| Subject: Facing the Storm -- and more than one |
Author:
Wes
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Date Posted: 20:38:29 03/01/09 Sun
Well, all right. Here we go with Facing the Storm.
Everybody goes through turbulent periods in their lives, and in Facing the Storm we have four couples going through such periods more or less at the same time. In a way it's kind of a placid story, but everyone has to face the storms that come in their lives. I will admit that the cover and the title are a bit dramatic and metaphorical, and before anyone asks, it derives from a specific incident that takes place toward the end of the book.
I will admit that I'm glad to see February over with -- not only from the fact that for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere it means the end of winter is drawing near, but February has been a very hectic month.
Back in the middle of January, I decided to see if I could break a spell of not writing by working on Randy and the Alien, a book I started in 2004 and never finished. I had what happened mostly thought out but was struggling on how to tell it. The work on it went pretty well, and I managed to wrap it up in the first part of the month.
Since I felt like I was on a roll, I decided to take a swing at another book that laid unfinished about that long, titled Superheroine. This was a rather short book, a little out of my normal style, but I hit on a scene that I just didn't want to right and it had laid around since maybe 2005 without being touched. It turned out that I was able to finish it up in only a few days, with about 13,000 words.
Now I was really on a roll, so I turned to Bullring Days, a book I'd been working on last winter and stalled no for no good reason other than the fact that I was tired of writing in general. This is a much bigger book; I figured I was about 80% done at 205,000 words. I finally finished it up yesterday morning at 264,000 words.
In addition to that, I was going back and forth with editors on Facing the Storm, and making a fast pass through the next book, Blue Beauty, before sending it out to edit.
As if that wasn't enough, Friday night I went to turn on my main computer, and I had a heck of a time getting it to turn on -- a power supply issue. While I do most of my writing on an old Pentium 300 down in my workshop (I get bothered less that way), the website is updated from the big computer. The next morning I called the guy that does my computer work, and found out he was several days backlogged, which meant that the big computer would be down for a few days. "All right," I said. "What can you do on a laptop?"
We went around for a bit till he quoted me a price about a hundred bucks less than I expected to pay. "Good enough," I told him. "See you shortly." An hour or so later I managed to tickle the big computer into running and I was transferring files to the new box. That's always a pain, but I managed to get the important stuff done, so now getting updates done isn't going to be an issue.
It's been a long time since I've owned a laptop and I'm not sure I'm going to like it, but we'll see. The last laptop I had, if you can remember that far back, was an XT without a hard drive -- it ran off two low density floppies and was a pain in the butt, so it's part of the reason I've shied away from them since. I haven't used the keyboard enough to tell if I'm going to get used to it, but time will tell. I will admit to having visions of sitting out on the back porch on a nice evening and working on some other books in the pipeline, but at least now I don't that, completing first drafts of Randy and the Alien, Superheroine and Bullright Days hanging over my head.
What's more, it's March. That means it's not February any longer. Hopefully this month will be a bit quieter. I plan to work on the model railroad, do a little reading, and generally unwind a bit. Who knows, I might even get back to the book I intended to work on when I wound up working on Randy and the Alien.
-- Wes
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