Plans and rationalizations

Having a girlfriend and parents in education--and keeping a freelancer's hours oneself--means that summer is once again vacation season; a state of affairs I have regarded as rightful since a young age, like Santa Claus. The irregularity of my habitation should explain the irregularity of my posting as of late; at least, I throw it to the bench to plead for me. Do not cross-examine it too harshly.

Next Saturday I will be in Cape Cod, at my ancestral estate, where there is no internet. I should perhaps endeavor to post something that weekend anyway, from a Panera at least. The flip side of the freewheeling freelancer's schedule is that there are no true vacations, only changes of venue, so I will have to catch gulps of WiFi when I can.

The exciting development of the past couple days is that Girlfriend has simultaneous job offers from three schools, each one a worthy one to the best of our knowledge. She is forced to play the Lucy Westenra between them--not a bad situation, all told, but why can’t they let a girl work at three schools, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? The real answer, as in Miss Westenra's case, is that there are only so many hours in the day, so you have to disappoint someone. (And lest I seem too glib by far, it really is a shame that there aren't three of her to go around.)

Girlfriend is also attempting a truncated JulNoWriMo (which would seem to stand for "July Novel Writing Month," which only almost makes sense), and I find her a compelling example. My current plan is to get the draft of Nenle and Death done in the next couple days, and use the remainder of the week to draft another short story that's been a long time in coming, but in this case never started: my riff on The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I recently encountered an influence that filled out my vision for the story, but it would probably be telling too much to say exactly what that is.

I want to set a more vigorous--even rushed--writing pace if I can. I received a sharp jab from a recent post by an author whose opinions I have been following. It's worth a read, if you're one to read about writing. The upshot is this: the idea of perfection is a danger to a writer. It keeps stories from being finished, and it keeps writers from growing. Now, Kristine Kathryn Rusch is no fan of the MFA style of literary criticism, and she actually does me the favor in her next post of tearing into that school of thought more vigorously than I can fully agree with (When following any pundit, I think it's wholesome to find the limits of your agreement.), but the admonition to get over yourself and just write bears repeating. In a year or so I will probably be sharing how someone else said the same thing and prodded me out of another period of artistic torpor. If I ever have the authority I will probably start saying the same thing. Or perhaps the pendulum will have swung all the way by then, and I will stand astride a pile of self-published kruft crying, "For God's sake, revise, you fools!"

And, really, I haven't been in such a torpor of late. I'd been making actual progress and enjoying it. It's alternately frightening and exhausting, but in between, it's pretty great.