Another Change of Scene(ry)

So not long ago, I mentioned that I had decided to rework my morning schedule (doesn’t everyone have a morning schedule?) to do writing stuff on the weekends and blogging stuff on the weekdays. That kinda sorta worked, in that I did get some (though not enough) writing done on weekends, and I did manage to (almost) keep up with the blog posting and with the visiting; but overall, it wasn’t really working out all that well, at least for the writing part. What I really needed was for the day to be a little longer. And so I built this device to slow down the Earth’s rotation and … Oh, wait, I’m being told the device is not ready yet. Scratch that. What I actually did was start getting up a half-hour earlier. More coffee, anyone?

Now, as it turns out, just getting up half an hour earlier was not entirely sufficient to get everything done that I wanted to get done. My original scheme was, get up earlier, do the blog stuff (writing a post and visiting the “nice reederz”, as Dennis used to call them), and use the balance of whatever time was left over to work on the book, as well as to also work on the book on the weekends. However, it tended to be the case that there wasn’t any time left over after doing the blog stuff, or, at most, there would be like ten minutes, and what can you write in ten minutes? (I mean, besides a hit song, if you happen to be Paul McCartney.) Finally, after a few weeks of this, I had a thought which quite frankly had never occurred to me before: I didn’t actually have to do all the blogging stuff at the same time. The Blog Police wouldn’t come and arrest me. In fact, it would be permissible to do all the week’s posts on Saturday and Sunday mornings, do the visiting Monday-Friday (to keep up with what the “nice reederz” are doing), and do the writing after the visiting. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past week.

So … Is it working? Well, it does seem to make for a more productive writing experience, as I get to stay in the novelistic mindset for more days in a row, which is important; the let’s call it “episodic” nature of what the critters get up to is more conducive to being done in a single burst. This past weekend is the first one where I actually did the entire week’s worth of posts in advance—that’s one post here, and seven posts over at the animals’ blog, in case anyone is keeping track (or is wondering who’s more popular)—and I got it done over the course of a couple of hours on Saturday and another 30-40 minutes on Sunday.

Does this mean I’m actually going to be able to finish Blue Roses? Well, we’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks. But at least I’m still making progress. I’ve even finally made Baxter’s roommate Felix a POV character, because, really, who wants to be locked inside one person’s head for an entire book? Not me.

That didn’t explain why Baxter could understand the squirrel, though—and the squirrel was answering him, chirps and chitters that Baxter would then present to the rest of them as words. Maybe he had a squirrel inside his brain. Yes. Squirrel-brain. That would be a fine new nickname for double-Baxter, ha ha ha! They just had to get back to a place where it was appropriate for such nicknames to be bestowed and used, and running away from mysterious coyotes was not that place, oh no.

James V. Viscosi, Blue Roses