Writing is Like...

Summer Haze, Summer Days

Writing. It's like building something from nothing. My current story, for example, at 124 pages and 68,474 words, is still just a disjointed skeleton with a few gobbets of flesh adhered here and there, but still undecided as yet what it will become, where the head fits, and the foot, and what will be done with the middle, that I'm thinking of putting nearer the front, and the other middle, which I'm leaning toward pushing out further into October (in the story).

Then there's the battle, and the time-jags, and the final denouement, who dies, who lives, who saves whom, coming home again, and how long they've been gone.

What of Minky the cat? What of the crops that need planting in spring on Eilidh's farm? The neighbors, who believe that Taliesin is a man from Australia rather than an elf from another realm? And Fannon, the enigmatic figure who becomes a key player in the plot? Can he come home too, for the first time?

It's all very exciting, building worlds, but a slog too, and one that, alas, in eleven days I'll have to give up on for ten months until I'm finished with teaching. I only hope the story's still there inside me, waiting for words to make it real.