Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Final proofing progress now 63%. Getting there. This meant sadly that my self-directed learning has slowed considerably, but hey ho, progress on the book comes first.

I did find time to flesh out some more ideas for the next book, writing down what has been percolating in my mind over the last year, in addition to recent upgrades and insights I want to incorporate. You can have too many ideas, and experience a kind of creative overload, trying to cram too much sausage into skin that will not take it, so it either splits, or you end up with one fugly looking misshapen sausage. This probably is not a metaphor I should pursue any further.

Moving on: I also had random ideas for The Red Palace (previous book I was going to write next), and I still think about my True Grit style story often, and calling it a True Grit style story makes me cringe, but it does involve a crusty old bugger reluctantly travelling with young girl and their relationship developing, so there is a strong parallel, albeit in a world of gods at war through earthly agents. I want to go full pulp style for that one.

So I am having idea distraction. Because it is easy to imagine how everything is totally amazing and will conquer the universe before you sit down to make it work. The abstract ideas, stripped of the need to function practically in novel form, are so beautiful and seductive, it is incredibly easy to get lost in them, and sometimes hard to start translating them into a plot synopsis, a character arc, a novel outline because once you do that, the wild ideas of origin are constrained, and you have to work harder to see the beauty in them once they are buried in character interactions, location descriptions, pacing evaluations, and so much more.

But the beauty is still there, excitement can still be had by the bucket load, and highs are not meant to last forever, they’re too damn distracting. Sometimes, no matter how inspired, you need to come down, bear down, and work on transforming empty pages into art. Or a pulp novel, which I suspect will take far more effort than I want it to, because I always want things to be easy, and they rarely are, no matter how many periods of inspired haze I may write through and be deliriously happy when it happens (not often, but often enough to keep me going) because you don’t edit in a delirious high, you don’t proof when overcome by the muse, no: you want to do those with as much cold calculation as you can muster when looking at your own work. That was a longer sentence.

I can’t lie, I do have flashes of “Woohoo!” when editing or proofing when the writing appears to me to be good, and I feel the original ideas shining even when transformed, and I connect to why I wrote the thing in the first place and am happy it still seems to work, to me at least. Another longer sentence. But I read my book from a completely different perspective to any reader, so must worry that what I find awesome may be very workaday to the reader if I have not provided them with all the information and emotion to have that passage hit them in the way it hits me. And the consideration of the reader’s perspective takes analysis, and careful construction of everything that has come before that particular section of your book.

That careful construction has its own beauty, and a deep satisfaction can arise from recognizing something well built, or rather, built as well as you can manage at this time. That’s where I am with The Gardener and The Goddess. It is now done as well as I can make it, at this time. You cannot, as a writer, anticipate every reaction, every interpretation of your fiction: if you seriously attempt that it will drive you insane. It is therefore better to focus on the final construction, and hope that what makes sense to you, excites you, will provoke a similar reaction in those who wander into those pages to look around and explore.

If we could accurately predict how readers would react and become addicts for (I mean irresistibly enthralled by) our writing, we’d all be millionaires. I’m still at the day job, folks.

Until next week, nurture your ideas, but create solid foundations for them, so that the houses you build of words are full of wonders, every room inviting, and all connected in a way that makes absolute architectural sense, so others can share in your delight without thinking about where the supporting walls should be. Unless your book is a critique of the architecture itself – in which case – go for it!

That was another metaphor I probably needn’t have pursued.