I’ve been pretty quiet in the blogoverse lately. There’s a couple reasons for that. For one thing, I’ve just been in a quiet mood. Not down or anything, just quiet.
For another, I’ve been making progress on my novel, The Lilith Quotient. I was stuck for the longest time. I had some vague ideas of things I wanted to do, but each time I tried to implement them, they just came out crappy. Recently the massive mental block I had began to crack and words began to flow a little better.
Some of the issue is anal retentiveness, I think. I made some notes throughout the copy I had in hand, like “add this here” or “rewrite this transition” with the intent of moving the story along and then coming back to clean up a little. Unfortunately, as they accumulated, they sat in the back of my mind, nagging me to distraction, so I couldn’t write chapter seven because I was distracted by something back in chapter three.
I finally just forced myself to begin at the beginning, and tend to every single note before I moved on. I looked at the first note. I stared at it. I read and re-read all the text leading up to that note. Days passed. Hair grew six inches on my legs. Presidents came and went, and still I stared at that note. I finally had an idea about it, ran with it, wrote it down. It sucked, but it was forward progress. I reworked it. Better. I reworked it again, better still. I stared, I thought, they fed me liver and macaroni and cheese with a tube. I worked at it. I got it to where I could live with it and move on.
I made a point of reading all your blogs once in the morning and once at night, and only commenting if I just couldn’t control myself. The withdrawal symptoms wracked my body and mind, but I persevered through the pain. I got a feed reader to lessen the temptation and speed up my surfing. The notes called to me.
The next note went a little easier, and the next one easier than that. I re-read the text from beginning to the next note. I made more notes, then addressed them.
After much work, I’m proud to say I’ve taken care of all the notes and I’m moving forward. Yesterday, I cracked a hundred pages, and the story is still moving. It’ll still need work when I’m done, but it’s together enough that it’s not nagging me anymore. Words have always come easily to me, so this is entirely outside my experience. I think it’s just a matter of the length. I’ve never attempted to write anything so very long as a novel.
I sent out a couple of copies for feedback, and I’ve gotten a few suggestions and assists.
Now my blog is collecting cobwebs, and it’s beginning to nag at me, so I’m posting this as much to shut my brain the frack up as much as I am to give you an update. I limited my time for this post to five minutes, so forgive me if it’s a little rough.
I’m happy now. I’m going back to the novel.
It has not come, but the day approaches too quickly.
)
If you’ve been watching my shiny new RSS feeds down in the left sidebar, you know that Dr. BA has covered the first three spaceflight disasters today, 
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