I hope the Halloween season has been healthfully spooky to you all. Mine has been particularly terrifying, coinciding with needing to talk to my GP office (medical paperwork stuff over my medical history, only emotionally scary), needing to deal with tons of admin for my flat (the building I’m in has issues large enough that the residents are starting to organize an association and I’ve been helping with some of the research on that), suffering the slings and arrows of fate (last minute reschedules, missing deliveries, my first drink-spill-on-keyboard in years), and a whiplash inducing weather swing. (It went from 22 centigrade at the start of the month to like 10 centigrade last week!)
As you can probably guess, this level of strife has kept progress slow – but the nice thing about slow progress is that handled right, it still builds up into getting closer to the goal.
So, while my work’s been hugely disrupted, I’ve taken slight advantage of that by getting to a variety of smaller things that have needed doing – feedback for friends, catching up on reading for SPSFC, and so on – while working on QtB whenever things calm down enough.
(I now have two reviews written for SPSFC, and when I get that third one in, I’ll post them all together in a group, for those wondering about that!)
It’s a little frustrating to have to hit pause on what I’m doing – I seem to really need to build up some uninterrupted momentum to get going – but things are building up into an increasingly huge stack of stuff that will, slowly, metamorphose into a novel. The outline is close to 20 000 words long, and I think that’s a function of writing it at much higher detail than usual. … I hope, otherwise this book is going to wind up being my first trilogy. I have also managed to stitch together a lot of different bits and pieces of writing I’ve done in the lead-up, including scenes I didn’t think would make it into the book.
We’ll see how it all comes together. And hopefully my November will be quieter and a little more productive.
I hope all of your Novembers are wonderful, filled with culturally and seasonally appropriate joys, and as suitably calm and/or as exciting as befits your temperaments.
As always, thank you so much for the interest and support.
