I will be in Detroit/Ann Arbor from 3/25 to 3/30, inclusive. Email and instant messaging should still reach me at the usual places.

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I completely vegetated yesterday. I mean, completely. I read some more of Divine Intervention (I'm a little more than a third of the way done) I'm trying to retrain myself to *read* instead of edit.

Somewhere in the last three years, I got in the habit of reading every single word of every piece of fiction I encounter. This particular bad habit, while I'm sure it's taught me an enormous amount about writing, has also dropped my page-per-day capacity from something like three or four hundred to, oh, about thirty. Which is bad news for (a) my to-read pile (b) my research reading (c) my tolerance for finishing books (d) my ability to keep up with genre and (e) my ability to read and annotate manuscripts for my crit buddies. So I'm trying to learn to read all over again, just like in first grade when I started recognizing words as words and not as collections of letters to be sounded out.

I imagine it's something like what a stroke victim goes through, in terms of retraining, although (obviously!) on a much, much smaller scale. Very frustrating, but I think I'm making progress.

No fiction words yesterday. At all. Not even just playing writing for fun words. I must be in serious burnout. And I'm cool with it.

No end of novel ennui and existential angst yet, though. I must be even gladder to see it gone than I thought. Still suspect I may need to Do Something to the end yet, but we'll see.

Cool rock they found out on the edge of the solar system, what? It's making neo_inbound kind of cranky and hubbletelescope is stoked.

katallen on plot some more.

The Stratford Man takes two and a quarter reams of paper and an entire ink cartidge to print out, and fills a 6" manuscript box to the brim. That's a long book.

Since I'm on vacation and we were talking about this, I think I'm going to see if I can start a brand-new ( Birthday Research Meme )

Do we sense a trend?

*g*

I know why B&I makes me so nuts.

Because of the Frankenstein Monster nature of this thing, I can't see it as a story. So I have no feel for it. I can't surf it.

I'm as blind to this book and its arc and its tension and whether they work as I was when I started writing. It's not a book, it's a stack of parts that I put together following a chart. I can't feel the story. It's like trying to walk through traffic by looking in a mirror and wearing earplugs: nothing is natural. Everything is calculated and nothing is reflexive.

I have no idea if it works or not. I can't feel it in my head.

I'm not used to that, and I don't like it. And I don't very much like the book anymore, either, although my first readers seem pretty happy with it so far. Writers cannot judge their own work. I just keep telling myself that.

Maybe I should have just trunked the damned thing. Oh, wait, is that the subtle voice of post-novel ennui? Could be, rabbit.

Off to a rubber chicken dinner with the boy at GAMA momentarily. To add insult to injury, I have to drive down near the Strip. Bleh. So very not fun.

On the other hand, I really like this song.