right around the corner

Do you know what tomorrow is?

It's December.

That's right. Already. How did that happen? Where did November go?

I wish I had more to tell you, but honestly, life is pretty much the same as it was the last time I posted. Still working on the novel. still behind at work. Still trying to sort out a new apartment; yes, there's one in Astoria we want. No, we don't have a signed lease yet. If that doesn't happen this weekend I am going to start looking again.

because the apartment hunt is taking longer than I originally anticipated, I don't know if we're going home for the holidays. Which, frankly, really bums me out. I like spending the holidays with my family. I like seeing my friends, and my godchildren. I like shopping at my favorite bookstore, and having long evenings of board games and Christmas movies. But this year . . . we'll see. I need to have the apartment thing done before I can go anywhere. With each passing day, it's less likely that I'll make it home this year. . . .

Sorry for the glum entry. That's really about all that's going on. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Maybe next week will be a more optimistic one.

this book

I realized, the other day, that while I have occasionally mentioned word counts and such for the novel I'm writing, I haven't really told you guys much about it. So I thought I'd share.

It's adult paranormal fiction. I'm envisioning it as the first book of a five-book series. It takes place in Eugene, Oregon, particularly on and around the University of Oregon campus. It's about a coven of four witches--what happens when they come together as a coven and how that affects things in the city, especially in terms of the heavily ghost-populated cemeteries.

So yes, the paranormal aspect of this book is all witches and ghosts and magic. No vampires, no weres of any kind, no fey folk. No mermaids or angels or ogres.

It's been an interesting process to write this one so far. Parts of the book are loosely based on experiences I had while living there, and some of the characters are certainly based on real-life friends of mine. So instead of spending a lot of time figuring out where the story is going, etc., I decided that this draft will be an exploratory draft. It's for me to figure out how to fictionalize myself and my friends and the city I basically grew up in. It's for me to figure out how I'm writing this book. The story line? Well, right now it moves too slow, then too fast, then too slow again. I'm not sure where it's going yet, although I'm starting to have some ideas. But I can sort out the plot arc later. What I'm doing right now is making myself comfortable with things. I've never written something based on people/places I know before. It's fun, but it's different! It raised a lot of questions in my mind. Were there couches or just benches in the halls of the English building, or am I imagining entirely that there was hallway seating at all? What is really at the intersection of 13th and Lincoln? Is it okay if I model ghost characters on real names from the campus cemetery? Etc.

I'm really enjoying writing this one so far. And I'm hoping to finish this draft by the end of the year. Then I'll probably take January to do a couple other things, and dive into serious rewrites in February.

There you have it; that's what I'm working on these days.

Happy Thursday!

brambles and briars

My head is full of fairy tales and impossibilities this morning. The restless feeling just grows and grows in these cold autumn days. . . . Some days it is all I can do to drag myself to work, to deal with my responsibilities. I want to write. I want to take long rambling walks in the park, to stay up late drinking wine by candlelight, to give in to temptation.

And this is exactly the wrong month to do so.

Sigh.

How is everybody else doing?

this life is just flying by

Man, it's November already. I feel like I blinked and a week and a half went by! I wish I had something exciting to tell you all about, some reason for not posting for a while, but the fact of the matter is . . . I'm just busy. We're apartment hunting in earnest now, I've got multiple freelance jobs, I'm a week behind at work, and I'm 40k into the first draft of the book I'm working on. The holidays are coming so I really should be thinking about planet tickets, gifts, etc. I'm in the middle of reading four different books but am not really making headway with anyway of them.

We did do ritual for Samhain (Halloween, for those of you who don't know the pagan holidays) and that was nice. Two nights ago we saw Blind Pilot play at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. That was a great show!

How about you? Anybody do anything exciting in the last couple weeks?

I've got to get to work, it's nearly 10 am. Happy Wednesday, everybody!