Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Progress. Never as much as you want. Always motivated when I need to go to bed.

It is January. I’m not dieting, just trying not to eat as much. I am doing the basic rehab exercises for my knee(s) every day. 30 years in nursing (I’m counting my training time) leaves a few marks. At least it isn’t my back. Yet. Doing more cardio, some mild resistance work. Reading non-fiction, being inspired for the future, depressed by the present. It all takes time. A little pool playing too, a calming pleasure despite the stabs of frustration it affords me! How, how did I miss that facking shot??

I had a wonderful day of writing this weekend. Two days actually. I have four day weekends, I’m lucky that way. So still getting my distractication in. This weekend I stopped one of my internet distractions. I feel better already. No, not the game, I still play that.

When I write I often write to break points, where I stop. Not story breaks, though. Mid-conversation, I stop.

It’s instinctual, this stopping. I know I don’t have the right code to unlock the next line. Oh, I know the shape, some of the things that need to be included, but that next line, and the particulars that can actually be added after it with anything approaching economy, never mind elegance, eludes me. That next line, like the Argonath, holds up its hand and says, “Go no further.”

Sometimes I am overwhelmed, too much to fit in, no way to make it all agree. This is quite common. Other times the words are caught in my throat, and I just need to cough out a phrase to move past, almost anything will do, those stops are easy to overcome. I think it is the sense of not wanting to make the choice of what is included, what left out, the sense that once written it will effect the future course of the narrative forever. I chose effect. Sometimes I like to revel in the possibilities still present in the unwritten, and do not want to kill off one possible bookish future. These are the darlings I regretfully kill, keeping scraps of them set aside, wondering if at a later point in the book they can find a place where they can shine without being a distraction. Sometimes it happens.

I’ve been collaging pieces together, fragments of scenes and entire scenes already written, finding the best shape for them to cohere into. Do you cohere into something? I think so. For my purposes today, I say you can.

This weekend was a sweet sequence. I wrote new conversation, worked in old, broke past a longstanding barrier, wrote more new, added more old, cut and chopped away large old sections of collage pieces, needed no more. Cutting away the dead wood was the best part for me, because normally it is so hard for me. This time, it was freeing.

It begins to emerge, the new book. Its shape, while not complete, is almost in view. I know it will appear. It is a comfort.

The story will not, I think, be terribly long. Because it does not need to be to make its point. My streak of writing progressively shorter books will continue. The next one will be longer for sure, which is ironic as it was originally meant to be a pulp fast dash. It is also growing in my mind, becoming so much more than it was. I’m going to cut it down to simplicity. Complexity can come later, if at all. After book one.

It’s been a good weekend.