Wednesday, April 24, 2002
Chapter Five got off to a proper start today. By 3:30 this afternoon I had 1,008 fairly decent words and two new characters to deal with. And I've sent the rough draft of Chapter Four out to be read by a couple of people who act as my "first readers."
I may take tomorrow off to do some neglected field work. But there's nothing harder than giving myself a day off, no matter how much I "deserve" it. Even if the day involves hard work, which field days do, I still feel as if I'm slacking off if the work isn't writing fiction. I think this derives, at least in part, from the fact that writing, unlike most professions (if writing can even be said to be a profession), has very poorly defined parameters for "work time" and "not work time." Any moment I'm awake I could be writing. There's no set number of hours that I am to work each day. My work day may vary from an hour to sixteen hours, seven days a week (excepting those awful dry spells). To make matters worse, my office is in my home. My business number is my home phone number. There is no line whatsoever between workplace and home, as I may often sit on the chaise in the front room and write or read, or may edit a manuscript in bed. I have to laugh whenever I hear someone complain about taking their work home with them, as my work is rarely ever anywhere else. Sure, there's no commute, no cubicle, no worries about how (or even if) I dress for work, but there's also virtually no escape. All of which makes deciding to take a day "off" very difficult.
I'm reading Arthur Conan Doyle again, as I have to get a Sherlock Holmes story written sometime in the next nine weeks. It's a project I would have had to pull out of if the editor hadn't kindly extended my deadline to the end of June.
Bill Shafer at Subterranean Press has asked me if I'd like to edit an anthology and I'm thinking it over. It would be a new experience. That's not always good. Anyway, right now we're only at the think-about-this-and-toss-about-some-ideas stage.
And that's probably about it for tonight. I've probably said this before, but I'm afraid I've begun to neglect my ink-and-paper journal for the blogger. It worries me, as they do have two entirely different functions. But there's only so much that can be written in any single day (even when you're an obsessive, guilt-ridden workaholic like me).
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