Okay, well, allow me to say good morning and happy…Friday?

Yes, it’s Friday instead of Thursday.  I’m afraid I pretty much spent yesterday lying flat on my back.  I don’t know exactly what I did to irritate it this time, but I have a chronic back problem (including so-called failed back surgery syndrome) and its level of trouble waxes and wanes.  Unfortunately, what with one thing or another, on Wednesday night through to Thursday, it waxed, baby.  I got very little sleep and was just a mess.  So, I stayed home from work, and I also blew off writing my blog.  However, I didn’t want just to leave the week empty…I suspect that if one allows too many gaps in regular publication, one tends to lose readers.

Thus, you have before you a Friday morning blog post from me, though of course you may not be reading it on a Friday morning.  In fact, I suppose it’s more likely that you are not reading it on a Friday morning, since unless you’re waiting at the computer for my next post to come out, or you happen to be at the computer around the time it does, you’re likely to come across it at some other point in the week.  It’s even possible (though it seems unlikely) that you’re reading this centuries in my future, perhaps studying the works of one of the most beloved, influential, and enduring literary figures of the early twenty-first century.  You may even be an alien, or an AI, or a trans-human, who can say?

Hello from June 7, 2019 AD/CE!  Hope things are well and good in your time!

I’m trying to think of a way to keep this blog a little fresher than it sometimes feels; I worry that my weekly posts can become a bit repetitive.  I originally spun off Iterations of Zero to put items there which I felt didn’t really fit with the discussions of my books and stories, and the process of creating them, that I was trying to make the central focus here; maybe that was ill-considered.  Maybe I should just wrap all my writings (and speakings) together here in this blog again, all at one address, and just separate them by subject matter, which I do anyway.  After all, and unfortunately, I don’t tend to produce IoZ articles or posts on a regular, consistent basis.

Anyway, I’m thinking about that, and we’ll see what ends up happening.  At the very least, it would free me a little from the self-imposed constraint of having to think of an appropriate Shakespearean quote to mangle every time I write a post here (though I do enjoy that process).

In other matters, the editing of Unanimity goes well, and I’m truly pleased to continue to find that I’m enjoying parts of the book that I feared might be…well, a little too much.  I’m sure that there’s much technically unnecessary dialogue in it (I’ve been told as much about some of my other stories, in the politest and most constructive of terms), and I may try to winnow it out.  But, damn it, there’s an awful lot of unnecessary dialogue in real life, and I do try to make my characters act like real people.

With certain very glaring exceptions, of course.

Still, I need to be judicious.  And one of the good things about editing one’s works over and over and over and over and over again (and then some), is that by the seventh edit, one tends to be quite sensitive to the boring bits of a story.  As long as one can maintain a spirit of goal-directed ruthlessness with one’s own creations, it’s possible in principle to cut a great deal of material out of a work and make it more streamlined.  Though I say it as shouldn’t, you might justly think.

Speaking of shorter works, the editing of Free Range Meat* is also proceeding, though usually only one day a week.  Even with that limited schedule, it will be done waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay before Unanimity, and soon I’ll be announcing its imminent publication.

With that, I draw this week’s blog post to a close.  Apologies for its tardiness, but perhaps changes are coming that will give you more frequent material to read here, anyway.  We shall see.

TTFN

*should I hyphenate the first two words or not?