Struggling, I think.
The deadline to get Brain’s and my pieces in for Steampunk Reloaded was so tight … how tight? It was like trying to shoehorn an elephant into a narrow-fitting stiletto.
Sooo, when we finished and sent it off, the sense of enormous satisfaction lasted about a day … then the sense of “shouldn’t I be writing something really fast for a really tight deadline” kicked in … which then became a sense of dissatisfaction, vague and amorphous … but I still couldn’t work out what was wrong … sometimes I am quite thick … eventually I figured “Hey, muck-fer-brains, is it coz you’re not writing?”
The thing about falling in a heap after achieving something big is that you need to remember to get out of the heap afterwards, in a reasonable timeframe. Two days is okay; seven days, not so much.
So, with that in mind, I have turned my porridgey brain to finishing off Ragged Run, the novella that follows Verity Fasssbinder on after the Brisneyland by Night story (which will appear in TPP’s Sprawl) … I am also doing the Year of the Novel course with the delightful Trent Jamieson in order to start the flensing and rewrite on Well of Souls … and am awaiting feedback on the fetid corpse of my PhD novel, Narrow Daylight, from Brain and Dr Donna, two of the smartest women I know … oh, yes, and fiddling about with the two short story collections.
I’ve also been teaching the Short Story Development Series for QWC – I really love my students, they are intelligent and engaged and offer insightful, respectful comment on each others’ work – which is a rare treat. I suspect I am jaded.
And that, dear reader, is how I’ve been passing my time.
