Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Maybe this thing, my writing, is back on track. I did a little better than 1,000 words yesterday on Chapter Three of Murder of Angels, which gives me just over one hundred ms. pages at this point. I begin to suspect this novel might be longer than my others, but it's really too early to be sure. I also did some revision to the preface for TFoC and added another paragraph. So, it was really a very productive day, which left me too exhausted to do much more than spend the evening with Thryn, camped out in front of the television watching a couple of Farscape DVDs, a few videos on VH1-Classics, Samurai Jack, and Home Moves. Television can be nice when you've spent the day pounding words into the keyboard.
Yesterday I wrote to The Flir and David Bowie. Today I'm not certain exactly what I'll write to.
When I was a kid, growing up in a world where people expected very little from life and usually got even less than they expected, this was something like a dream — having the freedom to write, without guilt, without the suspicion that it was somehow wrong and I ought to be doing something else more sensible. Sometimes, like this morning, it feels like a dream again. That I've supported myself well for the last seven years by writing and by writing alone, an utterly unobtainable dream, real but rarely seeming entirely real. When I was a child and I would tell people that I wanted to write (and, keep in mind, this was usually nowhere near my first choice, but usually came in well behind palaentology, herpetology, ichthyology, geology, or whichever of the natural sciences I was most enamoured of at the moment), I'd get, at best, a patronizing nod of the head. At worst, a disapproving scowl and a lecture on how I needed to set my sights on something more practical, something I could make a living at, something within my reach. "Like your cousin," they might say. "He's learning to be an auto mechanic. He'll be able to support himself and a family." Oh, they had the same reaction to my desire to be a scientist, of course. Really moreso, since I rarely ever talked about writing. I talked a lot about wanting to be a scientist, but, as it obviously lacked the glamour and security of automotive repair — well, I mentioned the scowls already. Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm going on about this today. I just had a moment of that dreamy feel I get about writing sometimes, that this is real and I'm doing it and it's going well and many of the members of my family who scowled stopped scowling sometime back.
Regardless, it's time to get to work.
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