Falling behind

I’m falling quite behind Chris Baty's target of “15k by Monday.” I am not excessively worried as I have tons of notes and outlines for future parts of the novel. However, psychologically it is hard: the word count snowball must roll soon enough to gain the needed momentum and become an avalanche.

What I did was to spend another weekend working on a science fiction story for yet another anthology. I did so somewhat reluctantly. First of all, I’m not 100% to be on target with this submission: they are looking for longer fiction, and I really couldn’t get the story to work over 3000 words or so. It might very well be that my writing efforts will be wasted, and the editor won’t move past the first page reporting the word count.

But the hardest thing was really to leave Nino behind. As I reported already a few times, it’s becoming increasingly painful to leave the novel’s universe for this own. Worse, the longer I stay away, the more difficult it is to once more immerse myself into it, a difficulty that manifests itself in needing to reorganize my thoughts about what happens next, or simply procrastinating the putting of actual words on (virtual paper). The process, I found more and more, is like a snake molting out of its old skin, or like those howlingly painful werewolf transformations from 50s horror flicks. Except, of course, that one is growing all those hair and fangs inside the brain. And that, of all things, is bound to hurt.