Beyond the edges

Heavens, another week's gone by and my poor blog is all neglected and its ribs are showing and it really does look kind of mangy. But this is a much more mellow effort than my previous blog. Friend Doug and were talking earlier this evening about how the health care hootenanny mostly made us both glad we weren't doing political blogs anymore. Too true, too true. I'd be nail-gnawing wall-crawling bonkers by now, with all the nonsense that's been going on.

This week has been a fiction-focused week, as so many of them are, and chapters nine and ten are off through the Tubez to my editrix, roughly one week ahead of schedule. The rhythm is still going, so there's every possibility of another two by next Friday, and then I reach those lovely three chapters In The Middle, the ones that made her want to work with me in the first place. Those just require a bit of neatening up, and suddenly bang I'll be five chapters ahead, which is quite the exciting thing. That's fifteen chapters out of twenty-five, ladies and gentlemen, well past the 25,000-word Dead Zone that has eaten all of my previous endeavors. On my personal map, that's the equivalent of boldly traversing the squiggly bits labeled HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.

Doug's been doing his own traversing, launching ventures and so forth, which in this economy is the equivalent of sailing into the squiggly bits labeled HERE THERE BE UNEMPLOYMENT AND STUPID ANTI-BUSINESS POLICIES OH AND DRAGONS TOO BUT THEY'RE NOT NEARLY AS NASTY AS ALL THE FLAKY PEOPLE YOU'LL RUN INTO WHILE YOU TRY TO DO THIS FABULOUS THING. But it's all about working the will, isn't it? Despite the quixotian quotient, what keeps a creative endeavor going is the thing itself, the bending of circumstance and events towards a singular goal by the sheer force of wanting to make it happen. That's the root similarity between entrepreneurship and artistic work: bringing the vision into reality. And if you're not committed to the vision of the thing itself, you're going to get burned. If you're focused on the fat fat payday instead of the product or service, the already heinous odds will just laugh as they collapse into a negative black hole of suck, taking you and your angels with you. And if you're focused on Getting Published rather than the craft of storytelling, you'll wonder why every query ends up the butt of snark and why no one cares at all about your story (such as it is).

In any event: it's been a mostly decent week for yours truly, and I hope yours has been at least as decent if not wildly superior. Have fun this weekend. Do something completely frivolous that you've never done before. Then tell me how it went.