Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I have had two full strength coffees. I should be powered up beyond belief.

But I ate two grotesquely sugared cookies (I was sugar free for about 5 months this year and fell off the wagon just before Hallowe’en, not a good time to give in to temptation! (It was tiny individual Toblerones that got me – direct from Switzerland. Growing up in Scotland, Toblerones were such a treat, and became strongly associated with Christmas indulgence. Knowing those came from the source was too much, so I had one. Of each of the three varieties on offer. And then more. The sugar express was back.)) so am paradoxically both jazzed and sluggish.

Yes, I write parentheticals that are way too long.

But it oddly matches a position I find myself in. I am jazzed (and sense that this is an ‘olds’ word choice) to be releasing a new book, but sluggishly engaged with the process of publication. I want it done, but the pieces are too slowly moving into place. And some of that is on me.

I’m jazzed to be working on a new story, but sluggish in the face of its scale, of the number of moving parts, all the aspects to be integrated into a meaningful narrative. At present it feels like three different books trying to live together and none of them can agree on breakfast. This has happened before. There is always a certain amount of having to balance the narrative, to fight concerns over pacing. I want/need a long opening to introduce my protagonist, to show where they are from and how their moral core was formed and demonstrated as a child, but I keep running into problems that need to be resolved as a result of that more prolonged focus, and that is before having to balance the opening versus the rest of the story and its dramatic arc.

This is a problem created by being excited by new ideas, and having a lot of them, and wanting to integrate them all. But integrating them all can distort the original (thrilling) idea beyond all recognition, and create a brain ache in trying to resolve all the new with the old. Sometimes you have to kill a darling before you ever write it, and I suspect that’s what I’m going to have to do. This leads to a reluctance to engage in that darling killing process, which delays getting on with everything else involved in structuring and planning a new novel.

So being jazzed isn’t always a good thing. Having too many ideas can cause mental constipation. Which is where the coffee analogy falls flat, at least in my case. TMI. Or maybe it’s the Toblerones causing the mental… ahh forget it.

I need to go treadmill for a bit and burn off that sugar, or a tiny proportion of it. Maybe it will help me gain a little clarity. Reading some of Boswell’s diary will also help. How a 22 year old from 260 years ago can help is interesting, he is such a mix of young/old in one body from my point of view today. Not near as wise as he thought, (he totally fell for a street con – which just shows what a sweet soul he had) yet full of interesting insights. I did at various times keep a diary, and any from around his age would contain what I thought were profundities at the time, but would they hold up even 30 years later? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll never know now! (And for that I am mostly grateful.) Some of his bon mots are too archly self-conscious, some are lost partially in cultural translation, but it is both fun and melancholy to read his musings on the future when we know what will transpire for him.

I may talk more of Boswell another day. All in all I think he is worth reading, especially as a fantasy author, because what he takes for granted is lost to us in the mists of time, his assumed cultural touchstones are now either absent or transmogrified. The past really is another country, and those who lived there and recorded their time offer a glimpse into how fantasy worlds can seem both familiar yet wonderfully different, his writing and life depict that very clearly. Ayrshire and London both still exist, but the people and manners have changed utterly. Yet still he speaks to me, and I understand at least a part of him, and what a sweet miracle that is. That is a great trick to master in fantasy fiction, to write a world and characters that are clearly not contemporary, with their own strange manners and morals, but human and engaging enough for us to see what we have in common, and become involved in the drama of their lives.

Until next week, my friends, lay off the sugar and read some old memoirs!