I didn’t mention all the holidays in my title… I’m too late for some, a bit early for others, and there are about a hundred of them.
I’ll be back for New Year, either the Eve or the Day, when I post my “By-The-Time-I’m-50″ Resolution.
But I’m taking ALL of next week off. I won’t be writing Lesson 8 for HTRYN, which means I lose one precious week of buffer. (But I’ll be gaining one precious week of rest, so I’m okay with that.)
I won’t be posting here. Write A Book With Me is taking the official week off.
I won’t be answering questions on the boards in HTTS or HTRYN or in my e-mail.
I WILL be doing customer service, but even that is going to be every other day, with Christmas Day off.
I’m going to rest and have a wonderful time with my family, and miss my Air Force Kid who’s currently doing un-fun work in unfriendly places of the world, twelve hours a day, six days a week, and won’t be having presents and wrapping paper and Christmas Trees and sappy music. (He wants us to save his presents until he gets home, because he’s sharing a tiny room with three other guys and has no place to store anything.)
I hope your holiday, however you may celebrate it, is full of joy and friendship, warmth and hope, love and happiness. I hope that you don’t count calories, that you do sleep late, and that you hug someone who matters to you and let that someone know you care.
Be well, be wonderful, and I’ll see you December 27th, when Write A Book With Me resumes.
On January 1st, 1985, when I was twenty-four, I wrote as one of a stack of New Year’s Resolutions that by the time I was twenty-five, I would have finished a novel.
I have no idea what the other resolutions that year were, and honestly, I have no idea where that one came from or why it stuck. But it stuck. And I finished my first novel, which was awful and never sold even after I revised it ferociously.
But the writing of that first book changed my life, and in the last twenty-five years, was responsible in countless ways for making my life matter to me, for making me a better person, and for bringing me joy and challenges I could have discovered in no other way.
Next October, I’ll be 50. And I’ve realized that by January 1st of 2010, I want to have a resolution to put on the table that will give me twenty-five more years of challenges, that will push me in directions I have not yet gone, that will give me something that’s hard to learn and hard to do well and hard to succeed at. Something I can sink my teeth into, something I can chase with focus and passion.
I have some ideas, some possible directions.
But I want to hear what you think.
If this were you—if one simple New Year’s resolution had changed your life 25 years earlier, and you were looking for something that could give you another quarter century of challenges—what would you pursue?
I’m off today. I get to celebrate the day with most of my family today…all except for my older son, the Air Force Kid, who is still over in the Middle East, and who is in my thoughts today.
I hope you have a wonderful day. I’ll be back here tomorrow. :D
So I’ve discovered something interesting.
Writing a complex 300,000-word novel while writing a complex, massive novel revision course is turning my brain into mush.
This is not fun. Sort of hurts, actually.
So in the shower this morning, I was kicking around the issue—put the question to myself of how to define the problem, got my definition in about ten seconds. “You have too many critical balls in the air.”
Brainstormed the solution, that took about 20 seconds.
For the duration of writing How To Revise Your Novel, I need something simpler—a single-thread fantasy, something intended to be short (I’m thinking 50,000 words), something lighter, something that isn’t a centuries-spanning epic, and most importantly, something that doesn’t have a huge amount of performance pressure attached.
So THEN I started playing around with what I could do instead for my Write A Book With Me novel.
That took longer.
But by the time I got out of the shower, I had this VERY cool idea. A multimedia collaboration with my daughter. She does handmade jewelry, and she’s really good. And in the shower, I’d had these images of fantasy artifacts and fantasy jewelry with magical properties, and a contemporary crossover story of an artist who discovers that within every human being lies a second world, as real as this one, incredibly beautiful, but deadly dangerous, only reachable by a few.
And I got the title. TalysMana.
So I pitched the idea to my daughter—”you design real pieces of jewelry based on the story I write. I’ll send the story to you a chapter at a time as I write it, when you have a few limited-edition pieces of the jewelry done, you send out the chapter via e-mail with a link to the artifact or jewelry related to that chapter. We’ll both autograph the pieces. When we’re done, I’ll put together a little signed, numbered, limited print edition of the book with all the pieces you created as full-color illustrations, and we’ll both sign that, too.”
She loved it. We’ve never gotten to work together before, and I think this will be a blast. (Plus, she’s the one who has to do all the hard stuff.)
It’ll be fun, it’ll be something special just for the folks who read my weblog and newsletters, and it won’t have the pressure attached to it of me doing something I’m intending for pro publication.
So that’s what I’m doing tonight. Putting together my cluster, calling down lightning, doing my Sentence, doing my Sentences Lite for scenes…
Fun stuff.
Becky and I will get a link put together pretty soon where you can get the chapters as they come out, and buy one of the pieces of her jewelry if something strikes your fancy.
Meanwhile, Dreaming the Dead is on hold for the duration of the writing of How To Revise Your Novel, because having my brain melting out my ears isn’t good for anybody.
Especially not me.
No words that count tonight. But stuff that will lead to words very soon. :D
How about you?
The Brain Mass Issue
The news on my brother-in-law, by the way, is there is no news. He’s in a holding pattern now, where the hospital with the doctor who WANTS to do his surgery suggested he go to a bigger medical center, and the bigger medical center said he’s not a county resident and he’s self pay, so no chance.
At this point, he’s controlling the seizures pretty well. In theory, he may be able to get the surgery in January.
My Writing
Last week went OVER seventy hours working on Hot To Revise Your Novel, including working all morning today.
