Strangely Socialised

I haven’t forgotten you exist. No, that’s a lie. I have forgotten you exist. Frequently. But only because I had other things on my mind. Important things. Like boxers or briefs, and paper or plastic.

The truth is that I’ve written over a hundred thousand words in the past couple of months and I’m feeling pretty good about it, but there is a great deal of editing in my near future.

I think I know what I’m doing with my Christmas vacation.

The girlfriend is off on vacation with the family which in theory means I have more time to write, but in practice means that I have no one to prod me onward when I’m not. A revelation was had regarding a particular story that I’ve been picking away at for… god, probably a year now, on and off. It’s not going to be an easy change for me to make to the structure of the whole thing, but not only is it a good idea I think it’s a necessary idea to pull the whole thing together.

I finished reading The Prestige a few days ago, which prompted a new idea that I’ve sort of been aching to explore, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do. But doubling (not cloning, but doubling) is so mentally problematic. I just really want to sink my teeth into that idea.

There are some days when I feel like what I really need to do is make a list of Practical Advice for Living. On this list would be such things as ‘buy toilet paper before you run out’, ‘wear a warmer jacket when it’s cold’ and ‘don’t watch Supernatural before bed’. I’ve managed to violate all three of these in the past week or so, most memorably (re-)watching two episodes of Supernatural last night before going to bed and having the unsettling dreams to show for it.

Yesterday was a complete wash on the writing front, but at least I entertained the clientele of Urbana with an animated phone call. (I exaggerate; I promise I didn’t make a spectacle of myself. But I did do what I normally don’t and took a – very urgent – call.) Today, however, was productive, despite the fact that Second Cup is no longer serving Belgian chocolate orange lattes. (I cannot express the sheer bliss of these lattes; maybe they’ll still make them special.) At least five hundred words on two stories, plus a bit of administrative work I needed to get done. And, more importantly, I managed to finally rewrite the beginning of a story I’ve long been picking at in a way that I think sets the right tone for what’s to come. Sometimes writing two paragraphs of really good stuff is more productive than two pages of work that you’re less than enthused about.

Writing time today was a bit of a failure, to be perfectly honest. The ingredients were all there: the unfinished story, the laptop, the coffee, the music… but it all amounted to a lot of staring out the window and a rejigging of the contents of my iPod. I wrote one completely sentence, but I deleted three, so I’m not sure whether that counts as forward progress or not.

Currently reading: Christopher Priest – The Prestige

Today’s writing round-up: about five hundred words, spread across three different stories. Not terrific, but not nothing. I’ll take it, anyway. I’m happier with the batch of revision notes I worked up for a very old novel which in its current state is basically a lot of flabby writing around a good idea. I might actually be able to salvage the beast yet.

Is it just me, or are zombies the New Big Thing right now? Or does the fact that I’m noticing them crop up everywhere mean they’re already the Old Big Thing?

I started out the year thinking that I was tired of the local Starbucks and Second Cups (after they renovated and thus destroyed my favourite Second Cup) and that this year I would go on the quest for the perfect coffeeshop. Not the perfect coffee, but the perfect coffeeshop. The one which was close to home, where I could go and spend a couple of hours writing and feel perfectly comfortable and productive.

It was a short quest. I found Urbana on my first try.

I like to think that my belief that there was a perfect coffeeshop (and much like finding The One, I don’t actually believe there’s just one coffeeshop that fit all my criteria, though probably no more than one within a two-block radius) wasn’t just another way to procrastinate. There are all kinds of ways to procrastinate without even knowing it, and sometimes I feel like I’ve tried all of them. After all, it’s that time of day again, when I have a couple of hours before I really need to work, when I have to decide whether I’m going to go and get dressed and head out early to go write or whether I’m going to stay here right in this sunbeam and kill time until I actually have to leave. Right now, the sunbeam is winning.

Sometimes I wonder why something I love is sometimes so hard. I have more works in progress than you can shake a stick at (this is a lie; I expect the average person and/or dog could shake a stick at them all in about fifteen seconds), but maybe that’s the problem. I spend as much time figuring out what I want to work on as I do actually writing. Frankly, sometimes more. I can’t imagine a life in which I was not writing, but sometimes not writing seems to be as much a part of the actual process of writing as writing itself.

Nanowrimo was successful! Despite repeated bouts with the flu, I managed to pull off just over 50,000 words. Not as much as I’d been hoping for, but more than the minimum and that’s the important thing. It’s terrible, though. Much worse than the story I put together last year, which I still really like and should work on some more because it could really become something.

Dad’s surgery was quite successful and they took out as much of the tumor as they could, which was most of it, they believe. Dad’s speech has just been getting better and better ever since, and he’s having trouble with fewer words. He’s not working, but he’s still carting his carmera around with him everywhere. Including around the hospital, which is where he is now. He started both radiation and chemo on November 20th, and is staying in a hospice at the hospital weeks, then going home on weekends.

I went to see him at the hospital on Wednesday, after going out for lunch with him and my stepmother, and got a full tour of the facility they’re staying in and the tunnels that connect all the parts of the hospital. Then I went in with him when he was getting his radiation and the technicians showed me everything and explained everything they were doing, then I got to watch on the monitors while he was getting the treatment. It’s actually really comforting to be able to go in and watch like that, and be treated with as much respect and accommodation as the technicians there did.

Since my flu has relapsed I won’t be able to see him again for at least another few days, but it was good to get that one day in. He’s still doing quite well and is in very good spirits. He’s made my stepmother promise to shave his head when he starts losing his hair so he won’t look like a dork. (His words, not mine!) I didn’t need to point out that dad doesn’t exactly have that much hair to lose. =)