudgeon) by midafternoon. Even the Ragnarok book is holding its breath, waiting. Of course that particular story is going to be hard to get off the ground and keep aloft, for reasons which have little to do with me personally. I would be stomping and cussing, but that’s a waste of energy and in any case, if it were easy everyone would do it and it wouldn’t be any fun, right?

Doesn’t help that a crop of Reply Guys and Rando Calrissians in my mentions have started to become troublesome. I think the threshold for certain types of engagement is a little lower on some platforms than others, and after years of work I had such a robust blocklist on Ye Olde Twitters that I didn’t see a lot of the questionable bullshit.

I’m taking note of certain folks, but right now most of it is more prophylactic blocking and muting, especially on BlueSky. It helps that glancing at the replies to certain posts (not my own) gives one a wonderland of bad actors to just block right out the gate. The bigger thing on Mastodon is techbro bootlickers–the neckbeards who think Daddies Elon, Bezos, and Kahle will love them and maybe give them a few crumbs off the table if they’re just hateful and harassing enough to the people who point out billionaires and their grifts are NOT your friend. There’s also a lot of the “but I LIKE ebook theft and there’s no consequences, so it MUST be okay!” crowd hanging around, shouting about how LLMs and accompanying art theft “really aren’t all that bad” and how we should just all be grateful that “anyone can write a book now”.

And I’m like, how wonderful, instead of being shitty in my mentions, how about you personally go and do that? Get a few books written and through the publishing process, try to make a living doing this, and if you’re still at it after five years or so, then maybe you can open your mouth to me. But never mind, because I’m fucking blocking your nonsense, Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar.

That’s another one of my grandfather’s pithy little terms. He was also fond of “Christ on a pogo stick”, but for some reason my grandmother considered that blasphemous in the way a sidecar wasn’t and would hiss at him about taking The Name in vain. (I don’t know what she expected; he was in the merchant marine, then the Navy, then was a cop for twenty years.)

Anyway.

Now that we’re starting to see the class-action lawsuits and possible regulatory action, the LLM/AI grift has passed its crest. The people who were going to make a lot of money have fled (or are halfway out the door if they’re slow) with their cash and the only folks left are the bagmen or the marks. And like any grift, if you don’t know whether you’re the top of the pyramid, the bagman, or the mark, you’re a mark and being fleeced.

We saw this same pattern play out with NFTs and bitcoin. It’s just amazing to me that a lot of the same people taken in by both are so rabid defending AI now.

In any case, there are groceries to get today, a new recipe to try, and waiting patiently for Gamble to finish incubating and poke its wee nose out of the cave so I can grab it, drag the remainder free, and pummel it into zero-draft shape. I might also get everyone off the damn plateau in Highlands War. All in all a busy day, and that’s not even counting walkies.

Best to get underway.

Bold Decision, Let’s See How It Works Out

The bold decision to leave my alarm clock un-set last night seems to have been the right one. I feel a lot less zombified than expected after yesterday’s scramble; there were a lot of moving parts, not least a high-anxiety video meeting, and I’m back to juggling three books again so there’s very little wiggle room in my daily energy ration. Fortunately the rains have moved in and every drop is a balm to my drought-tired soul, and if I treat my throat with honey and tea from now until Saturday I will probably have enough voice to do another Great Chapters read.

There’s a bit in Great Gatsby that I love, and think deserves to be read aloud. I’d love to do a whole Reading with Lili on it, but I can’t afford the time or energy outlay of dealing with a barrage of harassment and threats–how dare I say what I think of literature, after all!–so it’ll just be the plain readings for a while. I have thoughts of doing vids for Patreon subscribers, but shoehorning that kind of time commitment into the schedule…

Yeah. Anyway. Yesterday saw the arrival of a messenger in Highlands War, a particular conversation I had planned from the start in Gamble (finally got the hero shot, or at least winged), and I also managed to get the protagonist shoved into the pond for the Ragnarok book, which has acquired the working title The Doom of the Elder. It felt rather like juggling chainsaws, and I fell into bed with the weariness of the wicked yet victorious.

Triple-book juggling is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Gamble is heating up and will be spiking for the push to a zero-draft finish soon, so the other two books will have to be content with 200- or 300-word days when that hits. Highlands is in the middle of the long slog and a serial to boot, so it will trundle along slowly until I get to the rock-climbing bit planned for near the end. And of course Doom (I’m going to love referring to the book in that particular fashion) is a complex series-ender having to swim against a great deal of behind-the-scenes trouble, so it’s a stubborn, grit-my-teeth act of faith to keep chipping away. Each book demands something different and is in a distinctly separate part of the work cycle, so I can switch from one to the other when a particular set of mental and emotional muscles get tired or close to burnout injury.

And naturally I have other work queued up for when these are moved into the revision pipeline. Song that never ends.

My productivity took a helluva hit after 2016, and an even more monstrous one in 2020. It’s…pleasant? to be back in the saddle to some degree? I’m tired of witnessing the world’s disintegration, and hopeless despite the fact that things seem to be swinging in the opposite direction. Too much has happened, too much cruelty has been shown–even now, most of the people I see when I have to leave the house to acquire groceries (or do some other critical task that can’t be put off) seem to delight in breathing disease over everything with their naked face-holes, deliberately disregarding the fact that we’re still in a fucking pandemic, for Chrissake.

It’s enough to make one despair, even if the WGA strike has reached a successful conclusion (let’s hope they stay strong in support of SAG-AFTRA and the video game folks) and there’s finally some real legal action looming against Amazon’s monopoly (more properly monopsony, as several Reply Guys huffily informed me lo these many years ago and one just as huffily informed me was improper terminology recently, since nothing on earth will please a techbro Rando Calrissian) as well as a class-action suit against the huge plagiarism machines we’re calling AI. Oh, and the Biden Administration is looking to restore net neutrality, so that‘s a piece of good news.

I should feel more hopeful than I do. Beating myself up over that would be counterproductive, though, so I’m not gonna do it. Instead, into my imaginary worlds I go, descending into the cave to fight the monsters and haul the stories, blinking and battered, into the light. And of course, every day must see walkies, for Boxnoggin is a creature of habit and dragging me out for a bit of exercise does us both good.

I suppose I’d best gnaw on some toast and get going. There’s three books’ worth of wordcount waiting for today, after all, and a subscription drop too.

See you around.

Otherwise Aesthetics

Many a crocus shows up in spring, but these fellows are a sign of autumn. I was waiting for their pale shoots to explode and managed to get a snap in the sun before Boxnoggin dragged me on.

He is not interested in many flowers–or at least, not their visual component. His aesthetics are otherwise.

Anyway, the entire world seems waiting for autumn rains–or at least, all of the globe I can see from my particular vantage. After being in constant rounds of CEs or proofs since July, I am tired and longing to get back to the work of actual writing. I know Future Me will be grateful I buckled down and got all this sorted, and yet I am annoyed, my skin is too sensitive, and I am twitching with the need to hole up in my cave and create while falling water sweeps the roof.

Soon. Soon, my beloveds. In the meantime I’ve been cleaning things up and generally getting ready for a protracted period of hermit-ing. It will be lovely to turn inward once more and do the thing I was meant and made for. The anticipation is sweet, and I hope you have something similarly satisfying to look forward to.

See you next week!