Take One Down, Spin It Around

I took advantage of our hiatus from weekly classes to focus on getting the drafted second edition of One Last Quest done up. It's cooling off now, in the (virtual) trunk, the necessary waiting period between finishing one phase of creating and entering another. I can see the structure I was hoping for, and I can see the impatience I had in writing the early scenes versus the later ones. The re-read and revision felt like flipping through a forgotten photo album, especially where I remember being surprised at the points where the story took on its own life. I also remember how magical that moment felt, the weird writer's high of characters and situations unfolding without intervention. Yes, the voices in my head started taking control, and what of it?

Now it's cooling off. We have a six week session going now, and it's been my habit to keep my projects apart, one for class time and our structure exercises, and one for out-of-class time, usually a more matured piece that I'm polishing. Cloche and Crèche is my "polish up piece" now, which means I'm dragging a new project out into the daylight to be worked on. Another plate is up on the rod, spinning, spinning, spinning.

🧩🦏 

 

Popular posts from this blog

On Draft2Digital, and Bookspam

Turmoil, upset, and no shortage of sturm und drang this week among the indie publishing community (i.e., self-pubbers like yr humble rhino.) Draft2Digital announced they they were no longer going to be allowing purely free signup and support: new accounts will be charged $20 setup, and sales must meet or exceed $100 annually or else the account is charged $12. Barnes & Noble has a similar, albeit less spelled out policy that accounts not meeting standards could be knifed. Amazon, as of this writing, has been mum, but Amazon also has incredibly deep pockets. They can--and I suspect do--lose money on their self-publishing platform, and it's barely a mote in their financial eye. But boy, it was like D2D announced they'd be puppy-stomping, and indie authors would be funding it. What happened? I'm speculating that it's the general issue of scale . When books took a while to produce, D2D naturally did not get as many uploaded to their service to distribute, and they bot...
Read more

Cuts and Adds

Because of course I don't have enough going on right now, I'm looping way back to a craft that I dabbled in around the time my very first book came out: linocut carving. I've never outgrown my childhood fascination with print and type (as the many typewriters can attest) and linocut occupies a weird liminal space of creative endeavor, printing, and noodling around with sharp things. I dug out the old cutting tool and the erasers I'd used way-back-when, and I've been haunting the relevant section of my local art store. I've very much got a DIY aesthetic going on, too, and I've been trying to shunt my tiny social media presence over to things creative and not things time-sucky. These all landed in a perfect storm of "I should find a secondhand hobby die cutting machine and do my own printing." Enter the local secondhand craft store and a lucky find, and now I'm one "Cuttlebug" richer for a very low outlay, preventing me from taking on...
Read more

Creativity Under Fire

There's nothing my Muse ( she/her ) likes better than stillness. Over the years of our partnership, we've agreed on the terms of our relationship: namely, that I show up, hoping to write, and if she's in the neighborhood, will deign to drop by and leave me some raw material. It's a dysfunctional partnership, but it's ours. What matters (for her) is that I'm showing up, pen poised, mine relatively clear, ready to go. This... is not easy. "Relatively clear" is not my state of mind most days, before the whole stare-of-the-world gets factored in. Honestly, some days, the Muse could pull up in her ride, ready to toss an institutional brick through my proverbial mental plate-glass window, but I'm too preoccupied to hear her show up. And she doesn't accept being ignored. She gets sulky. Withdrawn. Reluctant. And ultimately: erratic, maybe the worst thing for a Muse to be when she's tethered to someone with a full life. Why do all the good ideas co...
Read more