It’s Thursday again, the third Thursday of the month, and as you may know, I did not write an episode of “My heroes have always been villains” last week.  I considered writing an episode this week, but I think I’ll just push that off until next month; I’m just not in the mood to do it.  Writing those posts is something I do for fun.  It may seem perverse to take pleasure in writing about and celebrating my favorite villains; perhaps it is perverse.  But I really do enjoy it, and I want to do it when I have a mind-frame of playfulness.  If I write about villains when feeling negative, I’m liable to enjoy the villain more for the villainy, rather than on terms of the character as it contributes to a work of fiction.  That’s not a state in which I want to encourage myself, so I’m going to write a more ordinary blog post; indeed, as you can see, I’ve already begun.

As you can also see—if you’re looking—I posted the audio for Chapter 8 of The Chasm and the CollisionThe Chasm and the Collision yesterday on my blog, here.  Within the next day or so, I expect to post the “video” of that audio on YouTube as well, so for those of you who prefer that venue, it will be available soon.

I’m pleased to note that my new regimen for writing Iterations of Zero is working well.  I’ve produced two IoZ posts in the last two weeks (on Tuesdays), and though this is too small a grouping to be considered a pattern, I expect that I’ll continue to follow that schedule.  Similarly, despite that commitment, I haven’t lost ground on my primary task, which is fiction writing, since I find it easier to write fiction on the weekend than to write nonfiction.  When I write a blog post, I expect to produce a final, more or less polished, work, and to publish it that day, whereas with fiction I know I’m writing a first draft, so I don’t have to think of the whole process from beginning to end on each day of the writing.  This is a quite freeing, and it encourages me and makes the process easier.

Of course, I could give myself that freedom with my blog posts as well, but I find that if I write a draft for a blog post and then plan to come back to it and edit it later, I tend simply not to return to it.  Other things steal my attention, and enterprises of great pitch and merit lose the name of action.  That habit would probably be surmountable, but the way I’m doing it now seems to be the most straightforward one available, given the constraints on my schedule.

Unanimity continues to proceed well under my slightly modified writing regimen.  In fact, it’s probably going a little faster than it was before.  Terrible events are occurring or are about to occur in it, but that’s only to be expected as a horror story draws to its climax.  I can’t believe how long it is, though.  Seriously, it’s a bit mind-boggling.  It’s not Proustian by any means, but it’s certainly the longest book I’ve ever written.  In its current form, it’s already longer than most Stephen King novels.

I expect to hone it down quite a bit, of course, before it’s ready to be published, but wow.  I sometimes wonder if the book will ever reach its end.

One thing I’m enjoying about it is that a character who did not seem very promising—he’s socially awkward and lacks a certain amount of imagination and motivation—is going to be the one who will rise to the occasion and “save the day.”  This was not what I expected, and it certainly wasn’t what he expected, but that’s the way stories go.

I feel as though I ought to have more to write about here today, but whatever it is that I thought I needed to say isn’t springing out at me.  I think I’m just extremely tired, in a non-ordinary, non-trivial sense.  This has nothing to do with my writing, of course—although I can become fatigued when writing, I never seem to tire of the process in any fundamental way.  The same cannot be said of so many other things in life.  Sometimes I wish I could just go to sleep for a year…or a century…or indefinitely.  Perchance, to dream.

Oh, well.  Life is dukkha, after all; you can’t always get what you want.  (And though the Rolling Stones respond with the rejoinder that, if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need, implicit in their use of the word “sometimes” is the fact that, quite often, you get neither what you want nor what you need.)

C’est la vie.  Sometimes it’s hard to see why anyone bothers with it.

TTFN