My week's vacation

I've been coasting in neutral for about a week now, writing wise. It's distracting; I know the WOTF preliminary judging is done, but I haven't gotten a letter yet. I have a hard time focusing on new writing when I'm sweating through these last few days of knowing how things went. Thankfully I no longer sweat through the whole 10-12 weeks of judging doing nothing new because that's just inefficient.

I finished the outline for the novel and had another emotional struggle with the size of the thing. I debated setting it aside and coming up with something shorter to write first. The general advice is shorter is better for first-time novels (more likely to be picked up, I mean). But I think I sort of have to write this first. Just to get it out of my head. Then I can move on. You know, two years from now.

But I took a week off to come to that decision. I've done this before; it's almost a joke. Since no one but me is affected by whether I choose to spend all my spare time writing or not, when I have trouble with the writing I usually say to myself, "Why don't you try not writing?" And then about a week later I'm writing again, because when I try not writing, I find that I can't not write.

But what really brought me back this time was William Gibson. I recently got a DVD documentary, really just him talking, called No Maps for These Territories. It took forever to watch it because Quin wanted to see it too so I had to wait. The director's style is annoying; he apparently believes we all have zero attention span to just listening to a really interesting man talk and keeps putting up weird visuals and music cues. Since I usually listen to the TV rather than watch it this annoyed Quin more than me. For my part, it was really cool to hear him talk about what he went through to write his first novel Neuromancer. Just listening him talk about what excited him about it got me excited about my own work again.

So, vacation over. Back to the writing. On one last Gibson note, he hadn't blogged for several months but just a few weeks ago he came back to post "I am. I am writing." Ahh, the waves on the beach. I'm so there. I had the same response I had when Neil Gaiman griped about his characters stopping the action to discuss the story so far when working on his novel.

First I say, "Thank god, it's not just me!"

Followed very quickly by, "Wait a minute, this never goes away?"