the holidays are over, the horrendous day-job project is done. my head feels full, almost too much so. a professor once told me that there were two kinds of writers in the world: the ones who translated their ideas into the written word and those whose thoughts were already in text. putting aside for a moment that this is one of those reductive models that i dislike, if i had to adopt such a binary construct, i am one of the latter. i do actually think in sentences. my thoughts and imaginings come replete with commas, paragraph breaks, the trailing off of an ellipsis or the pause of my beloved em-dash. and it gets damn tiring carrying around so much text in my head, especially when i am still in this generative mode. i have had about three different alternate prologues bounce around my cranium this past week, plus tweaking The End as it stands in my head and imagining a few stories past this main arc. all while immersed in dinner-making and present-wrapping and day trips and phone calls.
i am tired.
tired, but back, and able now not only to write for a few days but do some other related activities. catching up on critiques. writing a WTF note to a dear friend who recommended the eye of the world, because man, so far that has been 162 pages of yawn. plus it is not scratching my itch for stories with third povs mixed with omni . . .
all this, and also starting to do some hard planning for the paris trip. mapping out the hours of various museums and libraries, writing little introductory emails to a few places. once work starts next tuesday, it will be upon me far too soon; the more groundwork i can lay now the better.
gros-caillou, from the turgot map. a possible location in the novel. of course now the biggest thing in that area is the eiffel tower, sigh . . . it’s going to be difficult to find traces of its earlier self.