Tag Archives: godlight

godlight

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Last night I opened the godlight file on my Nook, meaning to reccommence my re-read/review and refresh my memory sufficiently to finish a long ago synopsis and actually submit the thing.  And I discovered the entire second scene is missing.  Gone.  Vanished.

WTF?

I heartily wish I had never tampered with the beginning at all.  And who knows what else I may have screwed up while messing around with it in my fog?  I also wish I did not have so many versions.  I would like to bag all the old versions up and throw them in an e-bonfire of some kind, because there are just too many to sort through.

I really wanted to be done revising this manuscript unless or until a professional agent or editor tells me what to change, but alas. For now I think my current writing project will be an actual revision, which is to say, I have to fix what I ruined during my last revision.

Anxiety, boo.

I need pizza.

i hate macs, the pity party

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At school we use macs, where you save by hitting Command + S.

At home I use a PC, where I save by hitting Ctrl + S.

The mac’s CMD button and the PC’s Alt button are in approximately the same place.

So when I knew my hard drive was in death’s dooryard, I carefully backed everything up…except apparently I never saved the pages and pages of revisions to godlight‘s first chapter.  Except I suspect I did try to save it…by hitting Alt + S. 

Alt + S does not save anything.  😛

Then, I imagine, I closed the document and Word asked me if I wanted to save my changes and I hit NO because I hadn’t made any changes since the last time I saved, or so I thought.

Word is always doing that, and I always say NO because I imagine I’m saving some accidental keystrokes, or perhaps some touchpad shenanigans that I don’t want to save.  In Word, if you save, run a wordcount, and then close, it asks if you want to save your changes.  What changes!?

Anyhow, all those changes are gone, and have to be done over, and as I may have mentioned, I have zero time lately and I’m exhausted.

On one level I realize these are only a few pages of changes I’m talking about, but I am just so tired, and on the edge of despair all the time.  I feel like I will always be the B student in everything:  writing, school, housekeeping, dog guardianship.  I will never be a star at anything.

How can you be a writer if you can’t manage to do something so simple as save a document correctly?

Yes, I am feeling very sorry for myself at the moment.

I hate macs.

Also Word.

I’d give up, except I don’t know and can’t imagine what I’d do instead.

Blargh.

it burns

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money boothHave you ever seen, probably on television, one of those booths where the contestant gets in and then  money blows all around while the person tries to grab as much cash as possible?  That is how it feels inside my head a good bit of the time, with ideas and thoughts instead of money.

Lately, I have not been able to grab much.

There’s just too much in there.

No time to purge with morning pages.

Under the heading of IDEAS-GENERAL, there’s the new beginning for godlight, the work in submissions.  There’s the draft beginning for Seldom Untitled, the work — allegedly — in progress, although as for progress…ahem, mumblemutter.

Under IDEAS-SCHOOL we find the ideas for Digital Illustration class, where I am currently supposed to produce a series of zoo pictograms (icons).  There are ideas for Typography (which class I may be the first ever to  love).  There are the ideas for Drawing II.

Then we have RESPONSIBILITIES.  Under this heading find laundry, menu planning, shopping (what all did I forget last time and what all will I forget next time?) and prescriptions (human and pet) and cooking and cleaning.  Haha! if you could see my kitchen floor, you would be as appalled as I am ashamed; I should be in there mopping instead of in here blogging about how I should be mopping.  Also, maintaining relationships (phone calls, e-mails).  Feeding people and critters.  Cages, litter boxes.

I could really use a wife maid.

Up until about two weeks ago, I found myself thinking, in a recurrent way if not obsessively, that maybe I was done writing.  I’d told my one good story, and I had no particular burning drive to get on with telling another.  It occurred to me briefly that maybe, just as I only have seven hundred to twelve hundred good words in me per day, I might perhaps only have so much creativity in me per day.  Maybe, perhaps, I’m using it all up on school projects. 

