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| the desert is bright and full of sunlight |
Whirlwind trip back to see the parental units (both sets). We've learned that we hate stopping unnecessarily, so we typically do a 12 hour driving day first, then the shorter one so we have time to "do something" at the destination.
This time, the long hell day was the first and the very last. We also had an adventure (for us), and took the I-40 route back from Colorado, rather than I-70 across the mountains. Nous wanted to go to Santa Fe, so we did that (and had excellent rellenos and a thunderstorm and a mini-hike through the pinon pines above St. John's College). And I have a hoya cutting to root and nanking cherry bushes to sprout, gifts from the BIL, that I will endeavor not to kill.
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| Utah |
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| Arizona |
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| heart-home, inbound. |
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| snow! |
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into the storm
at Flagstaff |
Now... I have a manuscript to rescue from itself. I suck at talking about projects in progress, but Nous is patient, and gods know there is nothing else to do during large stretches of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. He mostly let me talk out loud, and now I think I have the problem pinned down. Now to fix it. (Or trash the whole thing entirely and start over. That remains on the table, too.) The original idea was more...word word word... romantic, I guess. What started writing itself became markedly less so, very rapidly (not a surprise), but it needed a Why. Nous helped me out with that. The How is still my problem, but it's always my problem.
The hours of forced inactivity (read: thinking) may have helped. I reminded myself that
Enemy has a file of 40K discarded words, scenes, chapters: places the story went that did not work out, and that had to be pruned. So far I have a manuscript full of motivational holes and a small list of scenes that need to be written before I can move forward (at least in my own head). I am generally a Finish It sort of person, except with my writing. Then it's all about sitting in the land of the possible, exploring permutations, wondering about maybes and might-bes, and generally being reluctant to commit. I also reminded myself that sometimes you have to write 40K words before you can figure out what you need to be writing, and that it's okay to throw things away. I'm not on a deadline. And I can always make more words.
