Sunder: Day 52

After a longer than expected Christmas-slash-New Year's break, I am back at the laptop and writing.  I started last night, actually, but I can't count it since I got absolutely nothing done.  Tonight got off to a slowish start, but the pace picked up considerably once I had a cup of coffee in me and the cleaning crew left the office.  It was a stressful work day so I am grateful for the chance to have produced something somewhere in the orbit of "creative".

I was looking at the notes I made for the first part of Sunder's prologue, but I wasn't satisfied with them at all looking at them next to the second part.  The first segment was just too passive and didn't build any of the mystery surrounding the main characters or any of the major events that start the ball rolling in the first movement so I reworked them and came up with something different.  Definitely an improvement, but I'll have to see how the thing works in the whole before I decide if I'm going to keep it or make further changes.

"You have to write down what you're going to throw away.  You know you have to go through at least ten versions before you can see how it works in the whole." (Leonard Cohen)

It's 11 PM now and I'm tired.  This is enough for one night.

Parallel Worlds

My life was a set of parallel worlds. Each world had distinct rules and personalities.  The chemistry, mathematics and history were different.  The basic elements, evolution and development were all as intricate and absolutely different as the life on a carbon-based world might differ from a world built on methane.  My parallel worlds were wide and smooth and clearly marked.  The atmospheres were mutually lethal.  There could be no collision course.
-- Kate Braverman, "Lithium for Medea"

(For Charlotte.  Endure, for this torment is not everlasting.)

Sunder: Day 46

You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon when the fingers bleed.

-- Kate Braverman

I can't even begin to describe how successful tonight was.  It was as if the last three weeks had built up to a critical mass and it finally exploded tonight.  I made some real progress on the synopsis, weaving existing threads and even laying down some new threads that (if I do my job properly) will keep readers guessing about what's really going on.  In all, I was able to finalize the prologue, all of the first movement and the opening sequence of the second movement.  Major, major progress.  K and I will have much to discuss tomorrow afternoon; in fact, I may suggest that we sequester ourselves in the basement to better focus our minds.

Outdoor adventurists look for this kind of thrill in mountain climbing or white water rafting or skiing down virgin slopes.  Stock brokers probably get it from a big score on the market.  I get it from this--from working and working and working on Sunder until the heat builds up and the raw iron begins to glow and take shape under every hammer strike.  I have missed this feeling so much that I despaired of ever feeling it again.  The story has begun to come together in a way it hasn't before, not even in the productive months before my hiatus and shoulder injury.  It is taking solid form in my mind.  In the same way that the interior landscape of The Wheel itself is beginning to reveal itself in my maps, the action of the plot is beginning to congeal in the synopsis. 

Now is the time when my legs must not flag.  Even when my arms scream and my lungs burn, I must not fail.  I must keep hauling stones across the desert in the night to my pyramid.   

Adversity is Alive

"Adveristy is alive and when it seeks you out, it's looking for a worthy opponent.  A win or a loss--it doesn't care.  It just likes to fight."
-- Cee Lo Green

Blue October

I will drive so fucking far away
that I never cross your mind.
Do whatever it takes in your heart
to leave me behind.
-- Blue October, "Hurt Me" (from the album "Foiled")

Wasting Time

"The time that we spend wasting, will forever seal our fate."
-- Cashman

Knowing If You're a Writer

"If somebody is truly a writer, he will find it out and he will understand that if there is any romance attached to the vocation, it is balanced by a number of unromantic circumstances, for the biographies of writers make it clear what a tough and enduring breed they are.  There have been writers who have burst upon the world, to its astonishment and delight, but most writers have to establish a reputation over a period of time.  That is where the toughness comes in; early discouragement  is the rule, and much work is done before important lessons are learned."
-- Robertson Davies, Reading & Writing, pg. 36 (University of Utah Press)


Please, God...help me be tough.

Human Limits

"There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before."
-- Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, pg. 3 (Knopf Canada)

"You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death."
-- Karen Armstrong, A Shrot History of Myth, pg. 37 (Knopf Canada)