Return of the Voices in My Head

Don't worry; I'm overdramatizing in the title to this entry. I'm not here to confess to some form of psychosis. I'm talking about the return of the creative impulse, at last. Now if only I can nurture it, I may get somewhere.

Last night I went to get some dinner, and possibly a book by Jane Yolen. As I sat in Barnes and Noble, I started having ideas about the long-delayed third installment (and thereafter) of the second Jace and Sandy story, "Later This Somewhere." I named the time-traveling theater troupe, and came up with a few other details about the story and its characters. Back home afterward I typed up some notes and sent them off to Sarah K, who has bravely agreed to collaborate with me on this particular project. I'm very nervous about this. Historically I've been extremely proprietary and defensive about my fiction. I almost never take anyone's plot suggestions, and the closest I've come to a fiction collaboration, aside from a few jokey Round Robin stories, was when other people wrote sequels to my Ficlets (extreme short-short stories on a site contributed to by John Scalzi). Although there was nothing particularly wrong with them, a few of the 100-character continuations of my work upset me sufficiently that I stopped writing Ficlets entirely.

But Sarah knows about theater, and I really don't, despite the fact that my mom was writing, directing, and acting in local theater all the time I was growing up. If I can swallow my defensiveness and Sarah does her part, we should end up with a better end result on this story than I could do on my own.

Meanwhile I've also resumed doing some mental work on Mages of Mâvarin. Tonight as I ate dinner, Rani's ancestor showed up to explain earnestly that he didn't spend all his time watching the living world; and Chendoris quarreled with Vilderni about Vilderni's murder. It's true that I haven't written any of that stuff down, but it will be there when I reach the relevant scenes. Meanwhile I heard back from Sarah, who provided some good and valuable input on the theater story, which led to more notes from me.

I still need to get past the distractions - tv, that online game, etc. - so that I can concentrate on getting a significant amount of work in. Considering that a) my main distractions are in this room and b) my minor breakthroughs of the past two days mostly took place outside this house, I think I'm going to start carrying my notebook into restaurants again. Actually I've been doing that for a while, but I may be ready to actually write in it. I hope so, anyway.

No pictures tonight: it's late, last night's entry was photo-heavy, and this particular entry doesn't lend itself to photographic illustration. But in the morning St. Michael's celebrates the Feast of St. Francis, or, as I like to call it, Take Your Dog to Church Day. I should have lots of photos of that for tomorrow night's entry. But first I must sleep!

Karen