Donde Está My Groove Thing?

You know how when there are about 4 inches of new snow, driving is a total mess, but if you get in the grooves of other tires, you are okay? (I’ve lost you southerners and tropical types, haven’t I? You’ll have to take my word for it.) And if by some total fluke, the big truck whose grooves you are driving in goes all the way to where YOU’RE going, then you’re in luck and get there without any trouble. But usually there are some obstacles…


The Plowed Roads

These seem a nice easy way to go… the truck has been through (for the sake of metaphor here, this would be EDITING) and the main muck has been cleared off. There is a slick spot now and again, especially if it’s still snowing (sections still to write) or if the conditions keep fluctuating. (“It’s raining, no it’s snowing, no it’s raining, no it’s snowing!—this would be why you don’t chase trends---those Vampires that are being rewritten as angels will have to be turned into alien beings before you are done) *starts humming ‘Inter-Planet Janet’*

But for the most part, these conditions aren’t too bad. You need to go slow and careful, but other than that, once you hit the plowed roads, you can be pretty sure you’ll reach your destination.

Mall Parking Lots

You know sometimes it’s a good idea to just go do a couple spins in a safe environment where you can’t do too much damage. I have five of those places. 1) The Burrow, where we can experiment, show off and display, all 100 words at a time, 2) HPANA, where I can drive a lot of DIFFERENT cars, most of them equipped with joke horns or plastic wildlife, and 5) My blogs, where I am free to say just about anything I like, but nobody is obliged to read it when I run boring, offensive, or plain old insane.


Genre Literature

Writing a book from scratch in a genre that has a formula is STILL writing a book from scratch, but the roads have been driven on enough times that the writer can SEE where it is super slick and she is likely to just end up in a ditch (or Merlin forbit, the neighbors Coy pond). Now where the grooves are too deep, it can be really hard to do anything original, but hopefully there has been traffic doing a wide enough variety of things that changing grooves now and again to keep things interesting isn’t too onerous.


My Journey at the Mo…

In November, before the weather got bad, I turned down a sort of muddy road called NaNoWriMo. It made a spattered mess of my car, but I managed to get back to the main road at the end of the month. I drove a while, finished illusions, and then stared at the shiny, tempting AMAZON thoroughfare and decided COFLUENCE needed the shortening/polish to be ready for the race with the big boys (okay, they aren’t big boys, it is a MASSIVE race with a lot of LITTLE boys, but when you are in a crowd of 10,000 you feel small, even if nobody is bigger than you on a case by case comparison…)

Driving on that Autobahn of writing roads wasn’t too bad—it was after all, already prepared for mass consumption, just needed a little tweak here and there, shiny new pitch, all that…

But trying to get back to CONSPIRACY—Oi! I have found myself again and again spinning my wheels in mall parking lots, trying to get back to the hang of it… I was even asked to judge an exhibition at the HPANA mall (one of my stories won a Best Golden Oldie).

But every time I try to get back on that road with only a couple of meandering tracks, to try to make my own way out that route to my destination, I keep sliding toward the abyss. I have lost my nerve to just DRIVE…

So I got this satellite system to examine how I accomplished the LAST two drives—the ones that qualified me for this one… trouble is, it is a slow, analytical process and is leaving me in a funk… I suppose though, that is ALWAYS what winter is like for me. I miss the carefree drives of summer, when books were falling out of my pen in a mere six weeks (okay, so that only happened once, and to be fair, it was September, mostly).

I have faith… I will get back to it. I think if I tried to set a 1000 word a day minimum right now though, I would be an insane person in a matter of days… it just isn’t working that way…