Back pre-pandemic, Plushie liked spending most of the day in my lap while I wrote. This was suboptimal because he’s a big enough dog that to fit him comfortably I had to sit in a very awkward position for writing. Over time, focusing became harder. Once TYG started staying at home so he had two parents around, he did that a lot less, which was great.
This past week for some reason, he’s back to his old habits.
Not usually with Trixie sharing the lap; typically she end up the other side of my left leg. Either way it’s very distracting when it comes to focusing on anything creative. However I can’t bring myself to keep him away — he’s thirteen and he won’t be with us forever.
So I spent very little of this week working on Let No Man Put Asunder, other than reading most of the first chapter to the in-person writing group (I’ll post about that next week). Instead I devoted my time to finishing final edits on 19-Infinity and settling on a cover (should be ready for reveal soon). Then I started drafting Story Behind the Story blog posts for the short stories I hadn’t written up here yet.
Today, though, for whatever reason, I found enough focus to work on redrafting Oh the Places You’ll Go. To my surprise it went really well: the rules for the magic in the story are simpler and clearer (I can’t believe I didn’t think of this solution before!), there’s more conflict and tension and less exposition. I’ll return to it next week.
I also have two posts at Atomic Junk Shop, one about the limits of reaction shots in both screen and print fiction and one looking at a few stories from the Silver Age.
#SFWApro.
