A Writer's Haven

This is the last week I have before I return to work on Friday. I’m excited but not. I’m excited to start this new journey, but I’m afraid of overextending myself.

This is good for six months, and then after this I have to reassess. Hopefully I won’t get sick again in the meantime.

I haven’t written, to tell you the truth, and I know, that’s bad. I’m actually beta-reading a novel for someone, and it’s over a hundred thousand words. At the same time I’m reading Second Company by Michael Hesse, which is how I really wanted War Mage to be but didn’t have the knowledge to do. To tell you the truth, he did a better job.

Dialysis gives me four hours to read, so I’ll have plenty of books on my Kindle.

Real Magic for Writers is selling steadily, probably because it’s cheap right now. We don’t know if it’s this blog, the podcast, or just Amazon bumping me up that’s doing the sales. It’s magic!

I have lots of things to obsess about. The dialysis (which has given me four hours of reading time three times a week), the next book which already has a writer’s block on the first chapter, and what’s going to happen for the rest of my life.

As soon as I move the computer upstairs to my third office (I live in a 10-room house) I will be doing a podcast.

I’m having trouble with the new novel, tentatively titled Ova. I want to introduce the main character, but I can’t seem to catch her voice. I don’t hear her very clearly–though I know what she ends up doing, at the beginning here I can’t seem to get her down right. I need to ask myself some questions and do a little “interview” of her to get where she’s coming from. I’ve plopped her down on the page and have no backstory, only what happens in the future.

I tried to write her home life, but it was boring. Eat, watch TV, go to sleep. Wake up. Do chores. Go to work.

It’s really hard for me to describe something or someone without making it seem like a description. I have to use active words, have characters do something other than stand there while we take a picture. Describe and action at the same time.

I know this is a blog about writing, but I need to take a moment to let you know something.

I’m starting dialysis Monday.

I’m waffling between “This is a death sentence” and “I’m going to fight like the dickens and live a long life with this.” 15 hours a week at a dialysis center, and working 40 hours a week won’t leave me much time for fun and games.

However, on the bright side, I’ll have time to write. Somewhere I have a Bluetooth keyboard and I can hopefully type using my iPad. I’m working on the next novel, the sci-fi one I explained in the previous blog. I’m doing it in Word this time around, not Scrivener.

I’ll have time to read, to listen to audiobooks and podcasts, and do fill-it-ins (they’re like crossword puzzles but you’re given the word and have to fit it in puzzle). If I had a laptop I would probably game, but I don’t have one.

I also have time to pester people, do my calls and emails. Go ahead, tell me my on hold time is an hour. I’ll wait.

I was in the hospital for two weeks due to a mental health issue, and realized while I was there that I missed writing.

I was into the game, and work, and other things known as Life, that I didn’t want to write. I didn’t have time or the energy.

So when I got out of the hospital, I let my publisher know that I was going to write something. But I wanted to write a different genre, something that I hadn’t done before.

While cleaning cat puke off a notebook, I realized that this notebook had my notes from a hard science fiction novel I had written in my 20’s. It was very similar to Dune in that it had to do with an alien race finding a mythical person to lead them. However, it took place on Earth.

I hadn’t written hard sci-fi since then and wondered “Why not?” My plan is to write the first chapter, present it to the publisher with a very rough outline of the rest of the book, and see what he thinks.