Milestone Entry: 300th Post, and How To Look To the Future

So, amazingly enough, I've made 300 posts here.  Though I think the main thing that demonstrates is dogged perseverance.  If you look at the earliest days of this blog, when I first started I hit the ground running, posting nearly daily.  Then that petered out, and for many months my posting style was... haphazard.  Which is pretty typical.  The internet is positively littered with blogs-- especially writer's blogs-- that start with a fury and burn out just as fast.  But getting past that phase, to push through despite the fact that doing so feels like screaming into a hurricane, that's the challenge.  That's what it takes to get a novel done.

I had been thinking about the future.  Not my future, specifically, but as any sci-fi worldbuilder would, what the future in general is going to look like.  Of course, actually predicting it is nigh-impossible.  But you can at least get a sense of where the technology will take us. 

Twenty years ago, there were a series of commercials from AT&T showing us where the technology was taking us, the things we will be doing in the future.

On one hand, the general accuracy of all this pretty good.  Most of the things presented here are part of our reality today: video conferencing, pervasive telecommunication anywhere in the world, wireless communication, voice controlled systems, automatic tollbooths, electronic books, distance learning.  Most of what's not part of our world today is technologically possible, but the infrastructure or wide-range implementation hasn't been done.

Take, for example, the "Keep and eye on your home, when you're thousands of miles away."  Utterly possible-- my parents have it set up in their house, for example-- but not common.  But how much longer will it really be before Apple releases iHouse? 

On the other hand, what is interesting is how the implementation misses the mark.  "Tuck your baby in from a phone booth."  The concept of long-distance video calls is spot on, but... a phone booth?  They saw where things were going, but didn't imagine the widespread of personal communication devices more or less eliminating public payphones.    Or "pay a toll without slowing down."  Common practice... but nobody swipes their credit card on their own dashboard as they drive by.  "Borrow a book from thousands of miles away."  That one is kind of amusing how clunky it is, but I can see how the this-is-clearly-wrong image we're presented with came about.  They wanted the visuals to signal "book" and "library", so we see her sitting in a cubicle in a library, looking at a screen, that shows the actual book, and pages being turned.  So the book isn't a digital object, so much as there's a camera pointed at a book sitting on a counter on the other side of the world.  "Answer a phone call.... on your wrist." Wrist phones?  I'm sure it's possible, but not something people have really demanded.    But it's spot on in terms of the concept of what we've achieved-- that you can get a call out in the middle of natural nowhere.  Just last year I got message from my agent that he needed a synopsis of one project, and I found the file, polished it and sent it to him... all while out by the Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park. 

The future is a pretty awesome place to live.

Time to keep driving into it.

Stepping Back to look at the Big Picture

This weekend was spent, in part, organizing and purging.  This tied, in part, to deciding to rename the warrior orders in Druthal.  Going through documents, finding outdated info, changing the names of things, purging out needless duplicates of paperwork.  (It's amazing how many times I've, frankly, thoughtlessly re-printed the same info.)  But I'm working on putting together both clean working files to reference (in Scrivener format primarily, though exporting that to a text format as well, in case of disaster), as well as a single, easy hard copy to go to if I need it.  It also involves digging through random handwritten notes (as I will jot down ideas just about anywhere) and making sure I've transcribed them somewhere where they'll do some good.

Part of this, of course, involved taking a good, hard look at the bigger picture of things.  I've made no secret of the fact that I have four different "heroes of Maradaine" series mapped out, with Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, Maradaine Constabulary and Way of the Shield each representing the first of their own respective series.  Each of these four books stands alone just fine, though I've made a point of including hints and connections that pay off for readers who read everything. 

Now, I have a big crazy plan for each and all of these series, which I've worked to some degree.  Part of this weekend's process involved finding more detail to fill in, which then filtered back into the final bits of the Maradaine Constabulry re-write. 

On some level, I know that it's completely crazy to even be contemplating the level of plan that I have.  But I think in terms of epic.  And hopefully, I'll be able to make that pay off.

It occurs to me that this particular blog is coming off just a hair short of a total box of crazy.  Which is how stepping back and looking at my whole big-picture plan makes me feel, sometimes.  The scope of what I want to do is so huge, it feels like a tidal wave that I have to hold back.  It's almost the opposite of writer's block: there's so MUCH you can't get out. If I just let it go, it would be an intelligible word-salad of madness.  An unsolved jigsaw puzzle, dumped out on the floor.

Thus: Plan.  Organize.  Focus.  Build the edges of the puzzle first.  I've got three sides almost done, and I'm starting to build the fourth. 

This whole thing will probably make no sense to you, or it makes perfect sense, in which case you should probably be scared for your sanity.  Mine's toast. 

Off to the word mines.

Cobblestones Laid Down on the Road to Hell

The week after a writer's conference is a lot like the week after New Year's.  On one level, you're kind of exhausted, but in an excited sort of way.  You feel good about the fact that you're exhausted. 

On top of that, at least for me, you're energized with new ideas.  Ideas you're ready to implement.  You have ideas about what you're going to write, about how you're going to write, and how you're going to sell what you write.  And THIS TIME, like with New Years' Resolutions, you're REALLY GOING TO DO IT.

Of course, as that initial buzz coming off the convention wears off, you don't have that same drive you did right afterward. It takes discipline to keep the lightning in the bottle.

It's great energy when you can use it.  I finished the rough draft of Thorn of Dentonhill in post-Armadillocon fueled 2500 words-per-day frenzy.  I started this blog right after another con.  At the time, I tried to post daily, and then lost that momentum after a month or so.  I did keep blogging, of course, but it came out sporadically, more or less posting whenever an idea crossed my mind.

So now, I'm going to take a real serious attempt at regular posting.  Daily, I know I can't do without burning out.  If I tried that, I don't think I'd have anything left for fiction writing.  Once a week, I think, isn't frequent enough to properly build a blog following. 

My goal, therefore, will be twice a week: Monday and Thursday.  Blogs will be posted in the afternoon.