Monthly Update

It's been a month. I owe a blog. I know some of you are like, "When you don't update, I forget to check!" To which I say... get an RSS feed. Feedly works nicely for me now that Google Reader is kaput.

I haven't posted mostly because my days are very similar. I get up, I write, I hangout with family, exercise, occasionally cook, go to bed and do it all over again. My Instagram feed is all pictures of slugs and the meals I sometimes I make. Wild times.

I write in the morning. A lot of people write novels in the morning. I reckon this is because the task is so daunting and the imperative to make marginal progress so horrendous that if you don't do it straight away it just looms over the whole day.

I thought I would be close to a full first draft by now (ha ha, joke's on me!). I'm close to half way. It seems kind of crazy that people start doing this and actually finish, and that some people do it more than once.

In recent weeks I developed some mild but persistent anxiety that I was spending an awful lot of time on something that might be complete, irredeemable garbage. But last week I went to the Napa Valley Writers Conference and the chapters I showed were well received, so that was encouraging.

I've been organizing travel photos this week, which makes me nostalgic. I miss China, or rather, I miss my community that was in China, much of which has scattered to the wind anyways. Sometimes I'm afraid nothing will ever be quite so exciting. Here I was so juiced to fly a couple states over on a freelance assignment -- I got to fly to Pyongyang and Urumqi for work when I lived in Shanghai. But I have to remind myself that I've never really been an adult in the good old US of A and I really need to give it a try.

The other tough thing about this writing-a-novel thing is, pretty much, you have to write a novel inside. And the weather in Florence is always best before noon, when the wind picks up. After all that time in polluted Shanghai, I feel guilty sitting at a computer instead of walking on the beach. Who knows when (if ever) I'll have this much time to walk on the beach again! So I've decide that this month I'm going to go a bit easier, try to write in the afternoons and get outside more. The novel is going to take a long time anyways, I want to hike and kayak the coast while I can.