Thursday, May 30, 2013

Thursday Thoughts

It's been an eventful week, most of which I spent on the east coast - traveling to Baltimore to visit with my folks, and from there into Virginia wine country.  Got to tour Monticello (and Jefferson's more private retreat, Poplar Forest), saw so many gorgeous views, dabbled in wine-tasting, and tried duck for the first time.  As always, it wasn't long enough and I'm reluctantly easing back into the daily routine, but I did miss my puppies.

On the writing front, I wrote a poem - free verse - got the germ of an idea for another, and pondered expanding a third ... but as to the last, I've looked at it multiple times and it seems to resist being turned from its current state - a single cinquain, a snapshot of imagery - into something with enough meat to submit.  I also finished Nesting Instinct, which at 17,700 words and a little change has a lot of heft of it ... and still has that, "Yes, but ..." ending I love to wirte.  Oh, boy, does it ever.  I think an immediate sequel to this work would have to be a novel:  the implications are too broad even for another novella.

... and if there's one thing I learned from writing Nesting Instinct, it's that I don't think I could survive writing an entire novel from the first person perspective of a blind woman.  The tactics I used in a shorter (relatively) work would begin to wear thin and leave a reader unsatisfied in book-length fiction, I think.  On the other hand, maybe I should take that as a challenge ...

My next project is the final editing pass for Scylla and Charybdis, a focused, "cramming style" readthrough.  I found this immensely helpful with Butterfly's Poison (even if Harper Voyager didn't agree) and I'm looking forward to a similar clean sweep.

Forward march!

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