4 November 2004

The Slacktivist has some theological questions on the "Adam and Steve" commentary. I enjoyed his mystery immensely.

Yesterday was one of those days when everything takes longer than it ought. Today may be one of those days as well. And seven hours after I typed that sentence, I return to this window. Yeah. Everything taking more time than it ought, for sure. But I bought Christmas presents! Yesterday I bought one for my mom, and today for Mom, Grandma, Onie, and Sarah. This is the latest I've ever started my Christmas shopping. My family (the ones I was born with, I mean, not necessarily the later additions) skew towards the early part of the year for birthdays, so if I see something for the folks or the grands after Flag Day, it's a Christmas present.

I don't like it when stores decorate too far in advance. Last night I saw that Byerly's had hung a lit wreath above their door, and I shook my fist at them from my car. But me buying presents is different. I do it if I see them, I don't stress about it, and I stick them in a closet and go on with my day.

In addition to Christmas presents, I got a ton of books, some bread products, a hug or so, envelopes, a dragonfly cookie cutter...yeah. It was a decent afternoon yesterday, and another today. Even though the days keep slipping away from me.

I've reached another stage where I feel like things are piling up faster than I can attend to them. I'm taking tomorrow off Novel Gazing for that reason: better than making it into something to fuss about getting done. I know that part of the problem is that trivialities are cluttering my desk. I know that I have trivialities cluttering my desk specifically so that I will address them, because they drive me nuts. I think I've said this before. The down side -- as I've said before -- is that they then drive me nuts. And give me an inflated sense of how overwhelmed I actually am.

The other thing is that when one is finishing the rough draft of a book, it's fairly easy to spot what needs doing, and what the work priority is. Finish draft of book! In approximately X more chapters or N thousand words! Go forth! Accomplish it! But even though I've allowed myself to officially start drafting Zodiac House if I feel like it, I'm doing a fair bit of revision on Thermionic Night (to good effect, I think), and now would be a good time for several short stories, and there's an old short story that will be better if I just tweak this one thing, and there's stuff to package and send out with great gobs of stamps, and...yes. The priorities are less clear.

So of course, the brain handed me another novel idea yesterday afternoon and the first three paragraphs of a short story today, the latter of which I think might be called "A Plague of Calculus and Tobacco Juice." And it's Analogish, which seems like a good thing at this juncture, so I didn't want to lose it. So scritch scritch scribble. I think the writer-brain likes this feeling, being off-balance but not ready to go hide under the bed. The rest of us in here are not so mad keen, however, and I see no evidence that the writing is better under these circumstances. So I'm going to try to clear off some of the decks, and the writer-brain can just deal.

And that's that.