FULL BLEED: GONNA DIE IF SWEET MAN SHOULD PASS ME BY

Been a couple weeks, yeah. Maybe there's a lot to say all pent up in there. Maybe it's just been things happening while everyone around goes insane in public or private and there's not much to say about that other than realizing what is and is out of your control is a good way to try and stay sane or at the very least functional.

Let's see, did I talk about Shadow and Silence? Yeah, I apparently did. Good for me, talking up a book that not many people are going to want to buy. Good use of time getting that collection out there. Well, at the very least, the cover art got me into my very first art show, that being at the Amygdala gallery in Bloodstone Books in Sacramento. It'll be there until the early part of next month so you can catch it in person too, if you like. Just drive on down there. Go buy some books, too. Tell 'em I sent ya.

That's a neat thing to have happened, though. I showed some digital art once at SDCC in I want to say 1993, but it was probably 1994 before I had a computer which could actually work with files big enough to print out and post up for other folks to look at. That's a story in and of itself, involving the handful of times I did art for Bomp! records back in the 90s. But yeah, I wasn't cut out to be a commercial artist. I just cut and paste stuff. I do that now, pretty much, only I have a whole range of techniques to hide that fact. And more RAM, which means more layers.

Found a great new pizza place near the house, so that's a good thing. Cheaper and better than Round Table. Hey, I live an exciting life. Pure thrill-power start to stop. Never say die but say "can I go to bed now?" Got two kittens who are still young enough that they need to be kept in the upstairs room so they don't get into too much trouble. Only mildly allergic to them, which is interesting as I thought I was done with all that foolishness.

Finally broke through the jam that had been plaguing me on the current book, which is at least called Missing Pieces, but it might be All Missing Pieces or Little Missing Pieces or something along those lines. As I said before, I'd been stuck on page 100, which is not a great place to be stuck (nor is any of them.) And I'd been there for some time. Maybe since June? I let the whole thing go to pasture, let the weeds get higher than the garden. I can't even say this was a particularly busy summer even. But I wasn't ready to work on this, and I'd kind of given myself a deadline of November after the deadline at the end of the summer (in a week now) was not going to work. I am nothing if not flexible. Went back to work on the outline and stripped a little stuff out, focused on some things, let some other stuff fall back. Thought I had it. Then I figured out what the real problem was. The outline was fine. Well, it had been made mostly fine. But I was fighting with the central metaphor in the story.

First of all, you all get that the monsters in horror stories are metaphorical, yeah? Yes, yes, sometimes a Frankenstein is just a Frankenstein. Sometimes the guy with the chain saw wants to cut you into little pieces and it maybe shouldn't matter to the reader. You can throw in subtext if you like. So, yeah, metaphors. Well, I was struggling with the monster at the center of the haunted house (spoiler alert - the story is about a girl named Grace who runs away, but isn't running away, really, to the Last Prayer Club where she makes some friends and ends up at a crash pad that's haunted.) I thought the monster was one thing and I'd spent a lot of time working it up. This was, at least to my knowledge, a kind of thing that hadn't really been utilized in a haunted house setting, so I was pretty pleased with that, but found that I was still balking at the whole thing. I changed what it was doing with the house and the people in it and thought that was enough.

I had to cut the old monster out and have something else there. But I couldn't figure out what, which led to a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing on my part. Everything I was coming up with felt like it had been done before, even to the point of me adding a second monster in as a redirect and no, it was just too much. Too many notes. It wasn't right. And I wasn't going to change my mind about it.

Until one afternoon, I was getting ready to go out on a walk and not thinking about anything and the solution to things just jumped into my head from nowhere. I like to think that it was because I had been taking a hard look at the outline and fixing things (which I'd deluded myself into believing but was simply not true). I think the actual thing that worked was that I gave up working on it and just said "fuck it" and walked away completely. I was pretty close to walking away from the book. Yeah, a hundred pages is an investment, I know. But if it's not going anywhere, it's not. That can't be faked.

But in not thinking about it, something weird happened. It's not that a voice came into my head and whispered the answer. I almost said it out lout as it showed up and processed it and said "Well, yeah. That's what I should have been doing all along."

Brains are dumb. I don't like them. I don't know how to get around without one, though. Yeah, meditation. I can't sit meditate. Have to be walking or something. Anyways. Went to the computer, typed out about of page of clarity then went through the outline and had to do more than just cut/paste the new monster name. There was some suturing, maybe a couple of staples, little super-glue. But at the end of last week it was all there. Went through and read the pages I'd had already, I think 115 or so. Made the necessary changes to those, which wasn't all that much. Couple extra pages of business and dialogue which was there to reveal stuff and hopefully entertain as it went. I think I did an hour of actual pages last week. That's where I stand (I draft standing, I no longer ask why, probably just to get me off my butt, not because I want to write like Stan Lee) and type and keep the noise-canceling headphones on.

Stood up this week and got to page 148. I think that's mostly relief and panic and a little glee at things finally moving again. I expect the rate to slow down some. It's nice when you get before the recording machine and actually have something to put into it. Standing there fighting yourself sucks. It's worse when you know that there's something there but it's just not right so you don't really do anything. Maybe some shrieking into the shriek machine, maybe too much of that.

This book's probably gonna go long, which I might worry about if I was trying to shop this around. But I got over all that. I won't say I got better, but I'm trying to find satisfaction somewhere else. It's easier when you can do the actual work. I'm also trying not to think about the life of the book after, just making it happen a chunk of pages at a time then unifying it after. But I figure there'll be a Kickstarter around the same time as last year. The book will be done or on final revisions because I'm scared to do it otherwise. I've been burned, too. I don't want to burn anyone else.

So, yeah, sigh of relief.

Catch you all on the flipside.