It’s coming up hard on that time of year when NaNoWriMo sends would-be authors scurrying to their desks, anxious to pound out 50,000 words in a single month. As you can see from my projects, the first two years I tried, I succeeded, and thus kicked off what is now a 13-year career … writing. It’s been a lot harder in recent years to get past work and family commitments to get much more than a few additional words to whatever WIP I have underway.
And yet.
I have covers and ideas … and words! … floating through my brain. I’d love to usher them through the portal of my keyboard and get them out into the world.
Especially after working this month to edit Gayla’s latest, a paranormal fantasy story kicking off a new series: Faecombe County. Getting to the point of hitting “publish” is an underrated rush. Though honestly nothing new, even for women. Though I hesitate to think back on the days when books came inscribed with curses to deter thieves from stealing the precious tomes. Though the marginalia of those books might be entertaining enough to push the curious in that direction.
Harvesting fresh tomatoes and other vegetables even as the leaves turn is also pretty exciting: I keep thinking of the wit who said having a garden is like printing your own money. While true to some extent, it seems there is always another gadget or plant to buy. Given our experience this year with the terrible depredations of vine borers, I’ve been looking into beneficial nematodes, as we seek to maintain an organic balance on our current corner of the planet. Here, again, is a deadline fast approaching: The microbes have been in the fridge for a week now, while I screw up my courage to try something completely different.
Though, I suppose, not quite as different as the sound of a snail eating.
And that meditation on the lensing effect illness can have on the perceived passage of time brings me round to recent reporting on near-death experiences. And then necessarily to the nature of consciousness. And while I’m definitely not the skeptic this author is, I appreciate his sense for the nuances of all sides of the questions tying together God, consciousness, and quantum reality. If you’re interested in my (fictional) take on how that might look in a closely related future world, you would probably appreciate where I’m going with book three in my Planet Seekers series.
If there’s any one thing nudging me back toward NaNoWriMo… it’s the current, draft state of that book. We’ll see whether next month provides sufficient spare time to churn out the words to complete the story.