Flies, Flyswatters and Flying

I started chapter 26 today, and here's the nonstop I wrote (slightly edited) about 2:19pm trying to get myself jumpstarted:

Okay, here goes. I’ve been dinking around, doing everything but writing. I’ve been... I don’t even know what I’ve been doing. Fooling with Quigley. Looking up reviews of Charlie Wilson’s War. Because I thought it was lame and wanted to know if someone else did too. Apparently not. All the reviews I found were very positive.

So. I ate lunch. And I don’t know what else. Frittered. Oh, I wrote in my journal. Killed flies. Melted the flyswatter. Got the snail mail.

So. (Again.) Here I am. I’ve at least been thinking about ch 26. Oh yeah, and the cover for The Enclave they’re working on at BHP has come through. I don't know what I think about it, yet, except that it features the top of a woman's face and Cam is turning out to be the stronger, more central character of my male/female pov's. Even though Lacey starts the story.

So... (for the third time.) "So" is some kind of conjunction, isn’t it? A summarizing? A leading to? Well, I can see that even here nonstopping I’m going to just ditz and be blank and accomplish absolutely nothing. I thought earlier that maybe it would be better to try to work through editing chapters that I’ve already drafted than to just do what I’ve been doing today. Kill flies... melt the flyswatter -- Oh, and I looked for the source of the flies, too, because there are way too many and I’m convinced something is manufacturing them. Last time this happened, it was a bunch of dog food kibbles that had gotten knocked under the refrigerator. First I had discovered a stream of maggots on a march across the kitchen floor from the fridge to the freezer, then found the dog food kibbles under the latter and in a dark corner, riddled with holes! Gross!

So today I immediately used a flyswatter handle to knock the kibble out from under the fridge. There were only a couple kibbles, but they weren’t riddled with holes. Nor were there any maggots. I think I’ve gotten all the food sources out from under the the refrigerator, and also the freezer, and under the garbage can. I can't think of any other place. So where are all the flies coming from? Oh, and I melted the flyswatter by putting it on a still-hot burner (one of the disadvantages of having a ceramic cooktop stove). Then I had to clean plastic off the burner and cut off the burned parts of the flyswatter's swatter.

So.(Number 4) This is really and truly blither today. Could I at least try to address the subject? Lacey arrives at the party...

And from there things took off. I got on a roll, the timer went off, I ignored it and now, two hours later I have 7 pages of sketch/draft for chapter 26. How about that?

Grace,
Karen

Annual Bassett Hound Olympics

The Annual Bassett Hound Olympics was held in Ocean City New Jersey last month. I thought this video was good for a laugh, or at least a smile. Though I think it's unfair to compare their athletic abilities with other dogs. I mean, their legs are short. Their bodies are almost as long as Quigley's. Their ears are longer. It's not fair to expect them to be able to jump and run when they don't have any legs...

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4750189

I'm not surprised that I might enjoy watching such laid back hounds, sort of a break from the totally unlaid back hound I live with.

We took Quig to the dog park tonight. He was going nuts in the yard and car. Had earlier been fighting with his big Milk Bone can, digging random holes and eating the bermuda grass roots (Bear used to eat the grass; Quigley digs it up and eats the roots. How weird is that?) So he gets in the dog park and instead of running madly around like the little Weimaraner who's only a month younger, he trots from person to person (jumping on them happily), and spends a lot of time in contemplative sniffing. C'mon, Quigley! We brought you here to romp, not sniff. Admittedly at home he can't smell the smells he's smelling there, but still... He really likes all the people, and the people mostly like him.

Finished ch 25 today. More or less.

Karen

What Happens Next

I reached chapter 25 last Friday. Then the weekend came. We had a work party on Saturday afternoon, and then Communion and pot luck on Sunday, so I didn't get much work done either day. But today I got back to work... staring out the window, lying on the couch watching the penguins, trying to figure out What Happens Next.

