Hey, look! A squirrel....

I'm not easily distracted, I just....   Why does my scanner scan to .jpgs, while my work scanner only scans to .tifs?

So yeah...I started a new project today.  I feel perfectly justified doing so.  At this point...today, in fact...I have been working with Matt and Crystal and all for six months.  It started as a trilogy, and then became a...um, what do you call a two book series?  A bilogy?  Ick.  But anyway, the trilogy became two books which then became one book which then became two books again which has now become a trilogy with what was the second book now the third and making a lot more sense from a story perspective, and that book is yet to be written.  Phew.  160,000 words written and counting.

I really like Matt and Crystal, I really do.  It's just that immersion in one story line has become taxing.  I understand, now, why authors keep at least a couple of different series going at any given time, and Mr. Jordan, I take back everything I said about you doing Conan when I was hoping you'd finish WoT.  It just...gets old.

Now's a perfect time for a new project, really.  The second book is still largely crap, but it requires a fresh mind and perspective to revise it as much as it needs.  I tried last night, and though I successfully added a much-needed scene at the end, I didn't really "feel" it.  It's an important scene, too; when I had written the draft, I got to the climactic battle scene, had a lot of fun swinging the prose back and forth through the clang and whoosh of combat, and then...ended the book.  It's missing the "so what was it all about" wrap up part that, if I leave it out, will tick off the readers.  Problem is, if I just vomit a bunch of "what was it all about" onto the page, as I suspect I did last night, it won't be very fulfilling either.  What I fear, then, is that I could spend a lot of time revising only to be making it just as bad, or even possibly worse. 

Meanwhile, the first book is on the way to the editor's desk, and that's probably a month wait once it gets there.  No point revising that one any further. 

So...this morning, I chased a new squirrel.  Wrote around 500 words, in the short time I had before work, on the non-fiction book I've been gonna write.  I've actually been quite good about being gonna write it, refusing up to now to dive into this project despite having it entirely outlined.  Now, though, I have no reason not to jump right on in.  It's a fun project, really, and allows me to speak directly from my experiences as a career college DoE.  It's also first person, so it feels a little like blogging, except that I have to be careful to not just write in steam-of-conscience mode.  But that one exception aside, this is a very fun project so far.

Have a great day chasing your own squirrels!