Creativity is a fickle wench.

The big problem with having more than one project going is that occasionally all it means is that I can be stuck on four fronts at once. *put-upon sigh* I haven't been making Bookkeeping entries this week because there hasn't been anything to report. No words written. (Which, come to think of it, would make a great epitaph. Hoo boy, morbid much?)

On the other hand, Abyss and Apex have invited a revise and resubmit (matociquala, this is "Letting Go in Amity"), so I can turn my attention to a FIFTH front. At the moment, I'm stuck there, too, but I am hopeful that this will change once I've got myself back into that particular story's particular mindset.

my favorite moment from Sorcery and Cecelia

Spoilers! Spoilers bigger than your head! Go buy the book!

( But if you've already read it ... )

Sorcery and Cecelia is a fun, light book, ideal for those of us who wish Georgette Heyer would have turned her hand to fantasy. I love epistolary novels when they're done properly, and the whole idea of the Letter Game is just brilliant. And it's clearly a lot of fun, whether you end up with a novel out of it or not.

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WORKS CITED
Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer. Sorcery and Cecelia: Or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2003.

Well, damn.

Have just realized, v. v. belatedly, that I've got the entire plot of "Letting Go in Amity" back-to-front, upside down, or in some other way completely squabblejawed (where on earth did I find this word, and how does one SPELL it?). I should know to be suspicious when my stories start resolving themselves in major chords.

I've written the wrong story.

This may take a while.

bookkeeping

DL(2) Ch. 5: 74 words

Other work accomplished: Ran errands. Finally finished editing a long short-story/short novella (9k words--what the heck do I call it?) that's been sitting around not being edited for over a month, and have given it to Mirrorthaw to read. Tore "LGiA" apart and marked the salvageable bits. I know a lot of what the new stuff is, but I'm now pondering how to begin the thing.

That's one of the great things about the tear-down-and-start-again style of revising, grueling and agonizing though it is. For me anyway. It lets me back all the way out and ask myself questions like, Why did I do this? Was it really the best thing to do? Are there other, cooler things I could do instead? When I'm just editing, I tend to get locked into the structure I saddled myself with in the rough draft, so that I'll half-kill myself trying to get the prose to carry a bad structure, which is like trying to get those little birds that ride around on hippopotami to carry the hippopotamus instead. So, tear down. Start again. Think about what the story is, rather than what I've convinced myself to see it as. It's an unsettling mental space to be in, but it's also tremendously satisfying. Like (for I seem to be the Analogy Queen this evening) when you've been walking around all day with your feet hurting--walking on knives, as Hans Christian Andersen so charmingly puts it--and thinking it's because of the walking, and then realize that it's because of the shoes, and you can take those off. It's a great feeling, even if you do feel just slightly stupid for not having realized a long time ago that it was the shoes that were the problem and not your feet.

Verdict: Copacetic.

And you're stopping because ... ? Tired. Eyes starting to cross. Time for bed.