And here it is September.
As reported previously, I found a nice little place through writersretreat.com. The landlady has fixed up one wing of the house to be a nice big efficiency apartment, which she rents out by the week to writers and other people who just want to get away from it all for a while.
Whole days went by when I never saw anybody, except the half dozen drivers in their cars going up the road.
But if you want somebody to chat with a little, there's a cafe/bookshop a few miles away that's open for a couple hours every morning. They have free wifi (as does the room here), so I went over there three or four times, sipped a coffee, ate a scone or a muffin, and wrote. I also did the showroom tour at a potter's shop, and ordered a really interesting steamer thing, which I'm looking forward to cooking with.
There have been a couple of astonishingly clear nights when I could walk (well, stumble) outside, onto the neighbors' wide open lawn, look up, and wow, there's the Milky Way, clear as anything. Not to mention all of the stars in the Little Dipper (one of which I think is 5th magnitude), without even having to do the averted vision trick. And then around into the back yard (the "Just Light" app on my iPod Touch is wonderful for getting around in the total darkness), where I have a clear view of the, uh, south that'd be. And there's Scorpius, and the teapot in Saggitarius, and the Milky Way snaking through behind. The Galactic center is that way, behind those dark clouds that obscure the middle of the Milky Way.
In one of the scenes in the book there's a character waiting on a road which seems to be the earthly continuation of the Milky Way across the sky above him (her, it turns out). If the trees were in different places, this could totally be that place.
Writing wise, I've accomplished a fair amount, but have very little to show for it.
I spent the first whole day wandering around thinking about the plot and the characters and the dread What is this about, anyway? question, and boiled it down to a one-sentence summary. A kind of a "squeeze it til it tweets" exercise.
Okay, fine. Then I started thinking of various ways to integrate most of the trial scenarios and scenes I've written over the past couple years, and came up with something that might work, kinda sorta. And I wrote a scene or two that appear on that extra strand of the loopy, lacy, plot framework.
Buuut.... it's too damn complicated for anybody to follow. Time to do some major cutting. Get rid of the murder mystery. Get rid of the new stuff, and with it most of the paradoxes, and the dude who's everywhere doing everything to make my plot work, for no discernible reasons of his own. I'm not Dan Brown.
And so we're back to the plot more or less as it was in 2008, though with some sidebars and extra stuff that'll help motivate the choices in the third act. And I'm stuck with a lovable character becoming hateful, because she does what she thinks she has to do. But the thread where she repents all that and undoes most of it was a little too cute and too complicated to get to work.
But it was cute.
And the side plot, possibly for a sequel, where character hates his ex so much that he creates multiple timelines so he can kill her again and again in all of them? Nope, that's not in there either. Though there's a certain symmetry to each partner in a failed marriage driving the other to homicidal craziness. Perhaps I'll leave room in the three (or more!) dimensional timeline for something like that.
There are still some problems, like the more or less massive point-of-view shift in the middle, but I think maybe that could work. We'll see. Coming to a hard disk near me, perhaps for Christmas.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, I'm told the house is full of boxes, and toxicfur is moving out the day after Labor Day, which is when I go back to work. I hope it all runs smoothly. She's hired movers to do the heavy lifting and carrying. I basically just need to stay out of the way.
Oh, and I missed a four-day deluge of a Nor'easter, and then the Heat Wave to end all heat waves, and then the whimper that was Hurricane Earl passing by. After the deluge, toxicfur called the guy who replaced our roof last fall to report it was leaking again, and he came out the next day, found a problem and fixed it, no fee. So far, no more leak. But then there wasn't a leak during a similar nor'easter in the spring, either. I think it's an intermittent hardware bug.
And then pick up the pieces and put my life into some semblance of together. Just me and the one cat. We'll see how that turns out.
Driving home tomorrow. It's a four and a half hour drive in the zero traffic limit, which we might just approach on the middle day of a long weekend. When I came up here on Sunday two weeks ago, much of I-93 southbound in New Hampshire was stop-and-roll, people going back to Boston for work the following day. Some schools start Monday, but mostly people are off on Labor Day, which is Monday.
