Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Sometimes it takes a while...

Okay...today was interesting. I spent most of it working through my apathetic crap. Wasn't easy. I had to make myself do simple things like go deposit my paycheck because I got it a day late...and too late to hit the bank, yesterday...and I'd left my checkbook at home...so even though I really did not feel like leaving my apartment, I did. I also had to hit the PO to send off those free copies of David Martin and hope they will generate some interest on GoodReads.

I also half-heartedly tried to update some information on my books with Amazon...but what they told me to do didn't work. I did make some other things better. Sort of. Then I took a nap and woke up with a headache so ate and made potato leek soup for meals, next week, and balanced my checkbook.

Then I sort of wandered into working on The Vanishing of Owen Taylor...and saw some mistakes I was making in the narrative, not to mention a solid possibility that I was overlooking...and 'round about nine-pm I got back onto it...for a while. Now it's low-ebb, again.

When I get into these moods, it usually takes a long time for the residual sense of "Why bother?" to go away, completely. But I can finally sense it's finally drifting off. Tomorrow, I'm inputting corrections and changes into what I've already done on the book and aiming it to dovetail into a confession that will only be a hint of a confession. No Perry Mason crap here; my killer's not stupid. Neither is Jake. I have to honor that.

No, I don't have to...I want to. I fucking like Jake. He's a pain in the ass, sometimes, but he is what I wish I was. Funny...I have to build a fictional character to be the man I want to be. I wish I had been. Of course, I felt the same way about Curt, to an extent, but he's a bit on the crazy side, and I've always been more like Antony and Daniel and Eric...and...

Shit, look at what I'm doing -- mitigating a positive, definitive comment about one of my characters. I like Jake, who's a part of me, but there are all these other characters who really mean I'm nothing like him and WTF? Why the hell do I do that? Why can't I just let it be? Even when I read positive and glowing responses to my work (and there have been plenty), I think of ways to minimize their importance. Why?

Just one more aspect of my own private psychoses.

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