I think I’m writing here largely because I was having trouble at my typewriter. You see, I’m writing another novel, and I’m doing the first draft on one of my typewriters. This novel happens to take place in the same world as Lost and Not Found, chronologically after most of the events of that book, though not actually a sequel as such. It’s been a few days since I’ve written anything – I was working on getting started on the audiobook version of Lost and Not Found, then on composing a musical theme for same most of the week ((If you want to hear what I have so far, email me or leave a comment and I’ll send you a link)) – and I set down and tried to pick up where I left off. Apparently something had interrupted me in the middle of a chapter, in the middle of a paragraph. I’ve been trying to write chapters for this book for a variety of reasons -people seem to like and/or expect chapters, they help create a structure for moving between or tying together different elements of the story, it makes it easier to stop and pick up again at another time if there’s a chapter break, because I don’t have to match the flow of what came before quite as closely- but for whatever reason (now lost to me) I was half-way through this chapter. I set down a while ago and tried to just start going.
I read the preceding pages. I looked at the sentence. My hands sprang into motion, the keys of the typewriter clacking away noisily as the words formed on the page, and then … well, then the sentence started giving me trouble. It got longer and longer and, as it grew, it became less and less coherent. Where did this sentence think it was going? In the time I can usually pour out a couple of pages all I had managed was to mire myself in the first sentence I’d attempted. I XX’d out several words, cut the sentence short and -relatively- understandable, and stepped away from the typewriter. I finished my research on Klein bottles (one of the things that managed inexplicably to wedge its way into the sentence (which you will now be able to look for in the finished book, to find the troubled phrase)) and then came here.
To blog. Because I’ve been meaning to write something here for a while now, but keep either having something better to do (sleep, work on my novel, sleep, et cetera) or not enough to say.
Although that isn’t really the case, is it? I always have something to say. And I’m working on a lot of projects right now, have a lot of things coming up, going away, et cetera. So what is it? One long post, or a lot of little posts? I think a lot of little posts. I’m making a list right now of subjects to cover, so I don’t forget them.