Hi, everyone! I didn’t get a good night’s sleep last night, but the bed was too warm to leave and do work. It was weird in that I had no ‘drifting to sleep sensation’. I flipped (to me) in between two states: restless turning and dreaming. Really odd things, too – walking down a highway and talking to two people from work about re-coding a website. What’s odd about this is that I don’t know how to code. I have no idea how to tie together 1’s and 0’s to count to 10, much less writing a program to run credit cards. I am certain there is a lot more to it than that, but I don’t remember enough to even begin to draw any interpretations. Anyway – I have a little bit more of holiday shopping to do and then I can finally hunker down on the weekend to get the editing done and on Christmas Day sit back in enjoy the horror movie marathon. God Bless Netflix.

Editing is coming along, but it’s coming along slowly. I am in the twelfth chapter (Well Scented Rest, for those of you playing at home) and this is one of the chapters that will need a lot of work. In fact, I don’t think there was a single sentence in that whole chapter that was not spared the red pencil of doom. Yeah, this is going to be the hardest one, but it will also be the most entertaining in that I get to flex more descriptive muscles than I usually do with my work. I always feel that I don’t get in enough when I do the rough draft, so I am going to try to improve upon this with the next novel. As far as the next novel’s outline goes, I am stuck at dressing the main character. I need to get over this minor pause and get the outline finished before the end of January. Granted, I have three chapters outlined, so I can jump into writing it on the stroke of midnight, but I wanted to have the full outline finished before I set key to finger. I know what I need to do (have her examine the footage from her personal log after recovering from the surge and find that there were no people carrying her in); I just have to get myself to get to that point.

One of the themes that I am working with in the novel is the group versus the individual – the crew of The
Shepherd vs. Gail; the ghosts of the old crew vs. Eliza vs. Jenny. My theatre professor would be elated (well, as elated as he could get) over the fact that I am going back to what he called ‘universal themes’. In fact, looking at a lot of the works I’m writing – that seems to be a running theme of mine. I might have to start looking at some other things. Well…no, there are a couple of works that pit one group against the other. Well, I should work on some other themes rather than the individual versus the group.

I should also refill my coffee and get some lunch. I hope y’all have a good day and I thank you for reading. As always, feel free to leave a comment.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy