[Total sidetracking: I grew up thinking the word above was spelled ‘spicket.’ Because that’s how my sire pronounced it. ‘Spic-ket,’ a hard consonant clipping. I found out I was wrong at the spelling bee in 7th grade. Heh. The two years I attempted the spelling bee, I got nailed on the first word. But I’ve never forgotten how to spell either of them since.
“What’s the other one?” you may ask. Rhythm.]
I would like to thank you, dear readers. Several weeks ago, I asked for your spare energy for my poor and neglected characters. To give them some love and have the Universal Unconscious allow them to start speaking their stories.
And it worked. Heavens love you, folks. Y’all rock.
Asenath told me her background. She’s going on an adventure in Mexico
Countess Eulalia made it through the woods and into the beginning of her story
Saint Gregory the Lesser came to terms with his first death in glorious battle against the Turks at Rhodes in 1522
Thomas gave in to his need to be a hero and died for it
and Anthony confronted his former master, who is about to go on a bloody rampage
…I’m looking at that list and wondering how in the hell I’m going to manage so many storylines at once. But this is also how I read. If you look at my Goodreads page (more up to date than not, I think), you’ll find that I’m in the middle of like ten books. I get to a certain point and need to stop reading and move to something else. I’m a sluggard when it comes to non-fiction works because I like to make sure I didn’t miss any details. And my interests are all over the board: I read a book (or watch a documentary) on any topic that I feel even slightly curious about. Or it goes the other way: I come across something interesting and get the curiosities going over it.
Either way, apparently, I write like I read. So writing a page or so of Eulalia’s story, then jumping on to finish up a couple of paragraphs about Anthony and Gregory should be par for the course. But it’s taken me a really long time to understand that about myself.
It’s also taken a long time to go easier on myself. When I first started writing Fixit, it was like riding a fire hose. The damned thing wouldn’t stop. I’d go through a dozen or twenty pages in a day sometimes. It came to feel the norm.
But, as I’ve documented here, that dried up over two years ago. And in the meantime, I’ve written a ton of other things. Thousands of pages worth. None that have made it to their end points. Or ever will. But they were worthy and they taught me many things about the craft. And now that those other stories have dried up, the old ones that had stopped have stepped up to take their place again. Like having put aside A Distant Mirror for a year at about the halfway point then finishing it earlier this year.
Fixit lives. And I’m being realistic. Some days, I’m only going to get a couple of paragraphs. Some days a couple of pages. I’m not yet a full-time writer. I have a full-time job as a librarian…it isn’t as though I’m sitting home and playing video games all day instead of writing.
Well. I mean, not counting the weekends.
Anyway…
The words are flowing again. The characters have awakened and are speaking to me, telling me who they are and what they want.
Thank you. I can’t wait to share them with you.
The Painted Corner 