Patrick

Read­ing in bed, in the morn­ing, I noticed the mir­ror on the wall had a neat sym­me­try, reflect­ed the boards of the ceil­ing, so I snapped a photo.

After break­fast I wrote up some quick blog posts for Sun­day and Mon­day, which you’ve prob­a­bly already read. Then I stepped out onto the deck, intend­ing to see if the table there was dry enough to set a lap­top on (I do enjoy writ­ing out­side). The air was misty; it was­n’t rain­ing, but every so often it felt like a drop touched my skin. I grabbed my cam­era and head­ed down to the dam over the lake to snap some pho­tos of the fog. 

Then I sat down for my morn­ing writ­ing stint. After that I biked across the dam to the cof­fee shop, where I used the wifi to post the afore­men­tioned posts (and these pho­tos, while I was at it.)

After that, I read a few chap­ters in Catch-22, had some supper—leftovers, because it had start­ed to rain and I did­n’t feel like bar­be­cu­ing in the rain—and wrote for anoth­er hour or so. The rain came and went dur­ing the evening, but the clouds nev­er broke—at least not before mid­night, when I decid­ed it was bedtime.

I wrote about 2,200 words again yes­ter­day. Here’s a very first-draft sam­ple for you.

The hand­writ­ing end­ed. The next page was blank, and the next, and the next. All the way to the end of the book, as far as she could tell, quick­ly fan­ning through the remain­ing pages. June closed it and set it on the desk.

Did it mean any­thing, she won­dered, that the girl—Evelyn, she remem­bered, glanc­ing at the book’s cov­er, the author’s name in that faux-Goth­ic font—that Eve­lyn had cho­sen to rewrite a trick­ster story?

She sat alone for a long time under the mist­ed win­dows, wish­ing she could see out to the world. It looked like a bright sun­shiny day out there.

After a while, she got up and start­ed to pace. Back and forth, forth and back, slow pon­der­ing steps across the breadth of the Gath­er­ing Space. (Was it real­ly still a Gath­er­ing Space, if at most two gath­ered there? But then what was it that Nathan’s Jesus had said, Where two or more of you are gath­ered? Right? Some­thing like that. So she sup­posed it must count.)

(Especially—and her mind recoiled from the thought—if they two were all that remained in the world.)

I had me some cof­fee and some break­fast, then got to work. I got a bit over 2,200 words today in two writ­ing stints (morn­ing and after­noon), which put me over the 35,000-word mark. I fin­ished off the last six chap­ters of The Book of the New Sun (which was a lot clear­er to me on a sec­ond read; Michael-Andre Drius­si’s Lex­i­con Urthus was a huge help, too) and the final chap­ter of Fugi­tive Teleme­try, the lat­est of the Mur­der­bot novel­las by Martha Wells.

I ven­tured down to the Dari Isle and had take­out for sup­per. Their din­ing room is closed at the moment, but that’s all right. I enjoyed their chick­en fin­gers and par­fait in the com­fort of the cab­in. Then I start­ed my re-read of Catch-22 and—since the sky was cloud­ed over—fell asleep about midnight.

Sample

This is from one of the rewrit­ten palimpses­ts, titled “Low Key and the Ice”. It’s very first draft, and may change entire­ly in the final form.

The trick­ster and the drag­on met for the last time on an icy plain.

It was not the nat­ur­al home for either of them; the trick­ster came from shin­ing halls walled in gold, or at least he’d tell you if you chanced to ask that that was his home, as his father—one of his fathers, the one he claimed when he felt a need to prove his worth—had built it when the worlds were young. He was too caught up in the idea of his own her­it­ed nobil­i­ty to admit where he real­ly lived, which was, these late days, in exile among the rab­ble, those who died and did­n’t return.

The drag­on’s home was the seabord, where her innate fire com­plet­ed the four ele­ments (water, earth, and air being pro­vid­ed by the ocean, strand, and sky, of course) and brought them into, if not har­mo­ny, at least an uneasy balance.

This year I’m at a cab­in with no wifi, so my posts will be spo­radic. I’m hop­ing to bor­row the cof­fee shop’s wifi, as I have in the past, but we’ll see. (Update: I’m using the cof­fee shop’s wifi, all right.)

Any­way: I’m at Minnedosa for the week. I arrived at the cab­in Sun­day night, got unpacked, and fell into bed.

Here’s what I’m hop­ing to accom­plish this week:

• write at least 10,000 words in “Dried Flow­ers”, my cur­rent novella/novel project. Stretch goal: hit 50,000 words (right now it’s sit­ting at 35,000 and a bit).
• get some astropho­tog­ra­phy done. The fore­cast calls for a cou­ple of clear nights lat­er in the week. I’m hop­ing to get the Milky Way and—if the sun should oblige—some aurora.
• read some books. I brought The Book of the New Sun, Catch-22, The Secrets of Judo, and Fugi­tive Teleme­try, and I’ve got a few oth­ers saved on my phone if those aren’t enough. (In fair­ness, when I arrived I had 6 chap­ters left in BotNS and one chap­ter in FT, so those are kind of a gimme.)
• ride my bike
• go kayak­ing
• relax

Here’s to a good week!