The curse lifted.

The drought over.

<<<insert euphemism of choice here.>>>

In other, joyous, news: I am working on the new book!

Yes! It’s true!

After about three bad (or simply not appealing enough to get me to knuckle down for reals) ideas and false starts and carts before horses and gimmicky contrivances and so on and so forth, I have settled in on a story I’m excited to tell. Yay! As much as it’s hard work, there’s nothing quite so rewarding as building a whole world that didn’t exist before you made it up. And in that spirit, I am headlong into finding the voices of the varied narrators and key characters and the world in which they live and getting it all down on my trusty (but acting a bit flaky and crashing here and there and generally scaring the crap out of me) MacBook.

The first 100 pages are the hardest (at least for me) because you don’t really know the people and personas yet, and you’re still finding your way in that regard. It’s probably why I’m bad at short stories: I really like to understand someone (their back story and hopes and dreams and fears and screw ups and motivations and procrastinations and mental glitches) before I write them, and short stories just don’t allow for that. Nor is it necessary. And yet the process of creating all that – and for a dozen or more characters  is a lot a work. However, if the first 25 of the first 100 toughest pages are any indicator, I’m off to a good start. And that makes me happy.

And will probably make my sub-par blogging even worse, although I’ll try hard to make sure that’s not the case.

Admittedly, I have no travel planned and nothing much to report, but I suppose I could always start drinking heavily or hanging with the wrong crowd.

Or just make shit up.

You be the judge.

I suppose we’ll just have to see where the next day or two takes me…