Rest?

On the gym front:  I've pulled something in my arms (again)--it's the elbow joint in my left arm this time--and it's been a bazillion degrees the last week, so aside from some elliptical work, I really haven't been going to the gym much.

One the writing front:  the novel is at a virtual standstill, and I'm thinking the best route may be to look at the 52,000 words I do have and break them into short stories.  Lately, I've been not writing more than I have been writing.... I don't know if this is a function of pollen, heat, sleep, "man-o-pause," politics, a mutable Summer schedule that throws routine out the window, binge-watching Queer Eye or what.    On bad days I write less than 500 words; on worse days I write variations along the lines of  "You can't write.  You write crap.  You're too old.   You're too white and cis.  You're not gay enough.  You're too lazy.  You're a fake.  Fake fake fake.   You're not literary enough.  You're not dark enough.  You're not enough."

OK... some of it is related to not getting into an anthology and doing research to try to figure out where the story failed for that particular market.

I might try a stab at personal essay, which used to be fun, but I'm not sure if I have anything new to say.

On the music front: I've been playing my harp more.  Yay me.

Novel Ephiphany

Oof.  I left my iPad at work.  It's interesting to see how often I check it for social media.

I worked on story planning this morning since I didn't have ready access to a word processor.  A few weeks ago, I wrote some scenes based on a photo swap. Last night I printed out what I had and this morning I worked on outlining a story.  I'm using the term "outlining" in a very lose fashion, because all I really did was write down a character's birthday, the birth of the couple's child, and various holidays on an agenda.   The next step is to write things like "growing anxiety" and "morning sickness."  And I should come up with a threat that is exterior so this doesn't turn into 9000 words of brooding.

I also drew the floorplan for the characters' house, which will require a re-write of the blocking; but this is a good thing as the characters lived in an apartment when I started writing the scenes and upgraded to a house by the end.

And then I stared at the agenda, which covers ten months, and started to look at each month in terms of word count and just ho long a piece was a I writing?

I like this story idea and I'm toying with turning it into a novel; on one hand I need to start writing novels if ... well ... actually -- I need to start writing novels to see if I like writing novels, not to secure an old writer's pension (although that would be really nice, too).  ...Yeah; the reason I don't want to turn this idea (which I really like) into a novel isn't because first novels are almost always bad, the reason (which I've just discovered) is because I don't want the focus on product-product-product to suck all the joy out of writing a novel, and then make me disappointed with it at the end when I've written a bad first novel chock full of John Things(tm)  which confuse everyone (and are unmarketable) and no one buys.

Whew.  OK.  Worked that out.  Time to get cracking.

But first, the Day Jobbe.