Yesterday I took our pet rat Houdini to see the kids in China. She'd been sick for some weeks and it was obvious she wasn't going to get better. So she got to meet the youth in Asia. Sad face.
Haven't been by here in a while. Between the bursts of productivity and the crippling writer's block that follows those blissful days, I haven't felt much like commenting on my efforts.
I don't feel like a beginner anymore, I'll tell you that. Rather, I feel like I've started practicing with a superpower I've always known I possessed, but been too afraid to use (understandably: when I make mistakes, terrible things happen). Still, experimentation has yielded a great deal of practical knowledge about what I'm doing.
My biggest success is my steady implementation of stream of conscious flow during the first draft phase. Letting go of the need to have perfect sentences in perfect paragraphs has greatly increased my word count. On the downside, I'm probably spending too much space on needless exploration, but hey: fuck it. That's what revision is for.
I figure I'll kill this blog soon. It was created to help me understand the beginning stages, to keep me motivated, and to remind me of the goal (getting published). That goal is approaching rapidly.
Within the next two to three weeks, I hope to have The Holographic Moon available on Kindle and Nook. I plan to release it for free and beg every community, internet and analog, to give it a look and review if enjoyed. Hopefully I can start building a readership while I work on the other parts of the book (Working title: Small Comforts...probably will be changed). I've contacted an artist friend who is a fiend with oils, and he has agreed to paint me a cover for royalties.
I'd like to say I'm excited about all this, but optimism has given way to the realism. But you know what? That's probably for the better, because optimism and hope are fragile things. In an previous blog, I wrote about the concept of faith. It seems to me that faith is superior to optimism and hope because faith takes into account hardship, whereas the other two gloss over trials and tribulations while only considering success and reward.
Faith is a great tool for a realist, I think. Granted, we usually group faith in with people with religious delusions, but if we remove it from that context and discuss it as a willingness to engage in the unknown with courage and excitment, with a degree of certainty in the rightness of ones actions tempered by awareness of inevitable confusion and setback, you might agree that such an approach could have great benefit.
Of course, maybe I'm not really being a realist here. Maybe I'm just being a cynical optimist. Whatever.
Long rambling entry. Apologies. Again, this blog might be on its last legs. Its been useful, and I appreciate you anonymous readers, but I figure it might be a source of embarrasement one of these days. Whatever hill I started climbing when I began it is nearly crested, and my legs have gotten stronger. Soon, I think, I'll be ready for mountains.
R.I.P Houdini: I'm glad we made your life better for a time, and that we could help you escape when the chains got too heavy and tight.
