In sixteen days, I'm moving from the dense population and urban sprawl of Northern Virginia to the dense population and urban sprawl of Houston. In a way, I feel like I've free-agented from the Nationals to the Astros, a lateral move in which I go live in the Heights and the greater DC area picks up a player to be named later.
He probably has a better arm than me.
Unfortunately, the multi-pronged assault of life changes has done little to allow me to write. 900 books and 1,600 CDs lack opposable thumbs and refuse to pack themselves. Movers haven't harnessed their psychic abilities to issue quotes (but I'm happy to note that based on weight estimates from two sources, I officially have a ton of crap.) And there's not enough money for dwarves to tunnel to the back of the closet and unearth the things I didn't unbox 4 years ago.
Write? That's the thing with the keys and the imagination, right?
Though a trade show trip last week gave me a few hours of Dedicated Airplane Time, an oasis in the clouds that let me put pen to paper. Result: fifteen notebook leaves of one of the novels (the most mainstream of the three). Firmly in the "I'll take it" column, given the Packing Dance.
Five, count 'em, five pieces currently in the publication queue: "Friendly Fire" in Machine of Death any day now (no, really)(hey, that's what they said); "Lorem Ipsum Donald" in Tales of the Unanticipated next year; and a trio of flashy bits in Blood Bound Books' forthcoming Seasons In The Abyss anthology, which is still being finalized and as yet has no publication date - the triplets being "Good Bait", "Erin Beiber's Wild Ride" and "To The Devil, A Goat".
Slowly, the bibliography slouches toward a second page.
Even as boxes are being filled - maybe handling the books is a sort of osmosis of creative juice - various ideas are working in my head or in random index-card length flashes of "write this down!" lobbed like bricks by my muse. The process of creating never really stops. It's the dedicated finger-pounds per keystroke that are being put on hold while I decide if I really need four copies of Harlan Ellison's Angry Candy (don't ask). Soon, I'll be back to it.
Once the packing is done. And then the unpacking. And the refiling. And the new filing. And the laptop reconciliation (an aside: the piles of longhand-scrawled notebooks are one thing; working on files on two different machines is another entirely. I need one of those Filemaker Elves - like the dudes that make shoes, but more digital - to sort through what I've done where and give me proper unified drafts. S'okay - I have a new strategy for the new set-up that will keep it all straight.)
And THEN... then the fingers of mayhem go back to full-tilt keyboard boogie.
In Spring. Of 2012.
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