Working the Plan

"Stage 28" lies, thus unread and unloved, in the submission inboxes of a couple more e-zines.

Foundlings, faeries, catrinas...but first, "After the Blackout".

There are a couple of new links on the side. One is my friend Vikram's website, with his beautiful artwork, and the second is "The Digital Medievalist", which is currently proving more fascinating and distracting than Wikipedia and Crimelibrary combined.

Not Artistically Acceptable

So, "After the Blackout" has been driving me batshit, and not in the artistically acceptable way where I feel myself being stalked by shadows of the main characters, or unable to sleep, making me instead stay up all night at my desk, drinking gin by candlelight with shaking hands (a bad mix all around. In other news, I need new batteries for my smoke detector), and penning rambling letters to my sick wife in the sanitorium about how I long for the release of a squalid death. No, it has been driving me to hair-ripping, wall pounding, procrastinating, run-on sentence Hell.

I was in a coffee shop yesterday (I was waiting for someone! Don't judge me!), and I made a bunch of notes, so I think I know what is wrong, and what I have to do to correct it. The problem is, it means scrapping everything so far and starting again, which I'm not keen to do. I have other ideas I want to move on to.

Part of my reason for having this site is to keep myself disciplined. I have the attention span of a lobotomized gnat, I want an egg salad sandwich.

Sorry, sorry, really, I'm back, but see what I mean? I know lots of writers have trouble finishing projects they start...that's a pretty common problem for people in general. My way of combatting this is by making myself work on only one project at a time, and I don't let myself touch anything else until it's done. My reward for completing my work is more work. This website is also a disciplinary tool of sorts, for publicly shaming me into working so I actually have stuff to post.

Right now I'd love to throw "After the Blackout" across my apartment, or bury the notebook in the garden, and work on the next thing. I know if I do that though, I'll fall back into bad habits in a second, and not finish a piece for another two years. I have a few writer friends who seem to actually work steadily on multiple projects at once, and I look upon them as unicorns. Pink unicorns, with glittery manes, and ruby hooves, who speak fluent French.

I'm still a bipedal, non-imaginary anglophone, I'm afraid.

So, for the sake of any and all future works, back to the beginning I go.

(sorry Shayne)

White Lighting

I'm beyond the point where I take an overtly holistic or spiritual approach to writing, but some residual belief in faeries and winged muses clings to the inner walls of my brain. Case in point:

"Stage 28" HAD to be written in the wide black journal with yellow pages and the silver placeholder ribbon, with black pens, in handwriting.

"After the Blackout" HAS to be written in the blue-ish "inspiration" notebook my mother gave me for Christmas, with blue pens, in printing.

Stage 28: the story of the story, part FINITO except for editing, formatting, submitting, and publishing. Shut up.

Once the weather improves, black pens everywhere will be lighting candles as I bury their three fallen brothers in the planter outside my apartment building. Yes, I still have the first two pens that died so "Stage 28" could live. Yes, that means I've kept two dried up Bic pens for a year. Not just kept them, transported them when I moved this past summer. I'm quite mad you see.

Once Spring arrives for a long-ish stay (shouldn't be too long now) they will be laid to rest along with a Staples SONIX Gel pen that also laid down his life for the cause of my Phantom story. I think perhaps I will wrap them in a black cloth and sing their requiem.

You all think I'm joking, don't you?

I had to pause for a count of five between words for the last page-and-a-bit. That would revive the ink for another three letters or so. My patience was wearing thin at the end, and I just scratched out the name and date as quickly as I could. I might as well have done it with my fingernail for all it showed up.

Who cares? It's DONE.

Now, it will be shoved in a drawer for a week before I begin the major renovations it still needs, mostly in the last three pages. I'm pleased with the ending, but I need to clarify it. Clarify it to emphasize its ambiguity, which makes sense to me. There's also some reorganization of events to be done. The important thing is that I know all the elements that I want are there this time, and everyone's ended up where they should be.

What Happens Next

I have another story that I'll begin work on soon called "After the Blackout", and I also intend to pull out my stories from the past few years (five in total...yeah, kinda sad), rip them apart, and turn them into something I can be proud of now (not two or three years ago). Once that's done, I'll set those in circulation as well.

Be happy for me. I am!