The List Isn’t Getting Shorter
My desk, made from old decking boards, is still standing, which is more than I can say for my to-do list—it fell off the fridge because it was so heavy.
Somewhere on it, in no particular order: a blog for a movie review and an old university assignment, a full read-through of a novel, an email I owe an artist for our book cover, a trilogy that refuses to start at the beginning, a small person learning what feelings are, and a day job. This post is me walking the length of that list, mostly so I can see it all in one place, and it won’t slide off anything this time.
The next Almost a Cult Classic
It's underway. I'm keeping the title under wraps until the post goes up, but I'll say this much: it's from a beloved franchise, one with a built-in audience and decades of goodwill behind it. The film should’ve made this blog easier to write, but it didn't. The fun of this series has always been working out where a film with every advantage still managed to trip, and this one trips in ways that are half frustrating and half endearing. If you've followed along from Outland through to Wing Commander, you'll have a rough idea of the neighbourhood we're in. More soon.
Filling a gap
Also in the queue is another university assignment, meant to slot in between bigger posts. The writing side is done (years ago) — assignment, tutor comments, scores, the usual format — but the images aren't, and a wall of text with nothing to break it up isn't much of a gift to anyone. So, it sits in drafts, complete and unpublishable, until I find an evening to sort the visuals. It's coming. That's as close to a date as I'm prepared to give.
Reading Redemption like a stranger
Burn the Sky: Book 2 — Redemption has reached the full read-through stage. Last update, the final chapters were being edited; now the whole manuscript gets read front to back by the lovely mechanical voice of Word. There’s something external about having this voice read out our book, reading out wind (wɪnd like pinned) when the word is wind (waɪnd like w-eye-nd).
It's a strange way to meet your own book. As I mentioned in a previous post, my editing of this book doesn’t drag the original wording too far, but it does clarify moments that didn’t sound fluid enough or didn’t sound emotional for the event. I’m sure these edits won’t move the current 4.75 on Goodreads much, but I felt it needed a little polish. These changes improve the writing a little, as the main character grows up and sees the world differently.
The email I owe
Speaking of things I'd rather deal with now: there's a cover artist waiting on a reply for changes to the draft about the Redemption cover, and that email has been sitting flagged in my inbox long enough to develop a guilt of its own. Consider this paragraph a public commitment. By the time you read this, the reply will have been sent. Probably.
Starting in the middle
Then there's the next big project: an epic time travel trilogy, currently being written in an order that makes complete sense to me and possibly no one else. I'm writing book two first.
Not as a stunt. The middle is simply where the story became clear. Book two is where the consequences live. The characters there have already been bent by everything that happens in book one, and are twisted more in the second book. The problem was I didn’t know the characters who hadn’t travelled through time well enough, so I started at a known point. From here, I can now work out the other characters and how they deal with two sets of the same people from different times — the now and the future. You could call it cheating; I call it aiming. And for a story about time travel, drafting the future before the past feels less like a quirk and more like getting into character.
I’ll be looking forward to getting more down on paper so I can free up mental space for book three. Anyone who has seen Babylon 5 and remembers the episode “Babylon Squared” (Season 1, episode 20) and its two-part payoff “War Without End” (Season 3, episodes 16 and 17) will know the complexities of a story like that.
“But it happened, just the way I remembered.”
Big feelings, small person
Away from the desk, our little girl (three years and eight months, and yes, the months still count) is learning about emotions. Which means we are too. Big feelings arrive in a small body without warning and without a name, and our job lately has been helping her find the words. She can know that even though she’s angry, she can be loved at the same time. Some days she handles the recovery better than we do, but big hugs go a long way.
There's a professional irony in spending midnight sessions trying to make fictional characters feel things convincingly, then spending the daylight hours learning in real time how feelings actually work in a person who has zero interest in narrative structure. She's a better teacher than any craft book I own.
Work
And then there's work, which somehow holds the rest of this together. It gets me out of the house and among people, on my feet and moving, with my head kept busy by everyone and everything around me. I wrote a while back that exhausting days don't stop the writing; they just change its shape — still true. A day spent talking to people is a day spent collecting voices, and some of them will end up in a book whether they like it or not. I love it plainly. Not every writer gets a day job that feeds the writing instead of feeding on it.
Back to the desk
So no, the list isn't getting shorter. But nobody's rowing this boat gently, and I wouldn't scrape a single thing off the plate. Life is but a dream, apparently; mine just has a word count.
