Hello my friends and the occasional relative!

Today is a mea culpa kind of day. I’ve done some more tinkering, but have not significantly advanced in my last pass over the new novel. I’m stuck at the reworking of a conversation: I thought I had a correct angle for the insertion of needed extras, but every time I look at the original text, the extra seems so clunky, and I wonder if I should not just abandon it. But, if I abandon it, there really is nowhere else to put this information in remotely elegantly, so should I then remove all the other threads I have added up to this point, as they will, in some deep sense, go unfulfilled if this passage is not included? I think so, and do not want to do that (remove the related text already added), so I must make the addition, but my heart is not in it, and so I remain frozen.

I have thought about skipping on to other things, but feel that until this is resolved, around 100+ pages into the manuscript, nothing else will hang properly. This passage is needed to help later changes make sense and be a payoff to what has happened here, and been hinted at earlier. Indeed, this passage helps to underpin the new ending I have in mind, an ending which will work so much better if some sense of the stakes are added earlier in the book.

So, what I’m doing here is trying to persuade myself to get on with it! Sometimes I write to think, and in putting these words down, I do feel my motivation increasing as a result of reminding myself exactly what it is I am trying to achieve, albeit in rather oblique language for you, my friends, for which I apologize. How funny that writing what I already know in my heart helps to galvanize me into a promise of action. Whatever works!

This year has been a year of improvement in hitting targets, but these past few months have seen a drop off on that front. It serves to remind me that I remain a hobbyist trying to develop professional habits, rather than a fully fledged professional. And this is okay with me at present. I do this because I enjoy it, because I want to. It is a strange thing to want to write books, to spend years on them for very little return other than the immense satisfaction of actually completing the task, but I can’t imagine not doing it. I spent years talking not doing. My friends, it is better to do, even if sporadically.

I have written some more fast fiction, which I shall share later, and shall seek perhaps to experiment more obviously with it going forward. Try to learn micro lessons in style or construction from each attempt. I have written another report from the apprentices at the end of The Killer and The Dead, and will at some time add it to this site, and into canon. So I am writing, just not where it counts in terms of advancing The Salves and the Djinn/The Gardener and the Goddess.

Tomorrow is another day, another opportunity to advance. I plan to enjoy it. Take care my friends, and keep moving forward!