Next week, I think, will be more sane. A lot of what I’ve been doing is one-time stuff associated with setting up the How To Revise Your Novel course software, the course forums, adding a NaNoWriMo forum to HTTS, testing things, creating workgroups….
A lot, of course, is writing the course and interacting with my two beta students, so even once everything is set up, I’m still going to be logging some serious hours. And once the Early Birds hit How To Revise Your Novel at the end of November or the first part of December, that’s going to require some additional time, too.
But, to get to the point, I wiped out around 3 AM last night without ever getting to my fiction.
I’m not going to write tonight. Today is my Official Weekend, DammitTM. :)
But I’ll be back tomorrow night. With fiction.
How did you do yesterday? How are you doing today?
There was this guy in a music store once. I was about nineteen. Dude was about halfway to seven feet tall, shaved head, black-coffee complexion. I was trying out guitars, and he came in, pulled a five string electric bass off the wall, plugged it into an amp, sat down and began to play the Moonlight Sonata.
The world stopped. I leaned on the guitar I was trying out and just watched this guy, and listened. His hands were liquid, boneless, the notes perfect, the whole piece played out into the stillness like the magical gateway to another universe.
When the last notes shivered into silence and I realized there weren’t going to be any more, I asked him the name of the piece (I’d never heard it before).
I’ve remembered his version of it forever. I’ve never heard a better rendition than his, and I’ve listened to a lot of them.
Tonight, that guy and his guitar and Moonlight Sonata found his way to a street corner in New York City, where he enchanted Aleksa, before he passed on a message she needed to hear.
I’ve been hanging on to that moment the majority of my life.
It was something sacred then. It came out something sacred tonight.
413 words.
You?
Just over a year ago, on October 28, 2008, I had a dream that is still changing my life.
My first publisher, Jim Baen, who died on June 28, 2006, paid me a visit.
Now, I’m not pagan, Christian, or otherwise religious in any way, shape, or form. I’m not a believer in things. I’m not a fan of faith, which to me is the denial of the provable and rational in favor of the unprovable and irrational.
I do NOT, however, think that humans are just animated meat. I think that we are creatures of energy AND flesh, and that when the flesh falls apart, the energy goes on.
In what form this energy that we were goes on, I don’t know. I have some speculations based on areas of science I follow, but they’re only that, and worthless beyond my own personal interest.
However, while I’m waiting for scientific proof in either direction, I’m willing to play with my theory, and consider it as rationally possible as the theory of oblivion at the moment of death, which does not deal in any fashion with what happens to the energy of life.
I’m willing to consider that, along with the possibility that my subconscious had a brilliant idea while I was sleeping and found a way to make it unforgettable, I also could have experienced something real on October 28th of last year.
Either way, it’s Halloween, traditionally time to acknowledge the dead, and I would like to take this moment to set out a metaphorical place at the table for Jim Baen.
I’m still writing the book that came from that dream. The idea I got that night is still something that at times leaves me trembling with the potential power of the story, if I can only find the craft within myself to realize that potential.
And whether the idea came from Jim, or whether my subconscious used him as a highly effective attention-getter, he is in my thoughts today. And whether the experience was real or metaphorical, I offer my thanks for it.
And I miss you, Jim.
My brother-in-law’s surgery has been pushed back two weeks to allow his surgeon to do it after his vacation, which starts Friday, and to allow the department chief to scrub in on the surgery.
This will also allow my brother-in-law to get his Dilantin levels up, to decrease the odds of further seizures, to get his blood pressure down, and to otherwise improve the baseline health that would affect his surgical outcome.
Tomorrow would have been better, I think, but not with his surgeon halfway around the globe for a week or so immediately afterward.
Just got back from the ER.
My brother-in-law had a seizure, and ended up back there again, and we were there all night waiting for news.
The story has an up-side this time.
A neurologist came to see him who has done the procedure he needs, who is willing to do the surgery for him, and who will work with the family and deal with the payment issues after the giant tumor is removed.
He’ll have surgery this Thursday.
I did not, however, do any writing tonight.
Here’s the news. My brother-in-law is now back home because the hospital where he was cannot do anything else for him.
The tumors in his brain are benign. That’s the good news. The diagnosis is intracranial cavernous hemagiomas.
The bad news is, he needs to see a neurologist. He needs to have at least the largest of the hemangiomas removed from his brain—it’s 9cm in diameter, about the size of a baseball.
Because it has been slow-growing, his brain has rerouted around this mammoth tumor, so that until about a week ago, it wasn’t apparent that anything was going wrong. Last week something—we have no idea what—changed, and suddenly he had right side weakness, periods of incoherence, and what has become evident as short-term memory loss.
Now the tumor has become something that, if he is to survive, must be fixed. There are only a few places in the country that can do the surgery required, which involves threading a catheter through a blood vessel in his leg up into his brain, breaking up the tumor, and sucking it out a bit at a time.
The process is nightmarishly risky. Unbelievably expensive.
Not having the surgery, though, is a sure thing, in the worst of all possible ways.
And he has no health insurance, though he might yet be able to get it through work, and it might yet cover this condition. That remains to be seen.
Assuming he can’t, he and his folks are left hoping that a 9cm cavernous hemangioma in the brain, along with smaller hemangiomas, in a 34-year-old patient with few neurological symptoms (so far), and a history of leukemia as a kid, would be a rare enough and tempting enough case to interest a teaching hospital into taking him on for the education he would provide its medical students.
