Thursday Thoughts

I want to officially declare that, like other bloggers on my list - yeah, I'm rather funked. Must be something in the air ... could it be as simple as the pollen? I always blame the allergies, this time of year, but all I'm hearing is that this time, they really are that bad ...

In any case, in an effort to clear up the silence, I promise to post between now and next Thursday about two things: my ending-in-middle-of-sentence tic, and the idea of mystery in story (even stories that don't qualify as mysteries by the genre definition). Feel free to whip me with wet noodles if I do not produce.

Other than that, I feel like I have finally settled back into a slow groove, though Scylla and Charybdis continues to be a grind as I stumble from one difficult-to-write patch to another. Hopefully, the end result will be worth it ... but wow. One thing I'm also making note to watch is that the emotional arc is consistent. Anaea's progression from doubt to certainty seems to resolve pretty abruptly, but it is backed / foreshadowed by a lot of choices she doesn't consciously realize she's made. She's a stronger person than she gives herself credit for. Aren't most of us like that?

Working on another story which I feel has an excellent premise, but may simply be too massive for a short story - and thus, cramming it into a smaller plotline feels a bit forced and infodumpy. I'm letting it spin out to see how it turns out.

One grouse about Query Tracker: it doesn't differentiate between agents who want any fantasy and agents who want just urban. I must have gone through six in a row like that. Of course, one still does research, but it's irritating to have to sort through the invalid hits. While Flow (which is what I'm still querying right now) does qualify as urban, my understanding is that an agent is a longer term commitment ... so I don't want to pitch to someone who wouldn't be interested in anything else I write.