My agent called me last week, just to touch base. It's been awhile since we've talked and for all he knew I could have suddenly started writing Prairie Romances. I assured him that would not happen.

We talked about my process, and he said I write with outtakes. I just get these snippets of scenes -- a few lines of dialog, an image, a situation -- but I have no idea where they go, or what they have to do with each other. I just sense that they are supposed to be there. It's much more intuitive than logical or linear. Which is not the easiest way to do things. But I like that observation. I've been dealing with my "outtakes" today, writing around the edges of them and slowly but surely they are expanding into something.

Like when a character I thought was somewhere else began to intrude on the sequence I was writing today, and by the end he was the whole point of the scene. He and Cam even had a conversation that took me totally by surprise.

Back to my agent, though. Because we also talked about the next book, and I learned that Bethany House is waiting for me to send them a synopsis. Imagine that! Well, I have a book I already started developing back right after Arena sold, but it's a lot different from what I'm doing now. I'm quite intrigued by it and would love to write it, but maybe I should do something more along the lines of what I'm doing now.

Like I have time to be thinking of that, when all my brain is used up trying to figure out What Happens Next in Enclave. But that's God's problem, not mine. Mine is chapter 25, and I now have almost 12 pages of that written. Only a few places left to figure out before the chapter's done.

Grace,
Karen

Alcore Life Extension

Today I did a bit of research on the Alcore Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Scottsdale, AZ (an upscale community near Phoenix) that for 20 some odd years has been freezing bodies in ten foot tall steel tanks. Well, technically "freezing" is not what is done.

First a person must be declared legally dead. At that point the Alcore team moves in, artificially maintaining circulation and respiration to ensure "brain viability" until the "patient" can be cooled safely. Medical personnel (doctors?) attach the patient's large blood vessels to a perfusion machine which slowly replaces the blood with a chemical that will protect the cells and tissues from rupturing as they are cooled over the next four days. At that point they will be submerged in a tank of liquid nitrogen. Technically this is called "vitrification" which is solidification without freezing. Even though the... um... patient will be held at at a temperature of 320 degrees below freezing, they are not considered to be "frozen."

There are two options for those who hope to cheat death at Alcore: whole body patients, which are placed head first into the tanks (in case there is loss of liquid nitrogen from spillage or evaporation -- the head will be the last to be uncovered) and "neuro" patients. These are the, um, heads only.

Yes, in some cases the head is removed from the body and submerged in the liquid nitrogen by itself, on the assumption, I guess, that in time technology will figure out how to grow the rest of the body onto the head. The funny thing is that there is no clear reference to the fact that there are just heads in the tanks on the Alcore page, just this euphemistic "neuro patient".

Going the head only route costs about half as much as the whole body preservation, but at $50,000+ it's still a lot. There are now about 79 patients at the facility in Scottsdale and about 700 others who are signed up as members. Beyond the generally bizarre nature of it all (and my need for technical details for a scene I was writing), what I found interesting was the exercise in faith here. Faith in technology. Hope that this will give the people a second chance at life. In fact, one couple took out memberships not only for themselves but for their three young children. The oldest girl when asked if she wanted to be "frozen" said yes. It was better to "have a chance" than to have no chance at all.

I would guess these folks do not know Jesus as their savior. It's a bit astonishing to contemplate how vastly different my viewpoint is from someone who would go to Alcore. And I feel bad for them. No one has ever been defrosted. Alcore's chief administrative executive admitted they wouldn't be pulling anyone out of the tanks until they could cure the diseases that had killed them (to say nothing of the problem of regenerating the lost bodies on those "neuro patients").

Many in the medical field think there is no chance whatsoever of bringing people out of the deep freeze and back from the dead. It's purely a speculative technology, which is technobabble for "faith" -- faith in man's technology instead of God's omniscience and omnipotence and love and grace and mercy and provision... Faith that somehow someone is going to figure out how to fix everything still wrong with this whole system, and when they do, that the person's soul is going to still be there, having hung around for in some cases, 20 years. Or maybe they don't believe in a soul. But whatever --even if it all works, they'd still be in the same old fallen bodies, riddled with the sin nature. But they probably don't believe in any of that either.