Whole days went by when I never saw anybody, except the half dozen drivers in their cars going up the road.
But if you want somebody to chat with a little, there's a cafe/bookshop a few miles away that's open for a couple hours every morning. They have free wifi (as does the room here), so I went over there three or four times, sipped a coffee, ate a scone or a muffin, and wrote. I also did the showroom tour at a potter's shop, and ordered a really interesting steamer thing, which I'm looking forward to cooking with.
There have been a couple of astonishingly clear nights when I could walk (well, stumble) outside, onto the neighbors' wide open lawn, look up, and wow, there's the Milky Way, clear as anything. Not to mention all of the stars in the Little Dipper (one of which I think is 5th magnitude), without even having to do the averted vision trick. And then around into the back yard (the "Just Light" app on my iPod Touch is wonderful for getting around in the total darkness), where I have a clear view of the, uh, south that'd be. And there's Scorpius, and the teapot in Saggitarius, and the Milky Way snaking through behind. The Galactic center is that way, behind those dark clouds that obscure the middle of the Milky Way.
In one of the scenes in the book there's a character waiting on a road which seems to be the earthly continuation of the Milky Way across the sky above him (her, it turns out). If the trees were in different places, this could totally be that place.
Writing wise, I've accomplished a fair amount, but have very little to show for it.
I spent the first whole day wandering around thinking about the plot and the characters and the dread What is this about, anyway? question, and boiled it down to a one-sentence summary. A kind of a "squeeze it til it tweets" exercise.
Okay, fine. Then I started thinking of various ways to integrate most of the trial scenarios and scenes I've written over the past couple years, and came up with something that might work, kinda sorta. And I wrote a scene or two that appear on that extra strand of the loopy, lacy, plot framework.
Buuut.... it's too damn complicated for anybody to follow. Time to do some major cutting. Get rid of the murder mystery. Get rid of the new stuff, and with it most of the paradoxes, and the dude who's everywhere doing everything to make my plot work, for no discernible reasons of his own. I'm not Dan Brown.
And so we're back to the plot more or less as it was in 2008, though with some sidebars and extra stuff that'll help motivate the choices in the third act. And I'm stuck with a lovable character becoming hateful, because she does what she thinks she has to do. But the thread where she repents all that and undoes most of it was a little too cute and too complicated to get to work.
But it was cute.
And the side plot, possibly for a sequel, where character hates his ex so much that he creates multiple timelines so he can kill her again and again in all of them? Nope, that's not in there either. Though there's a certain symmetry to each partner in a failed marriage driving the other to homicidal craziness. Perhaps I'll leave room in the three (or more!) dimensional timeline for something like that.
There are still some problems, like the more or less massive point-of-view shift in the middle, but I think maybe that could work. We'll see. Coming to a hard disk near me, perhaps for Christmas.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, I'm told the house is full of boxes, and toxicfur is moving out the day after Labor Day, which is when I go back to work. I hope it all runs smoothly. She's hired movers to do the heavy lifting and carrying. I basically just need to stay out of the way.
Oh, and I missed a four-day deluge of a Nor'easter, and then the Heat Wave to end all heat waves, and then the whimper that was Hurricane Earl passing by. After the deluge, toxicfur called the guy who replaced our roof last fall to report it was leaking again, and he came out the next day, found a problem and fixed it, no fee. So far, no more leak. But then there wasn't a leak during a similar nor'easter in the spring, either. I think it's an intermittent hardware bug.
And then pick up the pieces and put my life into some semblance of together. Just me and the one cat. We'll see how that turns out.
Driving home tomorrow. It's a four and a half hour drive in the zero traffic limit, which we might just approach on the middle day of a long weekend. When I came up here on Sunday two weeks ago, much of I-93 southbound in New Hampshire was stop-and-roll, people going back to Boston for work the following day. Some schools start Monday, but mostly people are off on Labor Day, which is Monday.
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