After all, I did have a burning drive to finish that last DI project:

But no burn when it came to godlight or Seldom.  No particular guilt over lack of burn, either — which was the most disturbing aspect.  Can a burning desire just wink out like that?  If it does go, does it ever come back?

What can I do to make it come back?

Even if I figure that out, should I make it come back?  Because I really do not have time.

I thought it was me, my inner whiner.  This is all well and good for kids living at home and men with wives.  I AM the home, and I AM the wife!  And:    Nobody else spends this much time doing school work.  I’m only taking four classes!  WTF?

Last week my hard drive self-destructed and the youngest spawn fell ill, so on top of everything else, there was alla that there to deal with.  The inner whiner was on a rip, let me tell you.

Then I heard one of the young people, a second-year student say almost exactly the same thing about how much out-of-class time we spend on school work, and I felt so relieved.  It’s not just me!  There really is an exorbitant amount of homework in the graphic design program.  So. I could just quit, right?

Quit and do what?  Sit around having plenty of time to write but no desire to do it?

Well I could walk the dogs, there’s that.  And spend more time trying to not think of all the things I’m not supposed to eat, which is always a worthy occupation.

For now, my writing goal is to finish typing in the changes to godlight‘s beginning.  When that is done, I’ll submit both visions* for critique and see what they say.  While that’s pending I can go back to work on Seldom in my — ahem, spare — time.

Meanwhile I’ll keep thrashing out the school projects unless or until it becomes more pain than pleasure.  For instance, I needed an idea for a surrealist drawing yesterday, and the girls in the basement are simply not cooperating.

changes

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It’s a miracle I ever read a novel, never mind wrote one, as I have the attention span of a flea. I signed on to post about the wild and crazy night of dreams I just had, and how I awoke with the knowledge that–oh look. Dog videos!

Anyhow, ahem. I dreamed rough and woke up because my arm had fallen so thoroughly asleep it hurt, and I was suddenly sure not only that I need to change the beginning of godlight, but also certain of how, which in spite of much mulling, has eluded me so far. A way, I think, to move the beginning closer to the beginning (if you will) and yet still sparing me one of those in media res openings.

Those are very popular now, stories that begin in the middle of action, but I personally hate them. I want to know a little about the character before she plunges through the old wellcap on her way to the mailbox, and it’s hard to fit that knowing in without telling, dumping, or what have you. But if I don’t know the character, I won’t care if she falls through and dies down there or hauls herself out just as the cap collapses, or if she subsequently leaves a bloody trail upon the ground as she crawls to the mailbox and finds a letter from her dead sister in there.

So, changes. Or a change, plus its ripples. In a story, everything ripples out.

godlight – what’s it about

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I think I am supposed to be writing entries about the kinds of things that will appeal to and attract potential readers for my novel, but I don’t know what kinds of things those might be. I don’t really like discussing my unsold stories in public much, ever since a critique group member absconded with no less than two character names and a major concept, and since there is no way to protect ideas except not to share them, I re-envisioned the whole story and have kept it quite close to the vest since.

The novel is a dystopian adventure about a collision between the near future and the far future. Although I never come right out and explain it in the story, godlight is about using time travel to change the past, and to some extent, about the effect of time travel on multiple incarnations of the same soul. It’s about what it means to be human, and what it costs to belong.

In addition to the adventure, there’s a love story (actually three, now I think about it, one of them a love-hate situation) and a mystery. Did Cera–the heroine–kill her husband seven years ago and get away with it? Just about everyone in the story world thinks so, except her one crazy companion.

There is no god in godlight. It’s not religious fiction and it’s not my intention to confirm or deny the existence of a divine being.

Now if I think of any topics that might appeal, I’ll be sure to post them here. But while I’m working on Seldom, I won’t be able to discuss her story for fear of killing it. So I’ll probably continue to share minutiae about life, the varmints, and everything. I hope that’s ok, because that’s pretty much all I have in the silo right now.