Personally, I am looking forward to the new vastly upgraded model of human body to be distributed at the Resurrection. So upgraded it's not even the same species. I'm especially looking forward to it as I begin to age. :-)

Anyway, that research gave me a lot of stuff for my scene and I'm calling Ch 23 done. I have three scenes I'm considering next. What order should they be done in, and should they all even be done? One in particular I'm thinking of scrapping. Another is very vague -- I have no idea what is going to happen in it, which makes it hard to decide what order it should come in.

But that's for tomorrow.

Karen

A Picture of Me Working

A really cool thing happened today. It was Monday. The Monday after one of my husband's three day weekends, and those Mondays are always low production days for me. So I was doing my usual dinking around, going from thing to thing, unable to focus or concentrate on anything much, even as the voices of doom murmured at the back of my mind that the deadline was drawing nearer and I should be working, certainly much harder and for more hours than I was. In fact, I hadn't worked all morning, when I had ample opportunity.

Finally sometime around noon I persuaded myself it was time to really put my mind to the task of working on the book... and of course, there was the Blankness again. My familiar friend. So the first thing I did (the only thing I could think to do) was write a nonstop that ended up being a combination whine and prayer. Was I out of line for my lack of dedication and devotion to writing? As my calling and service to God, shouldn't I be treating it all more seriously? Shouldn't I just exercise self-discipline and plod on from A to B to C... The self-condemnation started in.

Then I asked myself I was thinking. I was thinking that I wanted some progress, that I was bad because there wasn't any. That if I’d just buckle down and pay attention, put my mind to there problem, there would be progress. But how did that mesh with the concept of resting that I've spent the last three weeks learning about? With waiting for the Lord to provide?

I ended up all confused and frustrated again. I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. I realized I had a form of how a writer's day should look, but that was someone else's form. Was that consistent with whatever God's form of it would be for me? What does me working on the book look like from God’s point of view? I had no idea. So I asked Him.

About half an hour later I decided to check blogs, and went to Robin McKinley's wondering if she had put up more pictures of her "hellhounds". She hadn't so I went to her website to see if there were some there, and instead I stumbled upon her FAQ's and the question of how many hours a day she spent writing. Her answer? "Two to twelve." Then she elaborated.

And described how I work almost exactly. It's two hours in the beginning when it's so darned hard. When you are "spinning substance out of nothing." When on a good day you know not just the next word but maybe the next sentence or even paragraph. Which is, as I've said before and she reiterated, "an incredibly exhausting process." But once "the book gathers momentum -- and pages and drafts -- I can work on it for longer , because there's more there to work with." Exactly.

Once you have some idea where you're going and how things fit together, those things breed more ideas and more connections and it just takes off. That's when you start putting in the 12 to 14 hour days. I'm just not there yet. So doing 5 pages of virgin draft, which is what I did today, is extremely draining for me and it's okay. It's how it's supposed to be for me. I just need to remember that.

Her discussion, which you can read here if you want (you'll have to scroll down to the second question, although her answer to the first question was very descriptive of my experiences as well), was so exactly what I go through that reading it set me free. I wasn't just being a lazy sloth. This really is a pattern and a way of working. And it occurred to me as I came to the end of it that God had just given me a "picture" of what me working on the book looked like.

And that, too, is very freeing. As for how I'm going to make my deadline if I only write six pages a day... I'm not going there. We're to live one day at a time, and I already know there's a point in the writing of the book when things begin to go faster. But even if not, the end can be rough. This IS a first draft... so, that's for Him to work out. I'm not going to try to decide what the number of tomorrow's pages is today. I'm just going to be thankful for the number that I wrote.

