Sid is Alive

It hasn't been a barn burner of a week. Other than the positive feedback, I have managed to edit only a couple of chapters. Trying to craft each sentence carefully takes time, especially if you're brain dead in the mornings.

At least it's the weekend, the first weekend Christine and I have had two days off in a row in a while. That gets taxing quicker than you'd think.

Hopefully today will be relaxing.

It's taking me longer to write the novel I'm working on than any that have come before. I guess I'm just more careful with every keystroke these days. (Of course the past couple of mornings making any progress has been difficult. The cats keep getting into wee-morning-hours disagreements. They manage to wake me at a point in dreams where I seem infused with anxiety. I make mental notes about how my nerve endings feel then drift off again. That puts me in the depths of REM sleep when the alarm goes off so I'm semi-conscious at the keyboard.)

I'm kind of reminded of Spaulding Gray's Monster in a Box monologue as I work through my chapters. (It was only after he died that I ran across a copy of his finished novel at the library.)

Sometimes it seems like every other book comes easily for me. The last manuscript I finished, and which my then agent chose not to market, came fairly easily from the keyboard and became a trunk novel for various reasons and unfortunate circumstances.

My second published novel came about quickly because I was floating on a wave of euphoria brought about by my first sale. Between the first book that sold and that manuscript, however, came a wending monster called Phoenix Rising that I scrapped save for a scene or two.

Maybe if I ever finish this book, the next one will go easier. There's always hope.

Critiques
I used to avoid critique groups, but as part of my striving for excellence, I've joined one now. It's online, and after bouncing chapters back and forth with a friend, I've decided to seek a little more input.

I spent a couple of days worrying that my segments were too brief. James Patterson has brief chapters but I worry my brief narrative segments won't seem substantial enough. I felt a little better when I started re-thumbing a favorite mystery of mine, The Magician's Tale by David Hunt aka William Bayer, author of Switch.

His first-person narrator in that tale hops from one quick scene to another and does so in fascinating fashion.

Hopefully my ensemble will remain interesting as well. Guess we'll see what the critique group has to say.

Decided not to drag myself out of bed early to work on the novel yesterday. Didn't get much out of the extra time asleep. Was still tired when I got up, but that extra dozing proved to be the highlight of the day.

Christine and I were rear-ended on the way to work. Could have been worse. Wayne e-mailed me a description of a fatality that came out of getting rear-ended which made me feel more fortunate.

Meant my neck was stiff when I forced myself to get up this a.m. and work on some more chapter revisions.

Thunderstorms rattled the house all night, putting the lights out one time. That propmpted the smoke alarms to go off, so I woke up thinking the house was on fire.

Just hasn't been a great couple of days. I'm almost finished reading The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, though. I started it along time ago after getting it from the Common Reader Catalog http://www.commonreader.com. Stopped when I figured out where it was going, but I guess I'm just in a better mood for the revisionist view. Elements of the Canon are worked in nicely and it's been a page turner.

This a.m. I continued smoothing out the rocky ridges on the same chapter I was working on yesterday. I've made all of the adjustments that make it fit properly into the rest of the story now.

Another day and I should have it as ready as I'm going to make it for now. It's more a matter of striving for the best metaphors and mood setters now, and maybe looking for spots to make the POV shine a little more, getting words unique to the character etc.

It's slow progress but it's progress. I almost opted out of this morning's writing session actually. Would have slept an hour later instead of getting to the computer, but fortunately a stray cat wandered onto my patio.

That prompted my female cat to hit octives she hasn't reached since we introduced our Tomcat into the home. It sounded like a wolf had climbed into the living room.

I got up to settle that down about twenty minutes into the extra hour of sleep I was granting myself. After brewing chai and browsing Fortean Times headlines, I managed about 25 minutes of writing.

Once I was up, the cats fell silent.

Spent half a day at work. The first sign of trouble came as it got hard to see my computer screen while editing a story for our website. I could manage but it was kind of like snow blindness, trouble seeing the text on a white background.

Started wondering what that was a symptom of but I had a meeting so it became a moot point for a while. Starting feeling the headache a little in the meeting, by the time I made it back to our office, which is in a different building from the conference room of our meeting I was feeling worse. Stomach was queasy. Stuck it out a while to finish up the final work on a newsletter before its printing then came home at lunch.

Rested a while and started to feel some better. I'll be back in the game tomorrow.

On the novel front, I'm polishing prose and working on the timeline. Tried something non-linear but I don't think it works. Going to try to get a few more chapters polished then show them to friends.

There's something about reading words on paper that's just different from reading words on the computer screen.

I've been working chapter by chapter through the rewrite of a first draft. I printed those out and started reading on the sofa. It made it a little easier to get a feel for the story's pace.

In this morning's writing session, I started dropping in a few more paragraphs in the prologue, which is pretty action oriented, trying to give a little more character flavor without slowing things down too much.

Wayne sent me a post from Comic Book Resources about a cool Archie comic featuring a cover with Dracula, the Mummy etc. fleeing Archie Andrews.

That prompted me to check out the news page, and an annoucement that pre-production is moving forward on a new Judge Dredd movie <http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=3605>, with a new actor, apparently.

I'm always excited to see any potentially new and imaginative effort blossom. Sounds interesting