I’m sorry I missed posting last week. Two things happened which made it difficult: my sister Martha and her husband Kenny came for a visit, and I am close to finishing the draft of my next book.
Dot resting her knees while entertaining company.
When I decided to resume writing this blog I was clear in my own mind that I would do it every week as long as I could keep up with my goals for writing the new novel. My process requires that I have daily goals. I find that meeting the daily goals keeps my motivation up to finish. Every day has to be a small victory. I am prone to depression and if I go too long without a daily victory I lose steam and get bogged down. Success looks different, depending where I am in a project. Rough draft requires counting words per day. For this project I need to write fifteen hundred words per day. The way I have things set up that’s about three typed pages per day. Totally doable. I work on the book five days a week. For revising I keep track of number of hours in the chair trying to fiddle and fuss with trying to make it better. I try and revise three and a half hours every day. Again, five days a week. If I can keep this up I can write one book a year. (moving from Sitka to Carmel has stolen about four months from year) My health and Jan’s health also need to be taken care of for there is no work if we are too sick to manage the work. And now.. it looks like Dot has some issues with her knees that is going to take many trips to the vet. Yesh…Did Shakespeare have a dog? Probably but there weren’t that many Veterinarians to deal with in Elizabethan England.
Anyway… last week was eaten up with having a great deal of fun with my sister’s family. I still took time out for the book but I didn’t have time for the blog. Each blog takes about two work days or eight hours. What I cut short on the blog is the revision, and I’m sure my readers can see all the mistakes that slip through because: 1) not having an editor for the blog and 2) not spending enough time on my revisions. There was a time that I hoped I would grow out of my rather crippling dyslexia… but no: writing backwards, or upside down if writing by hand, still persists. Word blindness is particularly troubling while trying to pick up typos. I’m telling you this not to complain but just to let you know that writing these things take time. Even when they are rife with mechanical errors. If I reread the draft immediately I might pick up five percent of the errors. My mind simply sees the correctly spelled words I intended and not the mistake I put down. If I wait twenty four hours I likely can correct seventy five percent of the errors. So I have to wait at least overnight before I can revise somewhat effectively.
I had a wonderful time with my family. I love all my siblings and we always seem to have a good time when we are together. There were a lot of trips around town and long meals where we all watched baby TV which consists of watching baby Arthur playing with his grandma’s walker and canes, watching him eat berries and throw balls, only to have Dot gather them up and sometimes crush them. Only to discover that after that entertainment is done with it’s time to start planning, shopping for, and cooking the next meal.
Something did occur to me after they left. I was feeling the effects of my typical post party depression. Not the serious kind of depression but just feeling a bit glum missing someone after they leave. To make sure we didn’t get sucked into real depressive behavior, Jan and I took a walk on the beach and took care of some chores, I made some soup for a friend who just had back surgury. Then we bought some lunch for ourselves and drove to a park to eat. We went to a park that is an old golfcourse that is now open to the public for walking. The man-made lake has filled in around the edges with Cattails and from the picnic table the wetlands was alive with the sounds of Redwing Blackbirds, Coots and a few songbirds around the edges. It was windy and the cattails hissed and clattered against each other so too it was noisy with birdsong and the black birds kept a sharp buzzing and chattering going, kind of like a chorus of electric guitars being played finger-style.
Young Arthur… always entertaining.
Just the sound of the birds thrumming cut through my emotional funk to make me happy. The whole scene reminded me of a billion tiny electronic connections being made. The pond had become a charged ganglia of sparking sounds in the nervous system of this valley. It somehow reminded me of my own brain, lively, chattering…. not at all dulled by melancholy but alive with penetrating connections: birds to birds, wind to birds, birds to ducks, and of course all of it making some connection to me.
Jan walked around the pond using her folding cane and Dot and I sat calmly at the table so as not to short circuit any of the avian activity, we all had a fine time.
The new book I’m working on is called “Big Breath In” and it’s a stand alone. That is it’s not part of either of my established series. I’ll read the opening of it and post it below. At least you can get a sense of what I’ve been spending my time doing.