And also for how the scene that was little more than a few lines of dialog transformed itself without warning into something I'm finding very interesting. So. That's cool, too.

Grace,
Karen

Plugging Along

Where has this last week gone?

Well, I thought I had ch 22 in the bag, but turns out I didn't. So last week I spent a good deal of time figuring it all out. I also wrote a lot of ch 23, and reworked a bit of 21. And more or less decided what would happen after ch 23.

Only now those plans are sort of mushy. I had thought I would write a scene where Cam is brought to a security level, but beyond what I just wrote, I seem to have no more ideas on it than that. So I guess I have to sit around and wait to see if there will be any (ideas) or if I should skip this bit and take things up the next night. I'm too tired right now to do any more.

I should probably just go to bed and hope to get good enough sleep I'll have a brain and some ideas to put to work tomorrow.

Grace,
Karen

Chaos to Order

Well, ever since Quigley was released from the cone, able to be put into the back yard, and life has somewhat found its way round to normal, I've actually been able to get some work done on my WIP. Imagine that!

On Thursday I got a late start on account of working in my journal a bit regarding the message we'd heard Wednesday night (still on rest and quite fantastic). I returned to ch 22 and the second main scene of the chapter, for which I'd just laid in a few notes the day before. At that point I had no idea what the purpose of the scene was. The parts I did have were side issues. So I started working and thinking and sorting...

Suddenly an image came into my head that had nothing to do with the scene I was trying to develop in 22, but involved some pods and told me where the black boxes came from. Oooh. Creepy. Cool... I LIKE it.

Now, which of my characters would be the one viewing the image I'd just seen?

One thing led to another and eventually I'd gone back to ch 16 and inserted the scene in Storyline 2, refined an existing scene in the same sequence and in the process added 4 more pages.

Friday I addressed the beginning of ch 21, another part of Storyline 2 that I'd only made notes on but hadn't written. I was overwhelmed by all the ideas that were floating about, and the way that trying to follow any one of them would lead me on very long thought trips that always ended up with me totally lost and confused. So I sat down and decided to try to come up with a very simple sequence of cause and effect using the central idea and/or material I already have, even if it seemed trivial.

I worked all day and ended up with a chapter. Only 7 pages, but I'm trying to keep Storyline 2 shorter, and 7 pages is about right.

Saturday I went back to chapter 22 where, once again, I was trying to figure out what the point of the second scene was. I have a sequence though and tomorrow I plan to pursue it. Who knows where that will lead.

This all fits right in with the lessons on resting. I might have to just put in some quotes from them, because they were so good. In summary it involves staying out of the future, not thinking about the problem, but thinking instead about God, the one who is in control, who knows all the details, who is FOR me, who is the one who will accomplish my work for me, who has promised me rest if only I'll believe Him...

This message is finally beginning to get through to me. I'm not sweating the writing and the blankness and the chaos, just moving along. And if I'm not working at a frenetic desperate pace, but taking a break to, oh, eat a cookie, stare out the window, play with my dog... I think it's okay.

Quigley has been ... wonderful. I'm loving him! I love his red coat. I love the way he moves. He's so sweet and loving now. He will stand there and let you hug him for a long time and no biting. Just licks.

He's still puppy, of course, and right now into swiping things, but it's cuter and funnier than it is disturbing. And we just go to him and ask him, "What are you doing? That (shoe/paper/bottle) is not yours. Give." We might have to repeat "give" a number of times but eventually he complies.

Okay, sometimes he tries to escape by fleeing under the coffee table, but we get him and then he has to "give." I like the way he does respond. I like that we tell him to "give" and he does, rather than forcing us to pry his mouth open and take it. He now knows how to sit, down, stay, shake, come, crawl, "take it," "get in your bed" and walk on a leash. None of those are perfect, and distractions do distract, but things are definitely getting better.

He's also lost all his puppy canines, and his biting is much more under control.

Time for bed.
Karen