Early in January, I admitted to having a little trouble restarting my brain after a long period of time off. I did manage to remember some things about writing, though, and I started making notes on a new project.
I dove enthusiastically into story planning for a little while, and then I found that thinking up good ideas was hard work. It was a lot easier and more fun to sit around reading all day, and that's how I actually ended up spending most of the month. Since the start of the year, I've read five complete books, plus the majority of the long and dense GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and a third of GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I'm sure that's the most I've read in a month since childhood, and it's probably a record I'll never surpass.
This was a lovely, lazy way to spend January, and now it's really time for me to get back to real work. I've had a chance to do some background mulling on the ideas for the new novel, and I'm ready to bring the story into the foreground again and face the fact that it will require actual effort to turn it into a draft.
Meanwhile, the query process continues, also mostly in the background. I'd love to get a move on with that, but I'm already doing everything I can at my end, and the majority of my role right now is to wait and be patient. I'll admit to that being another thing I'm having a little trouble with...
Good Stuff Out There:
→ At the New Yorker's Page-Turner, Thomas E. Kennedy recounts a tale of Aggravated Bibliophilism: "You return to the shelf of dictionaries, where it should be, and run your finger along the twenty-something multicolored spines, but there is no royal-blue one. You feel along the back of the shelf to be certain that the book has not slipped behind the other books. It has not."
2 comments:
Thomas Kennedy was one of my MFA teachers, and a friend. Love his work!
Cool, Lynn. His name seemed familiar, and that's probably why.
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