Sunday, March 17, 2013

mama said knock you out

After what was, in most respects, a fairly shitty weekend, I am suddenly in an excellent mood (perhaps even clothed in immense power, to quote my favorite movie trailer line from 'Lincoln', a film I never bothered to see). Not that there was any good reason why my weekend was shitty; I'm sure my red-wine hangover yesterday morning didn't help matters, since it destroyed my Saturday. But I was in a pretty foul mood for the past two days, and tried to avoid people so that I wouldn't get all snappish with them (a plan that mostly worked, unless you have to live with me). I think I was in a foul mood because I'm trying to plot out my writing goals and work goals and ALL THE GOALS for the next year and I can't quite do it because I don't quite know what my day job is and I also don't quite know whether my writing goals should continue as is (write a novel every nine months), or attempt to speed up (write a novel every six months), or go into overdrive (write a novel every six to nine months, plus some serialized stuff in between). And I can't decide the writing goals until I know the day job goals. And then I worry about becoming my old workaholic self, which only differed from my new workaholic self in that my new self was working for me and no one was paying for the health insurance necessary to deal with my workaholic-induced ulcers. Ha.

sssanyway, with all that uncertainty around goals, and with all my brooding over feeling trapped and settled and old, I was overdue for a couple of days of surly hermitville. However, I attempted to drag myself out of my surly mood today, and I walked down to Fort Mason to write for a couple of hours. I didn't write any fiction, but I did write several pages of notes about Prudence, and I felt like I made some real progress. Unfortunately, that progress led me straight to the realization that I need to do a lot of research for this story, so perhaps I need to spend the next month reading about the antiquities collecting world in Britain 1800-1820 (if any of you know of any resources on this, which I'm sure you don't, let me know). But writing made me feel better, and walking in the sun helped as well, so yay to that.

When I got home, I messed around with Photoshop some more (Prudence's cover is almost done!), then talked to the parents. Then I grabbed a burger down the street before coming home and talking to Terry for awhile, since I was in just enough of a better mood that I wouldn't inadvertently stab her in the face with my surliness. Then I came upstairs, messed around a bit more, and was struck with a sudden and blinding flash of insight about the whole Muses series...and so I spent an hour and a half brainstorming it. Let's just say that it involves serialization and Ferguson/Ellie's twin sisters...but I'm not going to say anything more than that because there's a good chance it won't happen because I may not be able to write the serial plan + Prudence's book in the next nine months (although I would love to try). Right now, though, I should probably sleep so that my subconscious can finally come out and scream at me that I need to focus on what I can do now, not add to my ridiculously Puritanical sense of guilt by piling more tasks on my to-do list that I can never accomplish. We all know the Puritan is going to win, but I can at least let my subconscious try to talk me into being a little more realistic. Goodnight!

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